Christmas Island is commonly known for its immigration detention centre and highly profitable phosphate mining, and not so much for innovative farming.

Christmas Island farm concept ( ABC News )

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 5 minutes 32 seconds 5 m A new farm which aims to feed the people of Christmas Island is being developed ( Jonathon Coghill ) Download 2.5 MB

It sits in the Indian Ocean, 400 kilometres from Indonesia, and 2,600 kilometres from Perth. That isolation means that if you are buying your weekly groceries there, be prepared to empty your wallet.

An iceberg lettuce can cost up to $19 and a cauliflower $15, because fruit and vegetables travel thousands of kilometres by plane or ship to get there.

But that is all set to change if a sustainable farming company has its way.

Mark Bennett is the director of Christmas Island Hidden Garden Farms, based on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, which has just started a 21-year lease of 54 acres of crown land from the Australian Government with the aim of supplying the local community with fresh fruit and vegetables at an affordable price.

"What we intend to do is set up a diversified sustainable farming model, which would include a number of different growing strategies, from traditional open-row cropping to greenhouse strategies, aquaponics, chickens. We want to harvest eggs, honey," he said.

"Basically, we want to get as much as we would find in a normal supermarket growing in a field on Christmas Island, so that the local community can experience what we have here."

The company will limit its use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides and will nourish its crops using compost developed from the local community's organic waste.

Fresh food prices could be halved

Mr Bennett grew up on the island and said his company hoped to help change the prices people pay for fresh food.

"If you go to a restaurant on Christmas Island and you get a steak and chips and salad, it's often joked that the most expensive part of the meal was the salad," he said.

"It's not uncommon for a family to spend $500 on a weekly fresh fruit and veg bill and we hope to reduce that family food bill by half."

Gordon Thomson, shire president of Christmas Island, believed the new farm had every chance of succeeding.

"The people who are proposing to grow the vegies are people who know what they're doing," he said.

"They are well supported morally and perhaps materially by the mine and the community generally."

Mr Thomson said it would also provide a sense of sustainability to the 1,500 people living on the island.

"If we can feed ourselves, this will be a great boost to our confidence as a community," he said.

"A community that can stand on its own two feet in every way is going to be a much more confident community and grow and perhaps retain more of the local population than we do at the moment."

But if you look at the history of Christmas Island, it is rare to find a successful large-scale business.

A litany of failed ventures

The Christmas Island Casino survived for five years but went bust in 1998, and an ambitious satellite launch facility built in 2001 was a failure.

Hidden Garden farm design for Christmas Island ( Supplied: Hidden Garden Sustainable Farms )

This is the first farming venture of this size attempted on Christmas Island.

There has recently been a smaller banana and avocado farm, and an aquaculture farm was damaged during a cyclone in March 2014.

Other older farming ventures were halted by colonial attitudes and stupidity.

In the early 1900s, the British Phosphate Mining Company was like a big brother to its Chinese workforce, the so-called "Coolies", stopping them from any form of farming on a large scale.

The rare few had very small hidden garden farms, a practice that inspired Hidden Garden Farms' name.

Historian John Hunt said most of the Coolies survived on a diet of white rice and dried fish given to them by the mining company.

"The Coolies were in a vitamin deficiency diet and hundreds of them died from beri-beri, a vitamin B1 deficiency disease. The worst of it was over in 1904 and 1905," he said.

Despite this tragedy, the population continued to rely on imported food.

In the 1980s, two businessmen came close to establishing a large pig farm. Unfortunately, there was a cultural hurdle - they built it right next to the Muslim cemetery.

"They put in thousands of dollars, they put in concrete pigsties, they had water trough, and then the Malays woke up to what was going on and the whole thing ground to a halt," Mr Hunt said.

Supplied: Hidden Garden Sustainable Farms ( Marty McCarthy )

Mr Hunt believed Christmas Islanders had avoided setting up commercial farms because importing fresh food had proven to be too easy, and this might be the biggest hurdle for the new venture.

Hidden Garden Farms' Mark Bennett said if his venture did succeed, it would go some way to securing the island's food supply.

"If we look at the community of Christmas Island, they're exposed to the distribution system. So if the flights don't come in, if the ships don't come in, which it often doesn't during the wet season, they have to rely on reserves," he said.

"Ninety-five per cent of their nutritional input comes from those freight lines. That is a terrible exposure to have on a community.

"So in the best way you can secure your nutritional requirements is by growing your own food very close to home."

Mr Bennett said developing the farm was his way of giving back to the island on which he grew up.

He said it could be a blueprint for remote towns on the mainland as well.

Construction at the site started this month.