REGENER8 ED 2 2019.

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Helen McCosker

Mike McCosker

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Kelly Jones

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What a spectacular year for

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foodies and farmers to restore our soil. As the drought rages on and Christmas may feel bleak for many, I am confident that 2020 will bring ease and relief. Stay hopeful. Love Mike.

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Imagine going to the super market, flashing a light at the carrots and being able to compare their real nutritional value to show you what you are really buying. Producers will no longer be able to skate by with visually appealing, but poorly grown and nutrient deficient food. Real-time accountability in the marketplace has the potential to dramatically impact the food system, our farms, our health and our ecosystem. Introducing the first prototype of the

Bionutrient Meter!

DAN KITTREDGE “A wonderful leverage point between the farmer and the consumer that we can all agree upon, sort of a high ground, is that nutritional value is something that we all say yes to - that’s important! Attempting not to be dogmatic about permaculture, or biodynamics, or organic, or regenerative or conventional. It’s really the results that matter.”

Warmly introducing Dan Kittredge. The mind behind the Bio-nutrient meter. Start from the beginning Dan and tell us everything.

My background is as an organic farmer. I grew up on an organic farm, a mixed farm with pigs, cows, ducks, geese, sheep, orchards, and mixed vegetables. More of a homestead than a serious market operation. But we had a farmer’s market, and CSA, and sold to health food stores and restaurants and things. That was my background,

my childhood growing up. And my parents ran an organic farming organisation called NDFA, North District Farming Association. And have done for the last 35 years. So, I’ve got a strong background in, what we now call regenerative, but whatever, biological, alternative ag, community. And I travelled the world in my 20s, and actually spent a lot of time on farms globally in Siberia, India, and Central America etc.

When I got married in my 20s, and decided I wanted to have a

family, I had not found any other lifestyle that was more attractive than being on the land, farming, etc. But, the biggest issue that I came across was that I wasn’t able to do it economically, because, like a lot of other farmers, I had pretty significant issues with pest and disease pressure, etc. And I had been brought up with this idea that organic was better. And I thought that if my plants were sick, that was a sign that organic wasnt better. If that makes sense? So, I thought, maybe there’s something else…

Maybe, organic isn’t the be all and end all and there’s more to it out there. Long story short, started educating myself, going to conferences, attending seminars, and reading books. We didn’t have YouTube then. You know, studying in the winter, and practising in the summer. And, in very short order, was able to get results that seemed quite stupendous. Pests disappeared. Diseases disappeared.

Yields went up. Cost of production went down. Economic viability went up. I was like, oh my God, there’s something here. I didn’t necessarily know enough about it to… I knew

enough to know that I didn’t know enough. But I knew enough to know there was something important there. So, about 10 or 12 years ago i started giving workshops and they turned into courses, and that basically turned into an educational organisation called the Bionutrient Food Association.

One insight that, I think, we have been holding for a while now, is that there’s this direct connection between the health of the plant, the health of the soil, the nutritional value of the food that’s produced, and the health of the human that eats it, or animals that the human eats. And so, our formal mission is to increase quality in the food supply; increase nutritional value. Because we think that that’s a wonderful leverage point between the farmer and the consumer that we could all agree upon, sort of a high ground.

Nutritional value is something that we all say yes, that’s important.

And we’re attempting not to be

dogmatic about permaculture, or biodynamics, or organic, or regenerative, or conventional. We think there’s insight and wisdom in all these different frames of reference. But it’s really the results that matter.

And so, through pretty much grassroots word-of-mouth means, we’ve spread from the north-east US across North America, and then a bunch of work in Europe, and a bunch of allies globally. And we have an annual conference. We’ve got local chapters in 15 different US states. We do a bunch of good, solid, educational, organisation, grassroots stuff but we’ve had this idea for a long time that if you work with nature, things work better- that the food is more nutritious. That if the cost of production goes down for the farmers, then we really need to be starting to implement this broadly, globally. We understand the correlations between plants well grown and carbon sequestrated in environment’s yield. Not just the environment but also the humans.

And so, the question really was, how can we take these insights about biological systems and how they work, and really try to spread them broadly, globally.

And the basic thought is, these days, money talks. Our thought

was if we can figure out some way to connect the economic incentive with these results, then we could have a strategy for rapid, broad evolution. And so, basically, the idea is, we want to make it so that the consumer doesn’t have to trust a label, or marketing, or a certification, or anything like that.

They can actually see how good this food is in relation to other food.

And this is one of the fairly untold stories.

In the collective consciousness, there is an understanding that food, nutrient levels have decreased over time. Here in the US, we’ve got the United States Department of Agriculture records going back to the 1930s and 40s. And Britain, and Japan, and I’m sure other countries as well, they’ve been assessing food and identifying what’s in it. If you look at the trajectory, there have been 40, 50, 80 percent decreases in nutrient levels over time, on average. But, there is no average carrot. Just like there is no average human. And our understanding is that some carrots are grown well and taste good. And some carrots are not and don’t. And so, our idea is, if you go to a grocery store, or a farmer’s market, where you have multiple produce of carrots, or cartons of milk, or whatever

to choose from, we would like to support you, the consumer, in being able to choose the one that’s most flavourful, most nutritious for yourself and your family. Because there’s a direct connection between flavour and nutrition. We are already hardwired with the capacity to tell nutrient levels in food. We don’t need this little sensor. Our noses and tongues are very sophisticated.

I like to tell people, you buy a bag of carrots from California and they say organic on them, and they taste bitter, that’s your inbuilt nutrient monitoring system telling you it’s no good for you. Doesn’t matter if it’s certified organic. It may not be toxic but it’s certainly is not particularly nutritious.

So, as an aside, as part of this work, we did run, I think it was a little of over 900 samples of carrots and spinach. We set up a lab last year to do this assessment. To identify the variation. We know there’s been decrease over time but the question is, what’s the variation right now, in what’s available to us.

And, depending on which element you want to look at, calcium, or potassium, or copper, zinc, boron, or manganese, it’s probably a 5001000% variation. Which means, this one carrot has as much copper as those five carrots. Or this one leaf of spinach has as much calcium as

those 10 leaves of spinach. So, a 5:1 or 10:1 variation in those elements.

But what’s really exciting, is in the health-giving compounds, the antioxidants and polyphenols, we found a 20,000 to 50,000 percent variations. Which means, this one carrot has as many polyphenols in it as those 200 carrots. Or this one leaf of spinach has as much antioxidants as those 500 leaves of spinach. Literally, you eat this one leaf of spinach, and you get the same amount of compounds as if you ate 500 leaves. So, the variation in the food supply is massive. And this is a story that hasn’t been told.

And I think as we begin to tell it, and help people to understand the

We want to make it so that the consumer doesn’t have to trust a label, or marketing, or a certification, or anything like that. X-Ray vision in the supermarkets.

implications and correlations, we’re going to have a pretty fun time.

So how do you achieve this? How do you actually give the consumer the ability to test that in real time?

Flash a light at the carrot and say, beep, 20 out of 100. Beep, 80 out of 100. Every element, copper or zinc. Every compound, protein, or carbohydrate, in Chemistry, is a vibration in Physics. Astronomers are able to tell us what stars are made of. They can say Alpha Centauri is eight light years away.

We know it’s 51% hydrogen and 48% helium and 1% other gases, in these levels and ratios. We know that because of this science called Spectroscopy. Which basically says every element vibrates at a certain speed. And if you take a picture of that light coming off that star, you can read what it’s made up of. And so, our thought is, if we can figure out what something 8 light years away is made of, or in fact, much farther away, can we figure out what’s something of an 8th of a millimetre away is made up of? Yes, we can.

We’ve had this idea for a number of years, at least eight now. But the issue was, can we mass produce a unit at a consumer price point that can do this? Only in the past couple of years, does it seem like the technology has caught up with the fantasy. With all the smart phones out there and the mass production of these little handsets, you can actually build this kind of a tool for just a couple of hundred bucks.

