There’s been a lot of hubbub about how farmers markets have become too expensivelately. This is not a new concept but it seems to have flared up recently. Kate Archdeacon from the Victorian Farmers Market Association (VFMA) composed this rebuttalto the above opinion...

Action on Climate Change A Food Sovereign Future Summary Food sovereignty is a kind of holistic thinking that must be applied to all aspects of life in the Mount Alexander Shire. I implore the council to implement a Food Sovereignty Officer, whose role it would be to...

Yesterday I arrived home from Food Sovereignty Convergence 2019. With our highest proportion of farmer attendees yet, I feel excited and invigorated that we will continue to create a food system. One that relies on agroecology, direct relationships, radical...

I recently took the opportunity to go on a short co-op road trip to attend a soil microbiome presentation by Dr Christine Jones. Dr Jones is a soil scientist and microbiologist, which is relevant to us as farmers with an ‘agroecological’, or ‘regenerative’, mindset....

About a year ago Tess (of Sellar’s Farmhouse Creamery) ‘roped me in’ to the Castlemaine Farmers Market committee (I secretly loved the idea). In spite of knowing my participation beyond offering my two cents at bimonthly meetings would be seriously limited, I...

Prior to my arrival at the Harcourt Organic Farming Co-op, I spent some time working at Jonai Farms and Meatsmiths. Not only did I make some excellent new friends in Tammi, Stuart and their community, but I also became involved with the Australian Food Sovereignty...

Name your price The 'Name Your Price' experiment was intended to capture low income households. The idea being that those in better circumstances had the opportunity to 'subsidise' the cost of those cheaper CSA shares. See my professionally designed graph below....

CSA Survey results are in Thanks to everyone for your feedback. I've worked may way through all the data and comments and have gleaned some good ideas for how we can build more mutual benefits into our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) family. There were 45...

I can’t believe it’s nearly June. Not only have I made it through my first harvest season at the reigns of 4000 fruit trees, but it’s almost been a year since I signed the lease. Where does the time go? The fruit season began in mid-November and was a crazy blur of...

A dry summer and wet winter is the natural cycle for our climactic zone. The first decent rain of Autumn is referred to as the 'Autumn break', as it's the indication of a shift in weather and a break in the long dry spell of Summer. What a Summer it was! Seemingly...

Unfortunately I had a fairly poor apple and pear season this year. The earlier varieties suffered in the heat, and the later varieties were kangaroo food. Here's a link to a short news video. Being such a diverse orchard is both a blessing and a curse. With...