There’s a certain romance about working on the land that fuels many farmers’ passion for their craft. Whether it satiates a primal drive to live and work in symbiosis with mother nature, or a worldlier ambition to earn an honest ‘salt-of-the-earth’ crust, farming is...

Soil ecology is an enigma to me and I marvel at its complexity and beauty. It’s a symphony of infinite living organisms and it’s a farmer’s job to be the conductor. Every new insight I gain is an exciting step toward that goal. I recently attended a regenerative...

Many of you may not know that I do not have a long history of farming. Just 5 years ago, I left my full-time employment, packed up my possessions and hit the road, eager to learn how to grow food. Everything I know now I have learnt through my farming mentors, reading...

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...