Foodies

I hadn’t thought much about where my food came from before my husband Greg and I moved to Port Campbell and started a duck farm. Being a city girl all my life, I hadn’t even used a shovel.

More than a decade later, I have such enormous respect for food and farming. Ducks have taught me so much about how hard people work to put quality food on our tables.

Great Ocean Ducks started as an idea that would allow us to live and work in the country, while raising our kids. It’s been a huge learning curve but the local food industry and chefs in particular have worked hand-in-hand with us to ensure the duck that is served up to customers is the very best it can be.

We started out with about 30 Aylesbury ducks, then expanded about six years ago with Pekin ducks, and now have around 2,200 paddock-reared, fruit-fed ducks on the farm at any given time. Our dogs help herd the ducks in the paddocks and we sell ducks each week to some of Australia’s best restaurants.

This region is full of passionate people who are invested in good food. There is great mutual respect between those producing food, and the chefs and provedores of the region. Chefs like Dan Hunter at Brae, Simon Yarham at Timboon Distillery and Sam Anderson at Forage on the Foreshore, have been so supportive.

Like most of the top chefs in this region, they want customers to experience not only great tastes but food sourced from a community of farmers who respect the produce they grow and the land they farm.

For them, it’s more than serving up a meal. It’s about where the food comes from, how it was farmed, how it tastes and, importantly, the relationship between the producers, the chefs and the consumer. It’s about the quality of the whole experience.”

– Jodi Clarke, Great Ocean Ducks