For many years, The Desert Fruit Company leased a packing shed and cool room in Alice Springs from the founder of Tamara Plantation, Jim Luedi. When Jim and his partner Trudi sold their Alice property to move to Victor Harbour it triggered some serious discussions about how we want to operate the business into the future.
We decided that the most practical way for us to run our operations was to run everything from the farm itself rather than splitting up tasks between the farm and Alice Springs. So we built a new packing and processing shed right next to the orchard.
The new shed utilises passive solar design and sky lights to take advantage of natural light and avoid direct sun in summer. Although we don’t currently have the capital to run our cool room from a solar array, we will install a smaller array to power our office, shed lighting, a fridge and fans. We have been very fortunate to receive some funding from ecoBiz NT to assist us in this project.
Our current goal is to run our water pump on solar power. This will be quite a large challenge as the bore does pump quite a bit of water quite a long way! But we feel it is an essential component in building a sustainable farm for the future
Fantastic. I’m a keen gardener myself and I’m stoked with what you’re doing. Cant wait to get your dates. I eat one each morning before I go surfing but they come from America so I’m looking forward to Oz dates. Probably old idea but. wouldn’t a windmill water pump be more economical?
Is this item in need of updating now as you have solar water pumping as per the Facebook photo? Susan