So, 2017, we built the first generation of this tool, this spectrometer, this bionutrient metre. We’re calling it the Real Food Campaign. One objective is to build a handheld tool that a consumer can use to flash a light at something, in the grocery store, or at the farmer’s market, and get a reading off it. Two is to identify the variation because you can flash the light at something, and read the light that bounces back, but if you don’t know what that means. Like, what’s the frequency of good, bad, and medium, then you can’t give the consumer an answer.

2017, we built the tool. 2018, we built the lab and our process for sampling in-data collection.

And now, this year, 2019, we’re overlaying that on with the third step, which is correlating the quality results with the management practices. We want to be able to give growers realtime guidance about what your imbalances are so you can address them while the plants are still growing, so that when the buyer purchases them, they can see that you’re the top 20 percentile, or whatever. We don’t want farmers to be embarrassed at the point of sale by the consumer saying, “your stuff is junk.” We want the farmer to be empowered in real time to modulate their fertility, their management practices, to get the kind of results that look like superior quality.

- is the core of our work that we’re engaged in, partnershipped with a number of other entities, some companies, some universities, other organisations, etc. It’s really quite exciting.

We don’t have many ground rules but one of them is that everything is open. All the data is public. All the engineering is public. The app, the algorithms, no part of this process will ever be propriety controlled by any corporations.

It’s critically important that this information be available to anyone globally. Any grower of any scale, any consumer, that we have this capacity to discern, it’s freely available, not controlled by large corporations.

That sort of, idealistic, perhaps, perspective, I consider it strategic, has been one of our issues because, that means the funding for this whole thing is coming strictly from donations. There’s no investment opportunity. And it’s coming along quite nicely. We have made available the first units for people to purchase, as of last Fall, 2018. We are building the calibrations this year.

And expect to have the tool you’ll get in the mail in a week will spit out a reading that looks like peaks and valleys on a graph, actually, right now. Only at the end of this year, will we be able to convert those peaks and valleys on a graph into red, yellow or green, or 20, 40, 80 out of 100, kind of response.

And so, these three steps - building the tool, identifying the variation in quality, correlating to management

It’s really amazing what you guys are doing, Dan. Keeping this open source, I think is the biggest thing.

It’s a critical design component.

We can look and see how things have been perverted in the past.

And its often times been by a desire for control for profit. And that’s not the way that nature works… Nature works through symbiosis, through the synergy. And this reductionist paradigm of control is what’s killing us, our culture, the environment.

We need to engage in a biological paradigm of synergy. And we have to structure it in from the beginning.

I think that’s the only way we’re going to go through this paradigm shift is by shifting our structures.

Your technology is defining food outside of labels.

That’s the whole point. These labels are like religions. I’m a Muslim. You’re a Christian. You’re a Jew. Actually, we’re all sentient beings. Who all have our own direct connection so let’s get the hell away from this tribal “us and them” baloney. Regenerative, biological, organic, permaculture, agroforestry, agroecology. There’s all kinds of beautiful, profound, insightful

streams of thought. Steinner called them streams, right, of thought. And I say let’s not have these streams be siloed. Let’s integrate them. Let’s learn from conventional ag. Let’s learn from organic. Let’s learn from biodynamics. Let’s let the results be the objective and let’s stop hopping on bandwagons. I understand we’re tribal by nature and so, we’ve got this impulse be on a team, and be opposed to somebody else.

It’s an interesting one because, we agree with you, but moving through a label, it gives you a platform to begin the conversation [Dan: Absolutely]. That’s one of the main benefits. It’s a conversation starter and it gives you a framework to start working in.

I think the impulse behind regenerative is very similar to the impulse behind organic. Similar to the impulse behind the localvores.

And the agroecologists. All these more integrated perspectives have the similar impulse, which is to revitalise the ecosystem. Revitalise the culture. Revitalise this whole… In

the Indigenous community of North America, the Native Americans said that every animal in Nature has a role. Beaver has its role. Fox has its role. And that the role of the human was caretaker. I’m sure other communities have said something similar but that’s the story I know from where I come from. I think that regenerative impulse, that term that people are coalescing around, is really about being a caretaker.

Which is our proper role.

I think a lot of growers would be pretty scared about the bionutrient meter. It’s like there’s no lie here. You can’t lie about it.

And it’s going to influence the consumer dollar more powerfully than ever. The Bionutrient Meter can change the entire economic force behind what we’re eating, and what we are buying

Absolutely. This could be a total gamechanger. And it’s not done yet. Right? We’re moving along the process but we haven’t done it yet.

You can’t get a really slick, userfriendly, consumer-dumbed-down,

quick response unit. We aren’t there yet. We’re a couple of million dollars shy of that.

It’s a massive undertaking to gather the data, to be gauging the nutritional, mineral, vitamin content of every single vegetable.

How they compare… Explain that process to us. How many people do you need involved to have that data… How big is that database going to be?

It’s pretty big right now. The reality is a lot of things have already been done. I think the technology, the process for assessment, the mode of analysis, the AI capacities, the software code, the engineering of these tools, the pieces are laying there in front of us, just waiting to be put together. I envision a process, whereby we have a very large number of people globally, actively engaged in data collection. In the same way that Facebook collects your personal data, whether you like it or not, the more farmers we have engaging in this process of sharing information of what their management practices were, what cultivars they used, what foliate sprays, what the phase of the moon was, what prayers they were saying, the more people we have engaging in this multi-faceted sharing and learning process, the more rapidly we can revitalise things. We’ve built the core structure for that process to occur. We did this literature

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review, and we looked at what the elements of interest were, we looked at what the compounds of interest were, we looked inside, which modes of assessment were relatively inexpensive. We’ve built the process, basically.

I was just in a conversation a couple of days ago with a group in France. There’s a bunch of Europeans who want to set up a lab there. We have to do this in a decentralised fashion. We can’t run this out of America. We need local nodes, globally. We designed the lab and the collection process to be very inexpensive, to be able to be done without requiring a PhD and a big fancy lab. I’m not sure if I’m answering your question entirely.

For the good people who are reading this right now, how would they get involved? How would this process extend itself to Australia?

One thing you can do if you bought a tool - you’re going to be getting an email next week, which invites you to be part of this global house party project… I just did the maths… We have 12 countries, 4 continents and 33 of the US states, people have these units in right now. Our thoughts were we would invite people to have some friends over. They can bring shopping from the grocery store, from the farmer’s market, and together, take your unit, and flash it at a bunch of these

different crops, and populate this data set. In a weekend, with house parties, maybe 50 of them around the world, we can get 10,000 data points. As a social event, invite your friends over and flash lights at things. So that’s something quite simple. I know we’ve got at least 5 or 6 units of these things in Australia. It wouldn’t be hard to do that sort of thing.

As far as systemically setting up a lab and doing data collection, we aren’t just testing the crops, we’re testing the soil. We have a whole protocol for historical data, and your weekly management data, etc., etc. There’s needs to be an entity, or individual, some capacity to coordinate that process. We do have all the protocols clearly delineated and up on our website and anyone can access them. We are happy to hold your hand in setting something up. We’d love to have something in the southern hemisphere, in the eastern hemisphere. That’d be wonderful.

If you were a farmer, Dan, and you’re wanting to go through the process, how do they do that?

We’ve got about 100 farms we’re working with in North America this year, that are engaging in the complete process of historical management data, in-field realtime, weekly data updates, and then, a subset of those are sending

"Have some friends over.

They can bring shopping from the grocery store, from the farmer’s market, and together, take your unit, and flash it at a bunch of these different crops, and populate this data set.

In a weekend, with house parties, maybe 50 of them around the world, we can get 10,000 data points."

For me, the question is, is your label a process label or a result label?

in their samples of soil and crops to the lab for assessment. If you don’t have anybody coordinating it locally, it’s a real pain in the butt to send vegetable samples from Australia to North America.

Customs, shipping, and time, and rotting, and everything else. You guys would have to have a local network, organisation, community, for it to be practical. If there is interest, it sounds like you’ve got a network there, we would be really happy.

