EVERY morning Kiewa Valley farmer George Barel rolls out of bed as the sun kisses the picturesque valley outside, heads to the kitchen and starts the day with a healthy breakfast. He downs a freshly brewed cup of green tea — which has been grown in the paddock outside the kitchen — and enjoys a serve of Weet-Bix and milk.

Well-tanned Australian farmers, cups of green tea and healthy diets aren't a particularly well-known combination, but Mr Barel is something of a trailblazer. He is one of about 10 farmers in Victoria growing green tea, a drink believed to fight cancer.

George Barel on his Kiewa Valley property where since 2002 he has been growing green tea. He enjoys a cup himself, but most of the crop from his 168,000 bushes is sold to the Japanese market. Credit:Wayne Taylor

But there's something else about the unassuming 45-year-old that makes him even more unusual: he's the only one of the 10 who used to grow tobacco, a product known for a different kind of association with cancer.

While a small amount of the green tea grown by Mr Barel and his wife, Antoinette, goes into his teapot (not hers — she prefers coffee), the rest ends up thousands of kilometres away, on the retail shelves of Japan, a nation of fanatical green tea drinkers. Mr Barel supplies his tea to the large Japanese company Ito En.