Stronger together in Kimba
Kimba’s townspeople stand side by side to see the whole town rise. The Eyre Peninsula community shows its strength in connection as a finalist for the 2025 Agricultural Town of the Year Award.
The Eyre Peninsula town of Kimba has earned the moniker “halfway to everywhere”, sitting between Sydney and Perth, and a five-hour drive from the nearest capital city.
In light of this, the community has gained a reputation of bringing the world to itself, through the strong ties of its community.
Lisa Baldock of Buckleboo Farms explains that this self-sufficiency is particularly visible across agriculture where the low-rainfall, dryland farming town is no stranger to extreme droughts and floods.
“There’s a strong connection in the community to help everybody out, regardless of who you are or what you do,” Lisa says, of the town recognised as the winner of the 2021 Agricultural Town of the Year Award.“That problem solving mindset has grown over time. They’re finding gaps and they’re filling them, and it’s not just for the Kimba community, it’s for the wider district as well which has benefitted from that.”
Lisa and her husband Tristan Baldock are members of Buckleboo Farm Improvement Group, better known as BFIG, which was established 25 years ago.
Now with almost 100 members, BFIG supports the adoption of research, new technologies and management strategies into farming systems, helping the town to be at the forefront and to react to the seasons they are dealt.
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BFIG has hosted variety trials and introduced genetic improvements into the district, significantly improving soil health and biodiversity. In recent years, its district-wide weather station network, which is farmer-driven and community-owned, has helped growers call safe harvest bans and spray windows keeping members one step ahead of the weather.
Responding to local needs directly has shaped the output in workshops too.
At Lienert Engineering, Matthew Lienert noticed gaps in machinery access for farmers. What began as a product-servicing business has evolved into making machinery in-house, producing custom machinery farmers once sourced outside the district.
“The clay delvers, for example, people were asking, ‘where can they get one built?’ That’s how we got into manufacturing those,” Matthew says.
“Without the farmer and without the local businesses, we’re not going to have a lot here, so you have to work together. We always take on board feedback from the locals as well as people further out on how we can improve the stuff we do.”
At Agsave Merchandise, a rural input supply and service business, managing director Wesley Schmidt has created new local agronomist roles, bringing fresh expertise into town and keeping vital services close to home.
Wesley has also invested in a gamma-metric system that maps soil density, helping farmers know and understand their paddocks better than ever before.
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“Farmers are very progressive themselves, they’re the leaders,” Wesley says.
“Most of our ideas come from the farmers themselves and we expand on that, make those investments and work on answering their questions. It’s trying to be at the forefront with them and complement what they do.”
The same togetherness runs off-farm. Our Town Kimba is a wellbeing initiative to tackle mental health challenges and build long-term resilience, from youth to farmer wellbeing sessions.
“Kimba has got quite a progressive mindset. It’s community wide,” says Andrew Murdock, team coordinator at Our Town Kimba.
“I think it is just a community culture that takes off and it gets going and it’s infectious. It’s an ‘all boats rise with the same tide’ sort of thing. When your mate’s doing well, you’re likely going to do better as well.”
Farmer Peter Rayson at mixed cropping farm Kallindi shares the story of a fire at his property, where his farm was saved by the incredible community response.
“When the header lit up, we put the call out and we finished up with 95 people, 25 private fire units and three fire trucks in the paddock, a pretty big response resulting in very little crop being burnt,” Peter says.
“All those people put the fire out. That’s the kind of response we get here. It’s fantastic.”
For a community with more than 50 volunteer groups and a population just over 1000, a response like this is common.
At the creative business hub Workshop26, Heather Baldock says 50 to 60 community members put up their hands to help transform an ex John Deere workshop into a thriving space for rural women and female-founded businesses.
The space now acts as a tourism drawcard and an avenue for off-farm income with nine microbusinesses, and stands as a testament to the community spirit.
This year they have hired their first full-time employee, and one of the businesses, The Small Town Soap Company, has grown strong enough to open its own shopfront on the main street.
“When we decide to do a project in Kimba, there’s a group of positive people with enough drive and energy who want to make it happen and do,” Heather says.
“We make things happen here. It’s a love of our community and a desire to see it thrive for generations to come.”