Part of what we’ve been organising is the National Regenerative Agriculture Day, which is on Valentine’s Day. We basically hijack Valentine’s Day [Dan: That’s beautiful]. Our mission, over the next 10 years, is to make Valentine’s Day synonymous with regeneration. It would be absolutely amazing, by next Valentine’s Day, if we could coordinate with 500 farmer’s market, and community gardens to do a massive data collection on the NRAD day as part of the week. [Dan: Incredible. That would be amazing]. We could call it VEGETABLE DISCLOSURE. These stories are wonderful. Yes. Yes. If you could have people, a few hundred groups, in one country, getting together on one day, and doing some serious citizen science, that will help heal the planet, and heal our children. That would be powerful.

How much does it cost for one of these metres, Dan? $377 US dollars.

I know we’ve talked about the labelling aspect, but one of the big key things getting discussed a lot

here in Australia at the moment, is labelling. Finding a certificate label for regenerative food. A lot of people are looking at how to gauge that. It’s going to happen in the next couple of years, that label. I’d like to guide a conversation with you on that topic, because I know it’s going to be of interest to lot a people. A food label that focuses on nutrition and not poisons, so much. Organic, to me, is related to dropping the poisons and the GMO’s. When I think organic, that’s what I think it is.

For me, the question is, is your label a process label, or a result label? That’s the biggest problem with organic, or with biodynamic, or with any of these other ones. If you follow the regulations that were set, you get the label. But you don’t, necessarily, have to get anything resembling a good result. That’s my biggest problem with these certification schemes, is they’re not based on results. They’re based on some group of people’s idea of what is right and wrong. And Nature’s the one who knows better than we do.

So, if we don’t have a metric that is associated with Nature’s flourishing as the foundation of our label, we’re starting our own cult. It’s a fad.

Because I’ve been in the organic world for 35 years, I’ve watched the Slow Fooders, and the Western Pricers, the Permaculture community, all these buzz words, Localvores. They rise for a few years, then they sort of fall. Because there’s a true impulse there but there’s not an honest assessment as part of it. So, you can have…

Localvores, for example, local food was the big hip thing a few years ago, until people started to realised that you can spray chemicals in your back yard just as well as you can spray chemicals in California.

Do you want those chemicals in your well water?

The classic one is free-range eggs and what that truly means.

Free

walking

hens?

Yeah.

Companies have learned to make a little picture on their label that says “free walking” and there’s no certification behind it. But the consumers are like, “oh, it’s got a picture on it. There’s this word.

Therefore, it must be true.” I think we have to get beyond… I call it religion versus spirituality. In religion, there is someone who knows better than you. Who tells you what’s right and wrong. In spirituality, you’ve got your own direct connection to the divine, however you define it. As long as we’re going to put our faith in labels, it’s like putting your faith in your priest. If you’ve got a label, you’ve got a priest, maybe it means something. You don’t necessarily know if you’ve got a good label or a good priest. And how do you get there? Why not just have your own direct connection with God? Why not be able to assess the food itself?

Ok let’s go past the label then, and let’s move towards the importance of nutrition. And how the notion of nutrition in our food is talked about a lot less, i guess because most people just assume its there. If i eat a carrot it is good for me full of minerals and vitamins. But it is just not the case anymore. All these diseases we’re now dealing with mostly because of lack of high nutritional food.

I’ve got this graph which shows average nutrient levels in food. The beginning of synthetic fertilisers; the beginning of herbicides; the beginning of insecticides. You can see when these things started being used, overlayed on top of the average nutrient levels in crops. And then, as part of that same graph, you see the incidences of chronic illness in the population. And they begin, as the mineral levels go down, the chronic illness skyrockets.

Cancers, and heart disease, and diabetes, and osteoporosis, and ADHD. You just name it. All those things that are… The psychological and emotional imbalances. The hormonal imbalances. These are all having to do with nutrition. A hormone is a compound that is

VEGE TABLE DISC LOSURE

As the mineral levels go down, chronic illness skyrockets. Cancers, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and ADHD. built out of elements. Your DNA… I’ve got a whole schtick I do about this stuff.

If you look at what it takes to build one strand of human DNA in Biochemistry. There’s these things called enzymes to screw the DNA together. When they did the Human Genome project, they identified all the enzymes necessary to build one strand of human DNA. Then, when they had identified the enzymes, they identified the elements at their core. It takes 25 different elements, like Copper, Zinc, Boron, Manganese, Cobalt, Cadmium, Selenium, Chromium, Palladium, Yttrium, keep going for a while.

25 different elements to replicate every strand of human DNA. Every single one of your cells has a nucleus in it with DNA as a core.

Your body is constantly rebuilding itself. Every day, you’re building 4

billion new cells in your body. You need 25 different elements, in each one of those 4 billion different cells, just for maintenance.

The farmer, when they get recommendations from the university for their fertility program, it usually involves three elements: Nitrogen, Potassium and Phosphorus. Sometimes Calcium.

Sometimes Sulphur. But you’re basically missing 20 elements that aren’t being managed for.

When those nutrients are not in our food, as they have become less and less over the past couple of generations, then they’re not in our bodies. And if our body needs those elements to function, and they aren’t there, then we start not functioning. And that’s what is going on. We are degenerating. We are physiologically degenerating.

That’s why we have all these chronic

If you’ve got a problem with the environment, the climate, eat food th you’ve got a problem with your child’s physiological issues, hormonal i issues, eat food that tastes good. If you eat a carrot that doesn’t ta good for you. If you eat an apple or a peach that doesn’t taste good, it’s

illnesses. That’s why we have children with cancer, and children with all these horrible things that children shouldn’t have, because we are two or three generations into building our bodies out of something that’s not food. It’s either junk, or it’s food. It can’t be both. It’s mostly junk. It’s empty.

What’s exciting is you get a new body every six months. Your blood takes two weeks to replace itself.

Your bones take seven years, but if you average it out, you get a new body every six months. We have the ability, if we start eating food that tastes good, in six months, get a new, better body, each of us. And in the process of building a better body for ourselves, the only way to do that is by eating food that came from a well-functioning, biological ecosystem.

So, if you’ve got a problem with the environment, the climate, eat food that tastes good. If you’ve got a problem with your child’s physiological issues, hormonal issues, emotional issues, eat food that tastes good. If you eat a carrot

hat tastes good. If issues, emotional aste good, it’s not s not good for you.

that doesn’t taste good, it’s not good for you. If you eat an apple or a peach that doesn’t taste good, it’s not good for you. If we just focus on this one thing of choosing the food that tastes good, then we systemically heal ourselves, and we systemically heal the environment.

Minor note, as far as I’m concerned, the real objective here is consciousness. And I’m hoping that I can head down that track with you. As far as I’m concerned, we have physical bodies, but we also have other aspects of our body.

In China, they talk about meridians and acupuncture. In India, they talk about the Chakras and yoga. The physicist suggest that 97% of reality is not on the physical plane. Dark matter and dark energy is most of the universe. The physical plane, all the things we can see with our tools, our telescopes, microscopes; all the stuff we can see is 5% of reality. We have a physical body, which is on a physical plane, which is 5% of reality but I think we’re hardwired with the ability to see on the other levels also.

Many people make decisions, major decisions in life, based on another sense of knowing.

I like to think of it as music. I actually got into university of music.

Didn’t finish it but that’s where I

started. If you’ve ever been to an elementary school band concert, a primary school band concert, you know what dissonance is.

You know what things vibrating out of tune feels like and sounds like. Every element, Copper, Zinc, Manganese, Boron, Cobolt, every element in Chemistry is a vibration in Physics. Every compound, every hormone, DNA, etc. is a compound in Chemistry but a vibration in Physics. If your DNA is not being built right because the elements, the vibrations that are needed to build it aren’t present, then it is built inappropriately, and it vibrates out of tune.

If you’ve ever been to an Acapulco choir, singing beautifully in tune, four voices singing perfectly in tune, sometimes there’s this thing called an overtone, or harmonics.

And that’s when a higher octave is sounded, even though no-one’s singing it. It becomes resonant.

My hypothesis is, as our physical bodies becomes more coherent because we have, in them, the nutrients we need to be built properly, as we become more coherent in our bodies, we are able to tune in to our higher natures more readily. I would suggest that all of the struggles we have now,

www.bionutrient.org

politically, culturally, you know what’s going on in North America, in the US, politically, culturally.

