Specialty produce, naturally grown
Near River Produce is a small-scale specialty grower on the Mid-North Coast of NSW, supplying restaurants, providores, and home cooks with certified organic fresh citrus and Australian native ingredients direct from the orchard — Meyer lemon, Persian lime, Yuzu, lemon myrtle, aniseed myrtle, cinnamon myrtle, and lemon aspen, harvested at peak condition and dispatched to order with no middleman and no compromise on quality.
Produced under organic certification using biodynamic and regenerative practices at our Hollisdale property, our growing philosophy carries forward the same commitment to provenance that defined our award-winning rare breed pork operation — making Near River one of the few sources of fresh, direct-supply specialty citrus and native culinary ingredients available to the Australian market.
Our story
Near River didn’t begin with a business plan. It began with a conviction — that food grown slowly, on land treated with respect, tastes different. And that the people who grow it, and the people who eat it, are better for the connection.
Andrew and Therese Hearne came to farming not through inheritance but through intent. After years working in horticulture, Andrew found himself drawn to a more complete relationship with the land — one that went beyond growing plants and into the full cycle of how food is produced, shared, and understood. They found their place at Hollisdale, inland from Port Macquarie on the NSW Mid-North Coast, on the unceded country of the Biripi people. The land shaped everything that followed.
The pork years
The early chapter at Near River was written in pork. Andrew and Therese established a rare breed pastured pig operation that became, by any measure, one of the finest of its kind in Australia. Wessex Saddlebacks and Berkshires — old English breeds chosen for their temperament, their suitability to outdoor production, and the quality of the meat they yield when raised slowly and well.
No sow stalls. No routine antibiotics. No shortcuts. The pigs rotated through seasonal pasture, foraged freely, and were fed a varied diet that included spent brewers’ grain, whey from local dairies, and on-farm milled feed free from GMOs and synthetic inputs. The result was pork that earned four state award wins in the prestigious delicious. Produce Awards — in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2021 — and a loyal following among some of Australia’s most discerning chefs and providores.
Those relationships — built on trust, consistency, and a shared belief that provenance matters — remain the foundation of everything Near River does today.
Meals in the Fields
Good food is most itself when it’s eaten close to where it was grown. That belief gave rise to Meals in the Fields, an on-farm dining experience that began in 2013 and brought together talented chefs, regional producers, and guests willing to sit down in the middle of it all and pay attention.
It was never just a dinner. It was an argument — made through food — that the distance between paddock and plate should be as short as possible, and that when it is, something shifts in how people understand what they’re eating. Meals in the Fields is part of Near River’s past, and when the time is right, it will be part of its future.
The orchard
The citrus trees were always here. Limes and lemons growing quietly alongside the pigs, tended with the same natural approach but never quite the focus. Over time that changed. As the pork enterprise wound down, Andrew and Therese turned their full attention to the orchard — and to the question of what it could become.
The answer is taking shape across four acres of carefully managed land. Meyer lemons and Persian limes form the reliable core. But it’s the premium varieties — Yuzu above all — that signal where Near River is headed. Yuzu is rare in Australian commercial production, demanding to grow, and extraordinary in the kitchen. We are growing it deliberately, at scale, for the chefs and providores who have been waiting for a local source they can depend on.
All of it grown certified organic; all of it unwaxed, harvested to order, and delivered direct.
What drives us
What connects the pigs to the orchard, the farm dinners to the fruit boxes, the early markets to the restaurant relationships, is a simple and stubborn belief: that how food is grown matters. To the land. To the people who eat it. To the people who cook it.
Near River has always been about doing less, better. That will never change.
In mid 2026, Near River received full organic certification — the formal recognition of a direction we'd been moving in for years. It didn't feel like an arrival so much as a line drawn under the past and a foundation properly laid for what comes next. The same soil, the same trees, the same belief that how food is grown matters. Now it carries the certification to prove it.
Why we farm the way we do
Farming with integrity isn't a marketing position at Near River — it's a survival strategy, and increasingly, a competitive advantage. When you stop buying synthetic inputs, your costs fall. When you build soil biology, your trees find their own resilience. When you regenerate the vegetation around and between your plantings, the ecosystem begins to look after itself — the shelter belts earn their keep, the predator populations recover, and the whole farm starts to function as something more than a production unit. What we've come to understand, across years of working this cleared upland floodplain back toward health, is that the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of farming are not competing priorities. They reinforce each other. The orchard is more productive because the land is healthier. The land is healthier because we farm as if it matters. It does.
Get in touch
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At Near River we live and farm on unceded lands of the Biripi people and recognise their ongoing connection to land, water and community. Always was, always will be.