Gerrit Kurstjens was born and raised in the Netherlands, where he started a contracting company, then later a manure transport company and from 1985 he ran a construction company for manure transport and manure spreading machines. In 1996 he sold this company and was planning to take a (semi) pension. He wanted to live in the Netherlands for 6 months a year and the other 6 months in Australia. In practice, things went very differently. He now lives in Australia for at least 10 to 11 months a year. Since 2001, he has bought several farms in Australia as an investment to rent out. In 2006 he bought an arable farm of 11,000 ha and started to work on it himself.