As we individuals become less coherent, we’re less able to tune into our higher natures, we become more dissonant. And our culture, and everything else, reflects that.

My thought is if we really want to accomplish any kind of systemic change, we ourselves must become coherent first. If we are building ourselves out of junk, we should not expect ourselves to become coherent. It is a foundational, political, economic, environmental, educational, spiritual act to eat food that tastes good.

From that baseline, from the bottom up, each of us takes responsibility for our own piece of this broader puzzle. As we become more coherent, we have more energy. We have more clarity. We tune into our vision and our insight, more well. We have more vitality and capacity. We’re more magnetic.

Each of us needs to own this. And it’s really not much more complicated than literally letting your tongue tell you. Old people will talk about how things used to taste good.

You go to some parts of the world,

and things taste better. Well, it’s probably they weren’t grown in this industrial manner. They were grown in closer, symbiosis with nature. It all connects really beautifully, at least in my mind.

It’s so true. I’ve just finished watching David Wilcox’s ‘The Ascension Mystery’ schools. And he finished talking about the main 8 octaves and how they relate to the main 8 colour frequencies.

And how those colour frequencies relate to their own dimensions, which are reflected in the energetic bodies. If we go to a market place, say, in Cuba we see these images of fresh food: a market place of colours. The colours are so vibrant and extraordinary. The colours, the aromas, the sounds and the tastes. You see the harmony and you know the food is good god food.

Taste Tells You Everything We are wired to see this stuff.

We have the sensors inbuilt for discernment. We don’t need this little gizmo. Nature built us a really sophisticated monitoring system.

And if we think we need an external tool to bring us back into touch with it, so be it. That’s all it is [laughs].

Mostly an elementary attempt.

Dan we salute you and your efforts to heal the heart of our food chain. We are thrilled to introduce Vegtable Disclosure to our National Regenerative Agriculture Day 2020 and invite all groups who are interested in participating in this groundbreaking grass roots event to log onto the website and register their interest in receiving a Bionutrient Meter.

Bionutrient Food Association/Real Food Campaign 411 Sheldon Rd Barre, MA 01005 Email: info@bionutrient.org Telephone: 1 (978) 355-1199

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CITI-ZEN SCIENCE WE ARE LOOKING FOR COMMUNITY GARDENS FARMERS MARKETS SCHOOLS GARDENING CLUBS & GROUPS KEEN GROUPS OF FRIENDS YOUTH CLUBS CHEFS STUDENTS FARMERS AGRICULTURAL AND INDIGENOUS ORGANISATIONS GRASSROOTS NGOS AND LANDCARE GROUPS FROM ACROSS THE NATION TO MOBILISE YOUR COMMUNTIY FOR VALENTINE'S DAY 2020 TO DO THE SCIENCE TO COLLECT THE DATA SO THAT WE CAN DETERMINE THE TRUE QUALITY OF OUR FOOD-CHAIN AND FIX IT

HEALING THE HEART OF OUR FOODCHAIN STARTS WITH THE RIGHT DATA

REGISTER AT WWW.NRAD.ORG.AU

$35.00

https://afsa.org.au/product/farming-democracy

www.afsa.org.au

“

FARMING DEMOCRACY opens the farm gates, it opens the books and ledgers, and aims to open our hearts and minds to the farming community. This book lets the world see the true work, rewards, and costs of farming!

Farming Democracy tells the story of family farms doing things differently. They are working for a ‘new normal’ in agriculture that is fair to soil, water, animals, and people. These farmers are building regenerative, agroecological systems that are viable in an epoch that has seen a sharp decline in the number of farms globally.

A regenerative era in Australian agriculture is emerging

by Eva Perroni.

Original article at Sustainable Food Trust.

Amid growing evidence and awareness of the impact of industrial agriculture on the environment, climate, public health, farming communities and local economies, an “underground insurgency� as Charles Massy calls it, is transforming the practice and culture of agriculture.

This is being achieved through the work of dedicated groups and

individuals for whom an alternative vision of agriculture is essential to healing the planet and human health.

Massy, an Australian sheep grazier and author of Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth has been an influential force in the efflorescence of regenerative agriculture.

“Regenerative agriculture to me is open-ended, which is what nature is,” says Massy. “There’s no limit to where she might go in regenerating health and you don’t know which direction it’s going to take. That’s what makes it exciting.”

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ore than a set of alternative farming practices, regenerative agriculture encourages an interdependent relationship between humans and the land, aiming to renew the health of ecosystems, the nutritional integrity of the food supply and the vitality of communities. In a continent known for relentless droughts and flooding rains, the philosophy and practice of regenerative agriculture is beginning to permeate farming and rural communities across Australia.

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all of the Reed Warbler by Charles Masssy, is a regenerative farmers’ tome that carefully

and provocatively considers a new perspective on the human relationship to landscape.

Grounded within the unique and diverse Australian landscape and the history of Australian agriculture, the book explores the emergence of a “regenerative era” where humans develop an “ecological literacy” which allows them to read, work and learn from the land. Massy argues that we need to shift from a “mechanical mindset”, where nature is devalued, and “manipulatable property” from which to extract profit, to an “emergent mindset”, where humans develop a relational approach to the earth that draws on indigenous

knowledge, the best of modern science and open-ended creativity in response to the increasingly unpredictable forces of nature. Since the release of his book, Massy has been participating in ongoing farmer workshops, public presentations and conferences to stimulate a global conversation and enhance the practice of regenerative agriculture across Australia.

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egenerative agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that seek to mimic nature, for example, through encouraging polycultures of different plant and life forms or grazing animals in ways that mimic their typical or historic movements in their natural setting, gradually improving and revitalising soil, water, vegetation, biodiversity and animal systems. Instead of using synthetic inputs like chemical pesticides and fertilisers to push the limits of production, regenerative agriculture uses a set of farming practices not just to grow food but to progressively improve the ecosystem in which that food is grown. The system draws from decades of scientific and applied research on agroecology, agroforestry, holistic management, organic and natural sequence farming and permaculture across global farming and research communities. It includes practices such as conservation tillage, no-till farming and pasture-cropping, crop rotation, water harvesting and well-managed grazing, among others.

Increasing attention has been drawn to regenerative agriculture as a way to mitigate and build resilience to climate change due to its ability to sequester carbon and rebuild organic matter in soils while also increasing crop yields and boosting farm profitability.

“

Regenerative agriculture to me is open-ended, which is what nature is,” says Massy. “There’s no limit to where she might go in regenerating health and you don’t know which direction it’s going to take. That’s what makes it exciting.“

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he need for “a new agriculture” is apparent across Australia’s complex and fragile landscapes.

Soils are typically older, more deeply weathered and nutrient deficient when compared to those of North America or Europe. The continent is also prone to extreme climatic events, such as recurring prolonged droughts, intense flooding, bushfires and heatwaves, putting farmers and farming communities at risk of crop failure, livestock death, insect plagues, financial hardship and damage to mental health. The introduction of a distinctly European agriculture in 1788 had a vast and extreme impact on the flora and fauna of Australia, with landclearing, invasive species and foreign crop and livestock breeds degrading soil, water and vital ecosystem functions. Decades of continued land

clearing and overgrazing coupled with industrialised farming methods have culminated into considerable challenges for the future of Australia’s agriculture sector.

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egenerative agriculture, however, is opening up new spaces for innovation and opportunity for Australian farmers and rural communities, with mounting farmer case studies and research highlighting its multiple positive impacts. A recent study commissioned by the Australian Federal Department of Environment found that the average profit levels of regenerative graziers were consistently higher than comparable farms (particularly in years where there was low rainfall) and that they reported significantly higher levels of wellbeing and greater confidence in their ability to achieve farming goals.

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ew programmes, educational courses and farmer networks have recently emerged to pursue and advance the ideals of regenerative farming. These range from on-farm consulting and extension service groups such as RegenAg and Regenerative Australian Farmers, to research and training programmes such as Soils For Life, the Savory Institute’s Holistic Management and RCS Australia, to Landcare Australia, a national not-forprofit providing funding and capacity building opportunities for integrated

land management and natural habitat restoration. The slow, but steady growth of regenerative farmer networks and cross-sectoral alliances are taking root across the country, while exciting educational developments are expanding beyond the agriculture sector, with an Australian-first school curriculum that explores regenerative agricultural principles and practices for students from Grades 3 to 10.

