Rural Australians with disabilities can find it tough to get work. But in South Australia, a brother and sister running an egg farm are providing meaningful jobs and financial independence to their employees with a disability.
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00:00Nestled on a small block of land south of Adelaide, near the tiny town of Finis, sits
00:14Rise and Shine Eggs.
00:18It's home to more than 2,000 plucky residents.
00:24It's owned and run by brother and sister duo Alastair and Heather Pearce, despite having
00:29no experience in chicken farming, a year ago the pair decided to give it a go.
00:34It was a very steep landing curve, especially the day the first lot of troops turned up.
00:40We kind of knew we weren't ready, but we didn't realise just how not ready we were.
00:45Alastair spent decades on the family farm on the Eyre Peninsula before moving to Adelaide
00:50in 2013, while Heather runs a successful medical business in Broken Hill.
00:57Alastair has that practical background in farming, but also in problem solving and trying
01:01to work out when, you know, is there another way that we can do things, so, and I guess
01:04my experience as a business owner in the medical, allied health and imaging area, we thought
01:09if we combined those skills together, we could make it work.
01:14Together they united to form Rise and Shine.
01:17After years spent working as an occupational therapist, Heather saw an opportunity to provide
01:22on-farm employment to people with disabilities.
01:26The most common thing I would see on someone's NDIS plan was they wanted a job and they wanted
01:31to make friends, and the more that you work with someone, the more you realise there's
01:35not a lot of areas where that's set up for people to transition into, so that really
01:40got me thinking, well, you know, what is it about a job that is the barrier for people
01:45getting in?
01:47So the idea for the egg farm was hatched.
01:50Heather says it's about teaching people who've had very limited opportunities, important
01:54skills in the workplace.
01:57You know, waking up on time to go to work, you know, how do I check my roster?
02:01How do I talk to people at work?
02:04And I guess what we thought is if you did a program where you taught those skills, you'd
02:08have someone who, you know, was employable in the open market when you finished the program.
02:19Employees like 39-year-old Jinda Holland, who spends his shifts collecting, sorting
02:23and cleaning eggs before they're ready for delivery.
02:26And I'm pushing the eggs on the farm belt, as you can see.
02:32While not necessarily a fan of chickens, Jinda admits he's warming to them after several
02:37months working here.
02:40At the start I was only on my own, I wasn't comfortable around the chickens.
02:48As my shift progressed to more and more shifts, I'm here at the farm, I'm beginning to like
02:58the chickens, yeah.
03:02Before egg collecting, Jinda worked in hospitality and at a factory, but says it just wasn't
03:06the right fit with his Wardenburg syndrome.
03:10I'm deaf in my left ear, I'll take my hat off.
03:15I have grey hair as a young fella and I have a different colour eye, so that was a challenge
03:22for me when I was growing up.
03:25I used to be bullied and that, and I guess coming to here, people treat me differently
03:31because I'm different and they accept me who I am and I thank them for that, yeah.