Our Story

Ask our Oma what the name Durlstone means, and she'll tell you: a stone in a river that changes the current — not moved by the water, but the reason the water moves around it. It's not a name we chose because it sounded nice. It's the name of the farm, and it turns out to be a fairly accurate description of how we've tried to run it ever since.

Our grandfather brought the family down from the Netherlands in 1979 and bought this piece of land in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands — surrounded by mountains and a beautiful landscape, far enough from anywhere that it still feels a little tucked away from the world. For most of the years since, the farm ran on tobacco and row crops.

About seven years ago, it became clear the farm needed to diversify — a sense that tobacco shouldn't be the only thing we focus on. Fruit felt like the right answer to that question.

It didn't happen overnight. A few hectares of citrus first, then more. Blueberries after that, the same way. Within the last year we built our own packhouse. We finished our first full citrus season running through it, and we're partway through our first blueberry season doing the same. It means the fruit now goes straight from the land into our own grading and packing, without stopping anywhere else along the way.

We're not going to tell you we're a fully organic, zero-waste operation, because we're not there yet. What's true: we generate our own electricity through solar, and we're expanding toward close to 1MW of capacity. We use precision drip irrigation on both the blueberries and the citrus, because water here is worth saving. We've been growing our tobacco more naturally for a couple of seasons now — it's cut our fertiliser costs by about 30%, and we've rolled it out farm-wide. Blueberries are newer to us, so that side is still experimental. We're getting there, one season at a time, not pretending we've arrived.

And yes — Zimbabwe has the best sunsets in the world. Ask any Zimbo and they'll tell you so.

More than anything, we're against waste. Fruit that's good, safe, perfectly fine to eat, that doesn't make it to a shelf because it doesn't look right — that's the thing we can't sit easy with. It's a large part of why we're building new products from what we grow, rather than letting good fruit go to nothing.

We're a Zimbabwean farm first. Good value speaks for itself — when something's genuinely worth it, people notice.

We still run a systematic farm, and if you ask us, that's the Dutch in us showing. We still hold onto some of those traditions — proud of where we came from, and just as proud of where we've ended up. The farm is still family-led, and we believe having the right people around you makes all the difference — our management team is exactly that, helping make it all run every day.

A few years after the farm began, our grandmother started the Durlstone Foundation — separate from the farm, funded mostly by donors overseas, built around education, and looking after the land and the people on it. Students who've come through our schools have gone on to scholarships overseas. Right now, because the community asked for it, we're building a high school. The Foundation is a way for us to intentionally give back to the people in our community.