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n a policy level, the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, a collaboration of experts from Australia and across the globe led by Southern Cross University, have created a list of policy recommendations and actions to present to the new federal government. These include free education programmes for farmers targeting drought resilience, business models and supply chain management, and funds to assist research and development.

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eyond the farm, regenerative agriculture opens up a dialogue about the interdependence of living systems. Like Massy, regenerative farmers Helen and Michael McCosker believe that authentic regenerative agriculture can exist only if it is completely interwoven into a thriving

regenerative culture. ‘Regeneration’ in this sense, requires a reshaping of the human journey, one that cultivates the values of stewardship and solidarity with an ethics of care in response to the challenges of our time. These values are what underlie the McCosker’s and graphic designer Kelly Jones’s initiative, National Regenerative Agriculture Day, a movement, they affirm, to “heal the heart of our food chain.” Part of this movement requires a conscious shift in the language, imagery and paradigms used to understand and communicate agriculture to a broader, mainstream audience as well as communicating the relationships between humans and the environment across the food chain.

Jones works alongside McCosker to translate regenerative concepts such as increasing soil matter and other practices into visually attractive and comprehensible forms for farmers and non-farmers alike.

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hat Massy, McCosker and Jones, and an increasing number of food systems experts are drawing attention to, is the need for a paradigm shift from mechanistic or industrial modes of agriculture predicated on chemicals, reductionism and the domination of nature, to a holistic and diversified

approach that seeks to mimic the natural, self-organising properties of a healthy dynamic ecosystem As Massy explains in Call of the Reed Warbler, “Entirely new and transformative solutions to addressing the unsustainable practices of industrial agriculture won’t come from within the same box.” Regenerating soils, landscapes, life and human health will require mutual learning relationships between humans and landscapes that draw on the collective knowledge and experience of all those with an interest in human and planetary health.

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rowing out of the groundswell of awareness that the industrial food system is both dysfunctional and harmful, the regenerative agriculture movement is gaining mass grassroots support in Australia and across the globe.

Driven by creative energy, community solidarity and an urgent sense of pragmatism, it has the ability to bring together an invaluable network of agricultural, health, policy, indigenous, academic and research practitioners seeking solutions to some of the most complex issues surrounding climate change, environmental degradation and human health.

5 people donating $8 a month annually will fund a Carbon8 Smartbox

Farmer Registers

Farm is Assessed

Carbon8 Smart Box

Farmers register with Carbon8 and fill in an Expression of Interest. This is a detailed questionaire which provides us with information such as soil type and current farming practices. It helps us to plan the best pathway forward to help the farmer on the journey.

Our Technical Environmental Advisory (TEA) Committee sets out the guidelines for the farmers involvement including soil testing parameters, education pathways and collaborating with regenerative educators as well as assessing farmer registrations.

Where donations permit, each farmer registered with CARBON8 is then sent a free Smart Box so they can begin their journey NOW at a time many farmers are seeking relief and real solutions. The boxes are delivered via Australia Post at no cost.

Soil Tests Conducted

Agronomist

Mentor

The initial soil tests are collected and the baseline testing and analysis is carried out through an accredited lab. As the farmers are paid on their success in getting carbon back in the soil, the soil testing gives us a starting point with our aim to build soil carbon to 8%.

A personalised Agronomist (where available) supports the farmer with putting together a Holistic Management Plan for their short and longer term goals on the farm.

Farmers are invited to be a part of a personalised mentor program to build maximum success at building carbon levels. Support is provided for implementing holistic management, multi-species cropping, natural sequence farming, etc.

Farmer Gets Paid

Carbon Market

The charity contracts directly with the farmer. The contracts are designed so individual farmers needs are met. First payments will be made for soil testing and paid directly to Environmental Analysis Labs (or other preferred labs). This step is subject to funding and reliant on donors.

As the farmers knowledge grows, we encourage participation in the certified carbon credit market.

Participation enables farmers to receive further financial benefit for increasing their soil carbon levels.

CARBON8 helps make this often complicated process simple and supported.

62 people donating $8 a month annually will fund a farmer to be paid for the carbon in their soil. *This has been calculated assuming an average 500 hectare farm with soil tested at 1.5% carbon levels.

For every 1% of carbon that you add to the soil, you increase the water holding capacity by 166,000 litres per hectare.

Farmer Registers

CARBON8 SMART BOX

Farmers register with Carbon8 and fill in an Expression of Interest. This is a detailed questionaire which provides us with information such as soil type and current farming practices. It helps us to plan the best pathway forward to help the farmer on the journey.

Each farmer registered with CARBON8 is then sent a free Smart Box so they can begin their journey NOW at a time many farmers a fraught with drought and desperate for real solutions. The Boxes are delieverd via Australia Post at no cost.

A remarkable memoir detailing a heroic and unswerving commitment to renew the severely degraded land on Wooleen, a massive pastoral property in Western Australia’s southern rangelands.

Holistic Management Handbook Allan Savory

The Oldest Foods On Earth John Newton

The Untrained Environmentalist John Fenton

Holistic management is a systems thinking approach developed by biologist Allan Savory to restore the world’s grassland soils and minimize the damaging effects of desertification on humans and the natural world offering step by step instructions using a holistic management approach.

This is a book about Australian food, not the foods that European Australians cooked from ingredients they brought with them, but the flora and fauna that nourished the Aboriginal peoples for over 50,000

The true story of how John Fenton transformed his family’s run-down sheep farm into a lush oasis by the simple act of planting trees - lots and lots of trees.

For The Love Of Soil Nichole Masters

2040 Documentary

For the Love of Soil was written to communicate the often complex and technical know-how of soil in more digestible terms, with case studies from regenerative farmers, growers and ranchers in Australasia and North America.

The Wooleen Way David Pollock

Award-winning director Damon Gameau (That Sugar Film) embarks on journey to explore what the future could look like by the year 2040 if we simply embraced the best solutions already available to us to improve our planet and shifted them rapidly into the mainstream.

Dirt To Soil Gabe Brown

Cows Sace The Planet Judith D. Schwartz

Call Of The Reed Warbler Charles Massy

Gabe Brown provides a heartfelt personal account of his journey and awakening to a new perspective on the importance of soil biology and the urgent need for a return to regenerative integrated organic farming methods.

Cows Save the Planet is at once a primer on soil’s pivotal role in our ecology and economy, a call to action, and an antidote to the despair that environmental news so often leaves us with.

This ground-breaking book will change the way we think of, farm and grow food. Author and farmer Charles Massy explores transformative and regenerative agriculture and the vital connection between our soil and our health.

Permaculture Earthworks Douglas Barnes

The One Straw Revolution Masanobu Fukuoka

Dark Emu Bruce Pascoe

In the face of drought and desertification, well-designed, water harvesting earthworks such as swales, ponds and dams are the most effective way to channel water into productive use.

This is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world. Common sense, sustainable practices.

Dark Emu injects a profound authenticity into the conversation about how we Australians understand our continent ... [It is] essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what Australia once was, or what it might yet be if we heed the lessons of our past.

The Biggest Little Farm Documentary

Growing A Revolution David R Montgomery

Portable Refractometer

The Biggest Little Farm chronicles the eight-year quest of John and Molly Chester as they trade city living for 200 acres of barren farmland and a dream to harvest in harmony with nature.o

Farmers around the world are at the heart of a soil health revolution that could bring humanity’s ailing soil back to life remarkably fast.

Growing a Revolution shows that a new combination of farming practices can deliver innovative, cost-effective solutions to problems farmers face today.

In gardens and farming it is an all-in-one tool that can be used to test the health of your crops, via a brix rating system. A refractometer uses refractive light passing through plant sap or fruit or vegetable juice to take a reading of nutrient levels.

Books not baleouts will help us drought proof agriculture.

It’s the only smart soilution.

