A country practice
As season four of Gourmet Farmer kicks off, Matthew Evans reveals what it has been like to have cameras following his family for nearly a decade and explains to DANIELLE McGRANE why this is possibly the most dramatic season yet.
In season one of Gourmet Farmer, Matthew Evans had a simple dream: to run his own farm in Tasmania. The former Sydney Morning Herald food critic allowed cameras to document his move from big-city life to rural Tassie, running a farm for the first time.
That initial dream grew after he met his partner Sadie. Add a son, Hedley, to the mix and the farm had to get bigger, two pigs became 22 and season two was born.
By season three, things got a whole lot more ambitious and the family had taken up residence on the bigger Fat Pig Farm, so now on season four what’s left for Evans and his family to achieve?
This time the goal is even bigger with Evans’ dream to open his own restaurant on Fat Pig Farm. The cameras were there to follow the family for nearly two years as they made this dream a reality.
“We’ve never run anything like this before and we’ve never built anything like this before,” Evans says.
“I’m a chef by trade so I get to use the skills I got when I left school, but also the skills I got more recently about looking after animals and trying to grow food.”
Each step of the way, every trial and every triumph, was captured for the SBS series which now acts as a sort of home video collection for the family.
“It’s quite funny, it’s like our holiday snaps sometimes, and my son sometimes likes to watch old episodes,” he says.
“You go, ‘Oh look at what you were like back then!’ or ‘Look what our farm looked like back then’, it’s a lovely way to have a record.”
It’s one of the most invasive ways to document your life, but initially that wasn’t a problem for Evans. In fact it was quite the opposite.
“I lived on the farm alone for most of that first season so that didn’t feel invasive, it felt like I had someone hanging around with me and occasionally the cameraman would pick up a shovel and shovel compost.”
Throw his new family life into the mix and it can be a little trickier having the cameras, and the extra bodies, around but Evans insists on focusing on the positive. Obviously, the good far outweighs the bad because they’ve all come back for another season.
“It pushes you harder,” he says. “It pushes you to do a better job, to transform your farm quicker than you may do otherwise because people are watching.”
Evans and his wife are an enterprising pair, making sure they can make their business sustainable. He fits this interview in between packing up and mailing about 75kg of bacon to people in the farm’s “Society of Bacon Believers”.
Of course the pigs have already been fed, he’s given hay to the animals, checked his chooks.
It’s a lot of hard work but the aim is to “not go broke”. He admits that if they’d known at the start of the process how hard it would be to build the restaurant, he doesn’t think they would have done it.
“To put something in the middle of a paddock, to put the power in, to put in the septic tanks and the grease trap and fulfil all your obligations to open up a commercial premises, really we could probably have just gone to Europe every year for the next 10 years for a month as a family and not spent that money,” he says.
And as the series kicks off again for the fourth time, it serves as a reminder in case they ever want to take something like this on again.
“In terms of new projects for us, I’m not sure we’ll be rushing into anything,” Evans says.
“Certainly nothing grandiose as this.”