Love’s Harvest is a series of four beautiful and intimate stories about organic farmers. Each episode portrays the experiences of couples and families toiling hard for their belief in organic goodness and the love and life it provides.

The demand for organic produce is on the rise but the perils and uncertainties of farming remain steady for those on the land. The farms in Love’s Harvest yield rude awakenings, happy surprises, heartbreaking loss and small, overdue fortunes. The beauty and serenity of rural life is jolted regularly by the reality of hard work and uncertainty. Relationships are strained or reaffirmed by the challenges of losing crops or feeding stock, while carefree country kids learn to be savvy business entrepreneurs.

Episode One - Garlic

After years of false starts, Gilles and Victoria’s fortunes are turning with a chance planting of organic garlic.

Frenchman Gilles met Victoria in a youth hostel in the lowlands of England. He called her ‘Sheila’, in a heavy Gallic accent and chased her across Europe until he found himself in Australia. Impressed, she bought him a beehive and so began their life together. It’s many years later, their two children have grown and moved away and their small, swampy, wind blown patch of land has finally embraced a crop. Gilles’s garlic miracle began with a chance planting that flourished in the cold winters and weak sandy soil. Each harvest they plait the garlic and sell the celebrated garlands at the markets in Sydney and Canberra. All is going well, when rot appears from nowhere and infects the crop. ‘It’s a disaster!’ Gilles exclaims but already he is devising a plan. Victoria smiles wryly. ‘He likes a challenge’.

Episode Two - Cheese

For Carla and Anne-Marie, women and goats go together but a long drought takes its toll on their cherished goat herd.

Carla and Anne-Marie are known for their delectable goat’s cheese. It’s the reward for ditching their teaching jobs and taking the plunge to farm organic goats on rolling granite country in Central Victoria. Feeling naturally drawn to goats, the women nurture their herd like a large, extended family - giving them all names and carefully plotting the family tree. But a dragging drought and the need for some agonising decisions soon ruptures the idyll of farm life. Carla and Anne-Marie must deal with the urgent need for feed, a competing mob of kangaroos and the basic instincts of mating bucks and new milking mums. For the creators of Holy Goat cheese, farm life provides some challenging dilemmas.

Episode Three: Eggs

Twelve year old Madelaine runs an organic egg business, the most profitable enterprise on the family farm.

Rob and Colita always wanted a garden of Eden. When they bought 400 acres north of Melbourne, they knew it would be an idyllic place to bring up their three kids. For them, farming is about love and it's more important for the family to be together than it is to make a fortune.  Madelaine, Hayley and Arthur are home-schooled on the farm. It’s a free-range life where they create their own adventures and help look after the sheep, cows, pigs, chickens and goats. When Madelaine when showed a special interest in chickens, Rob and Colita encouraged her to start her own organic egg and chicken business. Now 12, it’s the only unit on their family farm making money. But while Madelaine loves life on the farm, she’s in a dilemma about whether to leave her flock and attend a local schoo lfor the first time.

Episode Four : Raspberrries

Brad and Isabel toil hard for a good harvest, but a good harvest has it’s own price.

Raspberries are a tough crop to produce and Brad and Isabel are investing everything to get a good harvest. They met on a large berry farm labouring for other growers, but now they’re in pursuit of their own dream – their own organic raspberry farm. They bought a small property on the weedy edge of a creek near Yandoit where they work hard to get the soil structure and the vine variety right. A lot hangs on the success of their first Christmas crop and when it fails, they’re under pressure to try again, with new ideas but within the same strict codes of certified organic farming. Months pass and by the time the crop yields plump, juicy berries the stress of hard work and uncertainty has already taken a hefty personal toll.