SIGN UP FOR $8 A MONTH AND HELP US SEND SMART BOXES TO FARMERS CURRENTLY IMPACTED BY DROUGHT WWW.CARBON8.ORG.AU

Agtalent is a global marketplace for training and consulting services in the regenerative & sustainable agriculture industry.

Agtalent is dedicated to supporting learners, farmers and agribusiness professionals to up-skill for the sustainable and regenerative future of agriculture. We believe that human capital is the most critical limiting factor when it comes to business success in a changing world. It takes the right access to training, support services and skilled team members for agribusinesses to be able to thrive.

Agtalent will support the continued professional development of individuals and teams, in order to accelerate the global shift to an agriculture system that embraces technology, nourishes people and works in harmony with natural systems.

Training Search and compare the worlds top training opportunities in sustainable and regenerative agriculture, agtech, business management, direct marketing and more. We

list the very best workshops, courses, internships, incubators, study tours, online programs and vocational training. The talent marketplace is the place to get skilled-up for the future of agriculture or promote your programs to a global audience.

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Our network of carefully selected freelancers have a wide range of expertise to support your business to thrive in the changing global marketplace, make the most of technology and help your business to be more environmentally sustainable. The future is regenerative.

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LOOK DEEPER INTO NATURE As a farmer, I don’t know whether you feel rewarded. It’s so hard to explain. You have that connection. A lot of people ask, “Why are you there? Why are you still farming? You could be doing something else, earning a lot more money somewhere else?” But, you get rewarded not just from the crop that you grow, but you fall in love with the land you’re on and it’s very hard to separate sometimes.

AUSTRALIA’S FIRST REGENERATIVE BANANA! Hi Frank. It’s Helen here. Do you know that I have been eating your bananas since you started? I’ve got four kids, and they won’t eat any other banana than the ones with red-tips!

Thank you so much that’s fantastic!

Kelly here. I, on the other hand, had no idea about your amazing bananas until really recently. And then, I started to tell everyone about them. And that’s why I was so excited to talk to you today. The very first Regenerative Banana’s!

Oh, fantastic.

I have to say, it is a remarkable

thing that you’ve done in the marketing of your banana. Up until this point, the regenerative food community have had no way to label their product. So, there’s no marker out there. So, I’m really taken by the innovation you’ve demonstrated that you can come up with such a novel idea, and go ahead, and create a brand that enables the consumer to know what you stand for. First, I want to congratulate you for that. Because it’s the first time I’ve seen anyone manage to innovate that system.

Thank you very much. It was a passion. It comes from the heart, from the soul. I thought about it for a long time. Because I’m very much

Meet Frank Creator of Ecoganic red-tipped bananas which are sold throughout Australian supermarkets

Frank Sciacca, Director

Pacific Coast Eco Bananas, Innisfail QLD www.eco-banana.com.au

FRANK SCIACCA governed by my conscious, and it has a strong pull on me. And right now it is wrong what we are doing to the earth and it is wrong how people are used to farming. And it is wrong the quality of food that we are eating because it is damaging our health not supporting it.

When I looked at what I was doing, I felt that I needed to get this message out to the public.

A sticker wasn’t going to do it because everybody had stickers. It needed to be bold. It needed to be very visual. And for people to ask the question, “Why’s that? What’s that?” So, that we could get that message out. The message was the important part. It was a very strong message. When we looked at what we were doing, obviously, I knew the butterflies, the worms, the nematodes, all those insects out there, all played a role. They were all important things. It took Nature thousands and thousands of years to carefully balance everything out between weeds, grasses, cycles.

Everything came together in a wellplanned format. And, of course, we came along. We had no idea what

we were doing when we came along. All we were interested in was producing crops. The biggest crops.

All at the expense of our natural capital. And we just can’t afford to do that anymore. Obviously, the key indicators on the globe are showing us that we’re not managing so well, and we need to make changes.

If people see your red-tip banana, what is the core message you want them to know?

The message is about looking after the Earth’s resources for future generations. And feeding ourselves right. A healthy Earth is healthy people. An unhealthy Earth is unhealthy people. You can’t just say “I buy organic produce and I’m going to be healthy.” Because the air you breathe, and all the other aspects in relation to Earth’s health is going to impact on your health. This is about respecting one another, and respecting the Earth, and everything that lives on the Earth. If we can’t do that, then we’re obviously going to create an unhealthy Earth, which, ultimately is going to produce unhealthy people. So, my message is, it’s not about being selfish and saying, “This is just for me.” This is for everybody, and everybody has to be on board. What we do in Australia,

what I do in Australia is going to impact on Indonesia, or vice versa, or Japan. Because we all live on the Earth, on the one Earth. The message is about looking after your ecosystems. Looking after your Earth and respecting it.

The red-tip is about getting that message out. We’re not using an organic insecticide. Or a synthetic insecticide. It’s about not using one at all. And learning how to work with nature, and understand all that nature has given us, so that we can farm, knowing how to do it with nature. Organic, sometimes, can be production-driven because the market place pushes them to do that. Obviously, if you’re going to use an organic insecticide, it’s still going to impact on the balance and the ecosystems of our Earth.

It still creates problems. Organic insecticides that kills insects, and a synthetic insecticide that kills insects are certainly going to impact the same way. We needed a different way; we needed a new generation of organic farming systems. And we created Ecoganic.

So, Ecoganic, is it essentially the top practices…. So organic in that you don’t use toxic chemicals or poisons, but it’s regenerative because you’re working with

Obviously, if you’re going to use an organic insecticide, it’s still going to impact on the balance and the ecosystems of our Earth.

It still creates problems.

Organic insecticides that kills insects, and a synthetic insecticide that kills insects are certainly going to impact the same way.

We needed a different way.

healing the soil at the same time.

Is that a good summary?

Yes. With ours, what we’re doing is having a look at our ecosystems on our farm. It’s a process. We’re taking a farm that has been using chemicals and whatever before, and we have monitoring systems in place, monitoring key indicators in nature. And we’re bringing back the ecosystems, bringing back the balance. Understanding the crop that we have grown, alongside the weeds and grasses. It’s about understanding how the role play

between all those things works so that we are balancing the system out. And we are improving the organic carbon in the soil. All our insect orders are coming back, so we’ve got a whole array of insect life.. Not just one or two.

There is no silver bullet. You can’t do it in 12 months. It takes years.

And you can see the development and the process is years and years.

But you end up with a satisfying production system that is just awesome. Where I don’t have to rely on any pesticides, whether it’s

My family was in farming. We had sugar cane farms where I grew up in the North. I lived right beside a river; a big river organic or synthetic.

Frank, it sounds like you have come originally from a conventional farming system. Can we ask you about your family, and your farm, and your background? Were you always a farmer or did you fall into it?

No, I’m an electrician by trade. My family was in farming. We had sugar cane farms, where I grew up in the North. I lived right beside a river; a big river called the Johnson River. I spent half my time down at the River and I loved it. As a little kid, I grew up there. Oh, I used to go fishing, swimming, you name it. I learnt so much from that River.

I connected well. From then, I started going out spear-fishing and to the Great Barrier Reef when I was a young man. I’d seen the changes happening there and I thought to myself, “My God we’re just doing the wrong thing here. We need to get on and start doing the right things.”

The market place, and everybody, was pushing very hard for more production. Bigger bunches of bananas. More yield in cane. Bigger harvesters to harvest more volume of cane. And all this sort of stuff. It was just wrecking everything. The river systems were becoming more polluted. Where we were harvesting cane, the big harvesters were in there with lots of weight, and compacting the soil. It was going backwards. You could see crops of cane were getting smaller and smaller. People putting more and more fertiliser in to try and grow the same crop. The Great Barrier Reef, you could see its ecosystem was starting to fall apart. You looked, and you said, “Well, we’re certainly impacting here. We’re creating problems. We need to fix it. We need to stop doing it. We need to create a message out there to show people that we have to make changes for the next generation. If we love our children, surely we cant

called the Johnson River. I spent half my time down at the River and I loved it. As a little kid, I grew up there.

do that?”

I’ve seen big changes happening. It was just simple Mankind, oblivious to the fact that we can take, take, throw plastic in the water, throw bottles, throw chemical drums, do whatever. It was just fine, and that everything was still going to be okay.

