Know your farmer

When Mornington Peninsula chef and farmer Simone Watts isn’t cooking, she has her hands in the dirt at Cape Schanck’s Barragunda Estate planting produce for her pop-up cooking events. Simone has the wheels in motion to open a 40-seat farm-to-table restaurant at Barragunda in spring this year.

Simone’s cooking career began under the tutelage of esteemed Melbourne chefs Greg Malouf (MoMo) and Adam D’Sylva (Pearl). Travel and cooking in Asia and Canada were next to broaden her resume before she returned to Melbourne and took up the reins as head chef at celebrated CBD restaurant Coda.

After her time at Coda cooking for a packed house week after week, it was time for a break. “I was feeling disconnected from food,” Simone says. “I took six months off, travelled, and did an internship at Transition Farm in Fingal. Working with Robin and Peter at Transition Farm blew my mind and opened my world to biodynamics and respect for the environment. I never went back to the city.”

An interest in native foods then took Simone to Far North Queensland, where she worked as executive chef at the Daintree Ecolodge and would meet its owners, the Morris family. The Morrises have become integral to the next part of Simone’s vision, as they own Barragunda Estate.

In 2020 Simone returned to Victoria and set to work developing plans for what started out as a farm-to-table restaurant but grew into something bigger for both the community and the environment. “The pandemic delayed our restaurant plans for the better. Instead of selfishly creating a beautiful restaurant where I can do farm-to-table dining, we started asking, ‘What’s best for the community?’, ‘What’s best for the environment on the farm?’, ‘How can we integrate a better model for young farmers into what we’re doing?’”

The result is The Barragunda Collective, an agricultural hub of young, independent, regenerative farmers dedicated to creating a healthier, more connected way of life for themselves and the community. “When I spoke to people who wanted to farm, they wanted to run their own farming business. But here on the Peninsula, where you’re looking at a million dollars an acre for a patch of grass, you’re not going to make that back selling carrots very quickly. So the collective was born from the notion of providing young farmers reasonable lease prices to be able to farm.”

Regenerating Farms and Morning Penni Farm are the farming businesses that grow food at Barragunda for the collective’s community supported agriculture model, and eventually for the restaurant.

You can become a member of The Barragunda Collective and subscribe to have weekly organic vegetable boxes delivered to your door. There are options to add organic meat, organic orchard produce, preserves, mushrooms from Mushroom Forestry, and bread from Tuerong Farm to your vegetable box.

“We decided a direct distribution model for the community provided a direct link to consumers and gives them a sense of place so they can visit the farm and understand where their food comes from.”

To learn more and to become a member of The Barragunda Collective, go to www.barragunda.com.au