Hi! We’re Sam and Liz :)

In 2020, we decided to expand beyond our home garden and backyard layer chickens.

We hatched a plan to get out of our office based careers and became farmers 👩‍🌾👨‍🌾 - with no experience, no contacts and generally no idea; We started our regenerative, chemical free, farm about an hour north of Sydney called Hillside Food Forest. 🌳

We simply wanted to produce the best food possible, without chemicals, and do it while having a positive impact on our environment - our regenerative vision. We believe ethical, chemical free farming should be the norm. Hillside Food Forest is our attempt to be part of the solution.

We moved onto the farm in February 2021. We were able to purchase a mountainous, overgrazed, neglected 100acre property on Sydney’s doorstep in Putty, NSW.

We had a passion for regenerative agriculture and understood the importance of producing healthy food, free of chemicals, but with no farming experience (except from keeping chickens in rentals from Sydney’s Northern Beaches to Redfern), we needed to focus on learning and skill building.

And so the research began - alone, but free from the burden of “…because that’s the way we’ve always done it”.

We questioned everything - Why are chickens dipped in chlorine after slaughter? Why do animals regularly need to be ‘drenched’ (poison)? Why does moving animals to fresh pasture keep them healthy? What makes one chicken, or pig, or cow taste better than another?

We pursued knowledge, context, history - how did we get to industrial agriculture factory farming, and where to from here? It took time to build the practical experience too - which pastured poultry model works best for us? What breed pigs should we raise? How do we take care of all these animals? How do you build a farm fence? We had to work all of this out.

This is how we spent 2021 & 2022.

By 2023, we had established our beef herd, our critically-rare heritage breed Tamworth pigs and could raise delicious chickens - all chemical free and with practices that make our farm better. Now we could actually start producing products to sell - so Liz officially became a full-time farmer!

In late 2023, we joined Carriageworks Farmers Market - one of Australia’s best farmers markets and delicious. top 100 Australian food experiences - and shortly after we were nominated for the delicious. Harvey Norman Produce Awards 2024 - in less than 18 months of having meat to sell to market, we were suddenly being compared to the best there is.

2024 was our ‘Proof of Concept’ year - not only could we produce excellent meat consistently, but we grew our product range to eliminate waste - fully utilising our animals nose-to-tail. We starting making pet treats, bone broths and even launched a Tallow & Lard based skincare range - being the first business in Australia to produce lard-based skincare.

In 2025, we’re increasing our production to reach minimum viable scale to allow us to completely focus on producing the best products we possibly can, full-time.