Hawks ruckman kicks ag goals

He is just as happy spending hours on end in a tractor as he is tapping the ball down to Sam Mitchell at a centre bounce on the hallowed turf of the MCG.

Ben grew up on the family farm at Dederang, a small town located 50 kilometres south of Wodonga, where the family breed cattle and crossbred ewes.

Both his parents, John and Sharon, were school teachers and their 320-acre farm was a great way to bring up their four children.

For a young Ben McEvoy his youth was spent riding motorbikes from the age of about 8 to driving tractors and riding horses.

As a young boy, he remembers voluntarily missing out on trips to Melbourne just to stay by his dad's side on the farm.

"We were pretty normal farm kids. Spent all of our time outside and running amok. From an early age, I was the one that was into it (farming) the most.

"Mum's (originally) from Melbourne and she would come down to see her family and I remember a few occasions me staying at home with dad and all the rest of the crew would go to Melbourne.

Living on the land at an early age is where a young Ben also developed his love of training kelpie pups.

"Growing up I loved stock, I was into riding horses and got into dogs, I had a few kelpies and I still got a kelpie with me now in the city.

"That was one of my passions when I was a teenager, dad bought me my first dog and I had to train it," he said.

Ben has since purchased two farms of his own next door to his brother-in- law, Paul, in the cropping heartland of the Wimmera, near the small town of Joel Joel, a 20-kilometre drive from Stawell.

The high demands that come with being an AFL footballer means that Ben cannot be present on-farm at peak times during the season. This pretty well rules out livestock but that is not lost on his love of machinery.

"As I've got older I've probably turned into a bit of a diesel head," he said.

"I love tractors and machinery and it doesn't bother me to sit on the tractor all day."

Ben's brother-in-law does most of the contract work (spraying, seeding etc) when he is absent with football commitments.

This season's cropping program will consist of canola, oats and hay oats on his 250-hectare properties.

He is hoping for a much better growing season this year than last year.

"Last year was horrendous to be honest. I think we only had around less than six inches of growing season rain from end of May to the end of October," Ben said.

A career after football can be difficult for some AFL footballers once their playing days are over, but a transition into agriculture will be a natural one for Ben when the time comes.

"I've got a house up there at Joel South that me and the wife (Nicki) are planning to move to whenever footy finishes.

"Hopefully that's not for awhile.

"(But) That's the direction we have chosen and we're pretty happy about it."

With such a passion for agriculture and being so far away from the farm when footy season kicks in, is there anybody Ben can talk to at the Hawthorn Footy Club about how the season is turning out on the land?

"Yeah there is a couple of guys off farms. Luke Breust is from a cropping and sheep farm up near Temora (Riverina NSW). We are always talking all things farming.

"Jonathon Ceglar who I actually went to school with at Wodonga does a bit of stuff of his own. He leases a bit of ground and got some cattle.

"And there is plenty of other blokes who are from the country," Ben said.

He believes that more could be done on bridging the gap between the city and country where some people aren't brought up to speed about farming and where their products come from.

Ben insists that it is not necessarily the fault of people in the city but more education could be done to inform those who don't fully understand some of the hardships that farmers face in terms of drought, floods and low prices for commodities in certain years.

"A lot of people down here (Melbourne) would never have a chance to know," he said.

"In most cases it's not any fault of their own but there's no doubt there's a fair bridge there which is sad but it's just the way it is I think."

LIKE most professional sports, the AFL is a cut-throat industry and Hawthorn's Ben McEvoy has had to learn the hard way.

While on holidays in Cambodia at the end of the 2013 season, he received a phone call from his then club St Kilda informing him that he was to be traded to Hawthorn. "It was sad to be leaving, I had a lot of mates there but it wasn't like I was going to lose touch with them, I've still got good mates there," he said.

"You do get a bit nostalgic about moving on from a pretty significant part of your life, being at the St Kilda footy club for six years so I (was) fairly entrenched there but I recognised how the game works these days and nothing really sacred me anymore."(In the end) I had this fantastic opportunity in front of me that's just how the game is these days, I think it's how life is sometimes, you get thrown a curveball but for me (a move to Hawthorn) couldn't have been a better one.

"Twelve months on, Ben would be a premiership player at Hawthorn. But it wasn't all roses. He was dropped near the end of the home and away season last year and faced an uphill battle to regain his spot in the senior side.

"It wasn't the ideal run into the grand final. My form had lapsed a little bit (and) with two games of the home and away season to go I was dropped.

"So I played for Box Hill (Hawthorn affiliate side) in the VFL for about four or five games, so that was really tough and it came down to the wire, I was probably playing the best footy of my career (in the VFL) and still couldn't get back into the (senior) team."

"It came down to the last week. I was supposed to play in the VFL grand final the week before the AFL grand final. Just before I was about to go to the game I got the call from the club (Hawthorn) to say I wasn't going to play because 'you're a chance to play in an AFL granny next week'," he said.

Even though Ben was on the cusp of living out a boyhood dream of playing in an AFL grand final at the MCG in front of 100,000 people he still felt guilty about leaving behind his VFL team mates who were about to play in their grand final.

"That was hard too because I'd obviously played in a couple of finals with those boys playing in the VFL so I sort of left them in the lurch a little bit for the grand final but obviously for me personally it probably worked out very well because a few days later I found out that I was playing in an (AFL) grand final and next thing I'm a premiership player," he said.