A small family farm near Brighton in southern Tasmania has sprouted a commercial crop of European white asparagus for the first time in Australia.
The top chefs from Sydney restaurants have shown an interest in putting the vegetable on the menus at their high-end establishments.
Richard Weston first tasted white asparagus on an agricultural study tour in the Netherlands in 2012.
He had to bring the European vegetable back to Australia because of the distinctly sweeter, earthy flavour.
I wondered why something so popular and so in demand in Europe and yet Australians weren't entertaining the thought, Mr Weston said.
There is a thing that stuck with me the most is that in Germany, each man, woman and child roughly consumes 20 kilos of white asparagus - there are 85 million people in Germany. For about six years, Weston dabbled with the European variety of white asparagus before he teamed up with his friend and business partner Tom Barham.
Richard said we had to have a conversation about the soil at my property, and then the adventure of Tasmanian white asparagus was born, Mr Barham said.
It was the soil structure that we have here, the sandy loam that we're fortunate to have, and the drainage is good.
The conditions are similar to those in Europe, where they grow. From September to March, asparagus is typically grown in Australia, with 95 per cent of the crop being produced in Victoria.
White asparagus has a much shorter harvest period — just four weeks in Tasmania — and it grows at a phenomenal rate.
The roots can go down to 1.5 metres with a spread of 1.5 metres. "We're finding that already," Weston said.
He is harvesting around 200 kilograms of asparagus a day and expects to produce between 8,000 kg and 14,000 kg in the coming weeks.
Each asparagus spear is dug out by hand, put in an ice slurry, hosed down and cooled in a store room.
We don't have a lot of the diseases in Europe, so we're not having that problem.
Our grades are looking good. The top chefs are thrilled that they want to get their hands on the asparagus.
One of the top chefs in Quay Restaurant in Bennelong Sydney is Peter Gilmore.
Mr Gilmore recently visited the farm to check in on the harvest and was impressed with the product.
He said that the big thing for me is that you can taste the soil and the sweet terroir of the land in the asparagus.
It is not just Australian chefs who are eyeing the vegetable.
Two weeks into the harvest, Mr Weston's crop is already headed for buyers in Japan, Hong Kong and Malaysia.
The asparagus has to grow more than a third of a metre through the soil on mounded beds, and then a special kind of plastic covers the rows to protect the tip of the spear when it pokes through.
This dark environment prevents it from producing chlorophyll, which is the naturally occurring chemical that turns the vegetable green.