And the fact is, it isn’t. How do we get that message across? I’m sure the younger generation have been educated now and are seeing that it has become very very important that we don’t pollute. We don’t throw plastics in the waterways. We

don’t throw chemicals. Everybody’s becoming more aware of the fact that it’s a carefully balanced system we live in. And we need to be aware of that.

The way that the system works, it’s all about a block, a piece of land, and harvesting the natural capital that’s in that land. That means your organic carbon, all your recyclers, all your living organisms that live on that land, that do their job in relation to nourishing the soil and nourishing a lot of the elements within that web that exists there.

What farmers have learned, what we’ve done is, we’ve got synthetic fertilisers, and we just pour lots of fertilisers on. When we do that, we unbalance the system because we want to grow yield, we want to increase our yield and grow bulk volume of product. And, of course, the market place demands it. It rewards people for that. Your farm, your whole natural capital is going backwards, backwards. And the more fertiliser you put in, the more carbon you’re harvesting out. The more issues that you’re creating, the bigger imbalances that you’re creating in your lifecycles. Of course, you need more chemicals to go with it. You need more insecticides, more nematicides, more miticides.

You’re on that treadmill then.

You become an addict. It’s like somebody becoming an addict to drugs. Your farm has become an addict to all these products because you cannot farm any more through natural practices because you’ve

And the more fertiliser you put in, the more carbon you’re harvesting out. killed them all. That hasn’t been your focus from the beginning.

It’s been about how do I increase my yield because this is what I’m getting rewarded on.

How important are consumers in helping change the signals to farmers? Will it help farmers that are currently in a conventional system, if consumers back them, and pay that higher price? Do you think that will change the farmers’ methods of farming?

Absolutely. Absolutely. It needs to come from the consumer, or governments, or somebody’s got

The consumer and I are linked by what we’re doing on our farm, and what I’m doing with the soil, links me globally.

to say, “Well, look, you’re harvesting the Earth’s natural capital. Right?”

You’re taking away from the next generation on that piece of land.

Your organic carbons are falling away. Your microbes. Your recyclers have disappeared. You’ve left that land in a very barren place where it’s going to take years to build it back up again to where it needs to be. So, if you’re harvesting that away, and you’re turning that into product to sell it cheap to the consumer, then shouldn’t the consumer know what is happening? Shouldn’t the consumer know? And, it’s up to the consumer to support alternative systems. Everybody’s linked into this. The consumer’s linked in to the farmer’s behaviour.

The farmer’s doing it because the

consumer wants the cheapest product. Visually, the best-looking product. The consumer, at the end, is the person who is making the choice in the shops. That’s what the shopkeepers, or the supermarkets tell us. How do we change the consumers behaviour?

The consumer and I are linked by what we’re doing on our farm, and what I’m doing with the soil links me globally. Right? You’ve got to look at it from a web. You’ve got a big spider’s web, and we’re all linked together on threads in that big spider’s web. We all come together. The Great Barrier Reef. My River. My soil. The ants that live on my soil. The beetles that live there.

The fungi. The bacteria. That’s all

part and parcel of the whole system that glue’s all the important parts of the whole together, that makes the system work properly, or healthier.

And I’ll come back to the word, respect. It’s learning how to respect. That, to me, is the biggest thing. We’ve got to learn to respect.

We can’t respect one another. We haven’t even learned to respect one another. How are we going to respect the Earth, and what lives on the Earth? It’s obvious that we’ve got a long way to go there.

From people who throw tins out the window of their car, or plastics.

Have a look at the plastics that’s entering our oceans. There is no consideration given to our Earth’s health. They don’t understand that

if the Earth’s sick, then they will, all humans will, become sick that live on it.

You can’t talk about the environment any more without talking about our bodies. Because we are eating all the problems.

That’s right. For me, it was, how do we get this message across? I couldn’t market Organic. Organic in some ways is selfish. Because it was about saying, “This is for me. This is about my livelihood. I’m thinking of my life, and healthy products for me.” Where in the organic market, is the thinking about looking after the Earth’s resources. Or learning how the Earth’s resources can work for you. It’s all about using non-synthetic products but we’ve got a whole array of organic pesticides, miticides, fungicides, all those things. It’s actually the same process, or the same thinking as conventional, just replacing products.

Oval table in front Et ulpa quasime vellatur maio odis inti So, doloris is it more di doloremped aboutquost outcomes denis. than process?

That’s right. It’s all about outcomes.

It’s all about, “Have I increased my biodiversity index? How have I got more birds on my farm? How have I planted more trees and all these other things that are happening on my farm?” It’s not about the crop you grow. It’s about the land that you manage. And, the food that you produce off it? That’s how you need to reward the farmer. But, right now, they’re not getting rewarded for it because there is no market place set up to reward them for it.

I’m really loving how powerful you’re talking about this. Because the organic topic is quite a controversial one. Yet, what people don’t understand is, it simply just means your essentially removing the conventional chemicals and poisons. But you could still be producing a monocrop. You could still be using the most conventional farming methods and still hurting your soil.

That’s right. That’s why, when you look at it in 2019, our farming practices, need a new system. A

It’s all about outcomes.

It’s all about, “Have I increased my biodiversity index?

Have I got more birds on my farm?” new generation called organic farming. I don’t want to hear this “100% Organic”. What does that mean? You’re missing the point.

And that’s what I’m trying to bring home. This is not about one place.

This is about everybody coming together, about looking after the one Earth. Because we are all going to be impacted by it. It’s just not me.

So, I have to learn, from myself, not to be thinking just on me. I need to be thinking of you, and everybody else that lives in the cities, and everybody else that lives on this Earth. So, I have to start thinking

FRANK SCIACCA along those lines. Otherwise, we’re always going to be disruptive and destructive.

We call it the Love-Light Equation.

It really is about unification, and love and light. That is definitely the future of where we need to go, as far as growing our food and looking after the Earth and doing it with love for all and in peace.

Absolutely. You’ve said it. You’ve nailed it. That’s what we have to do.

That’s the message that needs to be put out there. We live in a capitalist world, and money’s the biggest driver. We’re at odds with how the market system is rewarding. It’s rewarding how to harvest more of your natural capital, and how to destroy more of it, for now.

But there’s nothing there for the future.

You’ve got to be able to walk on your farm, have a look, and see life.

You’ve got to realise, and think about it, and say to yourself, I can visually see life on my farm. I can scratch the soil and see insects. Everything that is there, there’s millions of them, and you look at it, and you say, “It’s alive. There’s life here. It’s living. It’s how Nature intended it to be.” And over the years, you see the benefits that come from it. You can have the biggest banana trees, and

the biggest crop, and see no life because you’ve used chemicals to kill this, and chemicals to kill that. As a farmer, I don’t know whether you feel rewarded. There’s a part of you that’s killing you, your soul; a part of you that feels it is dying because of it. Your farm becomes part of, and you learn to be happy at times, and also cry at times with it. And it becomes a bond. It’s so hard to explain. You have that connection.

And for farmers, sometimes, a lot of people ask, “Why are you there?

Why are you still farming? You could be doing something else, earning a lot more money than what you are in farming?” You get rewarded, not just from the crop that you grow, but you fall in love with the land you’re on. And it’s very hard to separate sometimes.

Frank, if you were in front of an audience of young new farmers, and someone asked you, “Explain to me how we’re meant to farm?”

What would you say?

With your heart. It means, you connecting, and taking ownership, and creating all the wonderful products that you can grow, and be able to take to the consumer, and say why your product is different, how it tastes different, how it’s helping your community, and it actually has attributes because

nature’s recipe is always the best recipe. And it delivers the better taste, better shelf life, the better product to eat. It’s your decision, your direction. You grow it. Make your product, deliver your message or your product, and what you grow and its uniqueness to the consumer. Don’t let the market place grab your product and, I suppose in some ways, bastardise it, and take away it’s attributes for their business. It’s your business.

You feel so rewarded by people coming to you, and saying what a wonderful product you’ve grown and it tastes absolutely fantastic.

That’s a reward that any grower, or any farmer loves to hear.

