Ian McLeod, 95, powering his farm ute and house on waste vegetable oil

Australia Broadcast Center

21-06-2025

The blue farm ute in Ian McLeod's shed costs a couple of dollars a week to run, and his farmhouse power bills are virtually non-existent.
In a world searching for sustainable and affordable energy, the 95-year-old farmer is quietly perfecting a personal power system, running on waste vegetable oil.
"Most of the farms around here have brand new utes, so when I bought a SsangYong for $1,800 online, people thought I was mad," Mr McLeod laughed.
"But when Rudolph Diesel first made the diesel engine, he used vegetable oil.
"I thought to myself, 'I could do that,' so I set about finding a ute with a pre-combustion diesel engine and converting it.
"Modern engines have to have the highest-grade fuel possible, whereas I deliberately went the other way.
"I went for an engine that would run on low-grade fuel."
Alongside the ute in Mr McLeod's shed at Glenroy in south-east South Australia are engines and mechanical inventions to purify the vegetable oil he collects from local restaurants.
"Nine times out of 10, when I go to a restaurant, they say, 'Just take the oil'. They don't want it. All I have to do is clean it."
For that job, Mr McLeod took an old electric separator and made a centrifuge out of the inner bowl, which purifies about 15 litres of oil an hour.
"It costs me peanuts because the engine driving the separator is running on the same oil anyway," he said.
"My main engine for generating power for the house runs on neat vegetable oil and starts from stone-cold on a freezing, cold morning.
"I'm gradually getting it better all the time."
For the best part of nine decades, Mr McLeod's remarkable mind for mechanical ingenuity has been known only by close friends, family and his wife Shirley, 92, a retired nurse.
"Up until the past four or five years, people had virtually ignored Ian … now they realise he's worth knowing and a lot of people are pests now!" she laughed.
As a child, Mr McLeod recalls being awed when his father took him by the hand and showed him a huge steam engine on a thrasher on their outer Melbourne farm.
"That sowed a seed in me," he said.
By the time he was eight, he had built his first steam engine using a turbine he made inside a Malt Extract can from his mother's kitchen.
Mr McLeod also drew on his mechanical mind to overcome the trauma of his early school years.
"I was a happy little kid, but I used my left hand to write, and the teacher in charge had a mind to change that and belted me.
"It's a sad story; I stuttered then for 40 years and wet the bed until I was about 11 because I was just a bundle of nerves," he said.
"So making these little steam engines and fixing things around the farm used to help me; it gave me back a bit of confidence."
The McLeods came to the black-soil plains of Glenroy via a converted scrub block at Dorodong in Western Victoria, and the family farm at Bulla near Melbourne.
The journey, marked by challenges met with determination, imagination and perseverance, is one which the pair look back upon fondly.
"We got away to a pretty rough start on the family farm when the Depression ripped the rug out from under my father and his brother," recalled Mr McLeod.
"Shirley was from Northern Queensland and her family pioneered the sugar industry up there.
"Times got so tough at one stage, she wanted to go back.
"I arranged with her early on — I told her she was free to leave with one condition: I'm coming too."
And while they've faced tough times, Mrs McLeod said they had "gone through them together".
"Some of our happiest years were when we first started on our own at Dorodong with a shed, two young children and second-hand tractors that Ian rebuilt," she said.
Later, at Glenroy, Mr McLeod set his sights on irrigated cropping.
"I hired a post-hole digger and, with the help of some local fellows, put five irrigation bores down in one day by hand.
"I had to put multiple bores down because I didn't have enough money to buy the piping to connect them."
Mr McLeod said he bought a stationary irrigator, which he converted to become self-propelled — one of the first in the country.
"It became a useful machine. Then a company from Corowa got wind of it, hopped in a plane, hired a car, came out to the farm and crawled all over it, took photos and said, 'Thanks very much Mac', and I have never heard from them since," he laughed.
Over his many years on the land, Mr McLeod has bought broken-down, second-hand and wrecked tractors and headers "for $25 or so" and rebuilt and redesigned them to create exactly the machinery he required for growing his crops.
"We harvested our first crop of sunflowers with a $25 header that I rebuilt," he recalled.
"I built a windrower, joined two old, wrecked tractors together; made a grain dryer for our maize crop, built weigh scales … I always looked for opportunities to mechanise and become more efficient."
As the seasons change in the south-east, and Glenroy's flood-plain past is met with a two-year drought, the McLeods reflect on a long life on the land.
"We just live quietly out here in our little nest. We're not part of the social set," Mrs McLeod said.
"We've faced some tough times and plenty of good times," Mr McLeod agreed.
"When things go wrong, that's an opportunity to find a way around it.
"When things go smoothly, I get bored."