On a small patch of land to the east of Melbourne, where the city's fringe gives way to something more pastoral, you can find rows of vibrant rainbow chard, pink-hued beetroot and one bright-faced, dirt-covered young couple.
Chloe Sparks and Jered Gruner, both 30, keep a keen watch over their first full season of sprouting produce with a mix of pride and quiet awe.
"We've never worked harder in our lives for less money," Chloe said.
"But we've never been happier."
The two are unlikely farmers. Neither grew up on a farm, or even in the country.
Their twenties were spent not in paddocks, but in the share houses of Coburg and Canberra.
Chloe studied psychology and worked as an administration assistant, while Jered had a series of landscape gardening jobs.
"We've always been very inner-north Melbourne-y. And now we live out on the farm," Chloe said.
The couple have become part of a growing new movement of young, small-scale farmers and producers.
Just a year on from planting their first crops in the Yarra Ranges, Chloe and Jered — who sell under the name Dog Creek Growers — are already supplying vegetables to some of Melbourne's best restaurants.
"In school, I was never told that I could be a farmer. It's not something I ever thought I was allowed to do," Chloe said.
"But I can, and I am, and I think more people are realising that they're allowed to do that."
Searching for 'another type of life'
In a red-brick Collingwood warehouse, where once-industrial buildings now house multi-million-dollar apartments, Kim Driver flits about boxes of the city's best produce.
The fruit and vegetable wholesaler has been an interlocutor between farmers and chefs for most of his adult life. He is witnessing change on both sides.
"What I'm seeing now is a new breed of farmers," Kim said.
"A lot of them will come from a background that's not farming.
"They may have worked in the city, but usually, they are very environmentally conscious — that's what draws them to it."
Paul Miragliotta's small Day's Walk farm in Keilor, in north-western Melbourne, supplies the restaurant trade, as well as hosting growing workshops, farm tours and internships.
He is seeing a new generation enter the industry from a range of unconventional fields, including IT.
"It can be people who are stuck in the city and want to transition to another type of life," he said.
Instagram makes things 'feel possible'
In a particular corner of Instagram, you can find an online local community of enthusiastic market gardeners scattered around the country.
Many are recent entrants to farming, growing a variety of vegetables on plots of land just a fraction the size of mainstream farms.
Some sell direct to customers and at local farmers markets, others into restaurants.
Grace Gamage and her partner Dylan Lehmann have grown vegetables for a little over two years in Allen's Rivulet, just 25 minutes outside of Hobart.
They post weekly updates for their network of direct customers through their Broom and Brine Instagram account, but they also regularly comment and communicate with small farms and growers in other states.
"I think that there is a culture of sharing knowledge," Grace said.
"It's just like a big cultural shift into actually making it feel possible."
Similar to the housing market, access to land is a barrier to entry for new market gardeners.
Broom and Brine grow on just a quarter of an acre of leased land.
At present, their operation is still part time – Grace also works as an artist, Dylan at a local resource centre.
She said the pair each worked about 20 hours a week on the farm, but were turning over $116,000 – with expenses that account for roughly 15 per cent of that.
"We make fine money for something that's quite fun to do."
Chefs' attitudes changing
Kim Driver works with about 100 mainly small-scale growers, many similar in size to Broom and Brine and Dog Creek Growers.
He recently merged his business with global food platform Natoora.
The company, which has outposts in London, New York and Paris, aims to connect chefs and customers with high-quality local produce.
Natoora's website also speaks in lofty terms about seeking to pioneer a "food system revolution".
That may not be immediately evident in their small Collingwood warehouse, but the ability to collect and combine produce from batches of small-scale farms in key growing areas around Melbourne's fringe has a logistical efficiency to it (they also work with a small number of farms further afield).
That produce is inspected and sorted, before quickly being distributed to more than 250 restaurants, wine bars and cafes around Melbourne.
"Not every farmer wants to have a 100-hectare farm — everyone's position is different — and I'll support anyone that's flavour and soil focused," Kim said.
"So if someone comes to me and they've got five bunches of baby leeks, but they are the best baby leeks I've ever tasted, I'll buy those five bunches."
Increasingly, the conversations Kim is having with chefs are changing, too.
There is now more interest, he said, in who is growing the vegetables, how they are being grown and the quality of the soil in which they're grown.
"In my early days of sourcing, a lot of it was focused on getting a restaurant a unique product that no-one else has," he said
"It was also price and yield focused, where a lot of venues wanted to keep the same menu for a longer period of time — they wanted, say, tomatoes in the middle of winter.
"Now, it's all flavour focused."
That's a primary driver for Nagesh Seethiah at his Mauritian restaurant Manzé, in North Melbourne.
His is one of a number of new smaller-scale venues and wine bars increasingly peppering best restaurant lists (Manzé received its first hat in The Age's Good Food Guide last year).
The size of such restaurants — Manzé only seats 25 people inside — not only stands in contrast to larger, higher-cost operations, but also affords certain opportunities.
"Our restaurant is quite small, which is why we can work with such small-scale farmers," Nagesh said.
"Having an intimate connection with, say, two people that have a couple of acres of land is more meaningful than an operation of 50 people on much more land.
"They can also share their process and story with you, they can give you a realistic idea of what's coming seasonally or what's on the way out, and they're less inclined to waste as well."
Earlier this year, Manzé began sourcing vegetables directly from Chloe and Jered at Dog Creek Growers after finding them on Instagram.
"It's definitely in the Zeitgeist right now — small-scale restaurants reaching out to small-scale growers, and building a relationship together," Chloe said.
The name Dog Creek Growers now appears on the restaurant's nightly menu. At the moment, that could be as part of a fennel dish or a sprouting broccoli fritter.
"A restaurant is a sum of many parts, and one of those parts is who grows the produce — the same way you have the name of the wine produced on a wine list," Nagesh said.
"There's no reason why they don't deserve that recognition."
Quality of life prioritised over income
The amount of vegetables grown and the number of meals served might feel minuscule — even indulgently small — at a time when cost-of-living pressures mean access to fresh food is a daily challenge for many.
Nagesh Seethiah believes there is nonetheless an onward and outsized net benefit to these types of farming relationships.
"That whole term about local or even organic produce has become so green-washed by now, so this is kind of taking the reins on that from the big supermarkets, making it less of this broad term and really acknowledging the minuteness of it," he said.
"It's definitely part of a wider movement and approach, but one that anecdotally, I reckon, is actually making a lot of change."
Nobody on either end appears to be getting particularly rich off this scale of operation, but at a time of looming recession and a housing market that's stratospherically out of reach for most young people, Nagesh suggests wealth has never been the ambition.
"It's putting a value on things that we care about and sharing that as well," he said.
"I think for most people like myself and in this sort of extended community, we're not tied down to making a lot of money.
"I think we're comfortable with that and we're comfortable living within our means and, on the flip side of that, earning within our means."
Chloe and Jered said the pandemic had "given them a lot of time to think about what's enriching" for their lives.
During lockdown, with limited backyard space at their rented share house, the two started "guerilla gardening" on public land in a cul-de-sac at the end of the street, pulling out weeds and planting native grasses.
That time spent together ultimately encouraged them to take the leap to farming on a full-time basis.
"We get good food, good exercise, a good bit of nature and we get to work together," Jered said.
"There's maybe a certain generation just thinking you don't have to go with the status quo.
"As long as you're willing to cop a few hardships and sacrifices — you're not going to have maybe the living standards you had before — but if you're doing it for these other [reasons] then it can be more than worth it."