You actually don’t need a measuring tool. You use your tongue. It’s the perfect measuring tool for nutrition. If you’ve got a beautiful sweet banana, then that’s the best that you can have. People find, you can’t lie your way through it. People know your product, they know how it tastes, they know how your product performs. That’s it in a nutshell.

Many years ago, we used to be at the Royal Easter Show in Sydney. I’ll never forget, two nurses one year came through our stand and one of the nurses said to the other, “Oh,

we get these bananas, the redtips”, she said, “we get these bananas for the palliative care” at one of the hospitals in Sydney they worked in.

And I raced after them and I wanted to know more about what’s happening. Anyway, she said to us, “We have old patients that have digestive problems, and stuff like that.

Bananas, we can’t give them the ordinary bananas. We buy the red-tips for them because they seem to not have the problems.” And, I thought, “Wow. That’s absolutely fantastic.”

Anyway, years on, we decided to do a test on them because everybody was coming back and saying, “How come we can eat your bananas but we can’t eat the other bananas?”

We got CSIRO to do a test on it.

And after some time, they came back with a report. It was a fantastic report. What it showed was that our bananas stayed on the tree longer.

They grew slower because we weren’t feeding them the fertilisers and all that sort of stuff. The carbon levels in the fruit were a lot higher.

When the banana was just on the ripe stage, the fructose, sucrose and glucose levels were double that of an ordinary banana. What it showed was that if the sugar levels were up higher, then the digestive system was able to cope with it a lot better than a product that had been picked off, bunches that were picked immature. Because when they grow them for production, the bananas grow really big. And what happens, is that they, oh, how do I say it, they’re immature at harvest, and the fruit will still ripen, it will still go yellow, but the starches inside won’t reach their full sugar complex until they are very, very ripe or spotty. And most people won’t eat their bananas when they’ve gone that level. So, they’re very soft.

So, it’s about the complex sugars, Frank, that’s actually helps with nutrition in bananas?

It was that the sugar complex was at its right level where it’d been designed to be at, so that your digestive system could cope with it easily. But, if you grow it really fast, and you pick it and it’s immature, the starches inside haven’t turned to sugar. You’re trying to digest more starchier product, and it’s a lot harder to digest. Obviously, it’s going to create problems in your digestive system. But that’s becoming obvious in a lot of our foods. The growing system is being pushed; industrialised. It’s changed the recipe. We’re getting intolerances to this, intolerances to that. We’ve just changed what the food, how the food was set up for our digestive systems to be able to cope. We’ve changed that aspect and it’s created problems. And that is all driven by money, and food is all about money, and it’s all about how do we grow it bigger and faster? It’s all coming to the cost and the health of the consumer.

And you can see that the younger generation are starting to pay the price. All of us are starting to pay

the price with intolerances, this and that, and everything else.

Finally you have to tell us, Frank, how did you come up with the red-tips?Why are they red? [laughs] I looked at them, and I said to myself, “It needs to be something really bold. It needs to be something that’s a stand out.”

It all started one day… I got some paint. I wanted to visually see what it looked like, whether it was a stand out with paint. I did it with paint. I looked at it, and I put them on the table at home. Diane, my wife, when I’d finished, said, “What the hell’s that?!” And I said to her, “That’s what I want our bananas to look like.” She looked at me. She said, “You’ve gone mad.” [everyone laughs]. I said, “Nuh, that’s what it is. That’s where it’s at.” From there, it went to…. cheese wax. It was food grade and all that, so I did some work on that. We dipped some bananas in that, and it worked really really well. From there, we had to do more work, unfortunately. There

was a fair bit of research work in finding the right products we could use in the wax, so that it had to be biodegradable. It had to perform environmentally, as well as food grade.

It’s so perfect. It’s like you’re wearing your little banana heart on your sleeve. It’s such a great example that the product is meant to represent the heart connection between farmer and consumer, in a really innovative way. We’ve all become so mono. One big bland supermarket, with nothing exciting happening anywhere. It’s such a really wonderful, grass roots innovation.

Thank you. It all comes from the soul. And you’ve got to have a spirit. And you’ve got to find it and link with it. It helps you along the way on your journey.

And all these innovative things come to you. You need to be aware of that part of it. I know it’s hard to understand, but it is, and I think a lot of people are not aware of it.

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Meet Jane O’Brien Founder & Manager Inverell Communty Gardens Rural NSW Keen Community Activist Food Grower www.facebook.com/ InverellCommunityGarden How did you get involved with the Inverell Community Gardens and when?

Well, I’ve been involved with Inverell Community Gardens since it first started at its new site in 2012. I was there when we planted the first tree.

My children, my beautiful children, helped plant the first olive tree. The Gardens originally came about as a result of a group who were concerned about food security in Inverell. And they really wanted to show people how Inverell, I guess, was selfsustaining, and can be self-sustaining, and has been in the past. - to teach the new generations how things used to be and how we can sustain ourselves.

Purchasing food, especially vibrant, nutritious food, is about energy as well. And it’s about community. And it’s about culture. It’s not just about a label.

What is the function and purpose of a community garden?

There are so many different functions and purposes. The first thing for me is connection. And it’s connection to people. But it’s also connection to nature and the cycles of nature.

And the potential.

Nature can give us everything we need in terms of feeding us. We’ve got opportunities to teach and learn and share knowledge and wisdom. There are opportunities to work with longterm unemployed people and our local community college teaches at the Gardens.

Community gardens are all about life skills. We take waste out of our community and turn it into amazing fertiliser. We’ve got a worm farm.

We’ve got compost systems going. Our disabilities support groups are involved, as are businesses in town. There are so many purposes of a community garden.

I think from a community garden, we can create our own food system; our own local food security.

It sounds like there is powerful interconnectedness that a garden uniquely manages to foster in a community.

Absolutely. Even if you look at health benefits. Mental health benefits are incredible. Because, when you start with that connection between people, and we all know that we need to connect with others, real healing can happen. It’s human need. As well as physical health.

On crazy winter days, you’re still getting outside, and getting into the sun, getting Vitamin D. And then it really spreads out into families, and into all parts of our community in so many different ways. Because people start to learn how to grow their own food at the gardens and then how to do it at home. How to compost at home. And how to stop waste going into landfill at home.

I don’t really want to buy an organic sweet potato with a bit of plastic wrapped around it from one of the multinational food companies or supermarkets. I want to go and have an exchange with somebody that has grown it locally.

What are your thoughts on creating regenerative food labelling?

My background is food technology.

Food labelling, I’ve done all that. From the regeneration point of food, you can still be getting organic food in the supermarket but it might have travelled miles and miles to get there. There’s this whole ethical consideration when you’re purchasing what you eat. It’s about energy as well. And it’s about community. And it’s about culture. It’s not just about a label. I don’t really want to buy an organic sweet potato with a bit of plastic wrapped around it from one of the multinational food companies, or supermarkets. I want to go and have an exchange with somebody that has grown it locally.

Inverell’s a rural population of around 12,000. In the rural agriculture belt. And yet, our access to locally grown food is really, really limited. There’s a distribution point at our local health food store, ‘Funky Monkey’. But apart from that, our access to locally grown food, and the consumers interest in locally grown food, seems to be massively, missing.

For me, it’s a disconnection. And it’s because people haven’t experienced it. Even though we’re in this amazing, rural, regional town. It is vibrant. There’s definitely a vibrancy here. I think, one of the reasons is we still live pretty fast paced. We’ve got kids to get to school.

We run from this activity to that activity.

It’s the slowing down to have the experience, and the connectivity to food is what we want to foster.

So, I think the magic is getting people involved so that they can see, and taste, and feel what it’s like to eat and chew food that they’ve been involved in growing. Our exposure hopefully will kickstart that curiosity and to experience that connection between local and locally grown food.

The Slow Food Movement is definitely a nice way of looking at locally grown food. It is about taking the time to make eating, and consuming, a more holistic approach to food, and sharing food, and growing food, and cooking food, and preserving food, and eating food. It is in contradiction to our fast-paced lifestyles.

Unfortunately, the notion of a vegetable

And what I mean by beautiful, is by massive trees, the coolest playgrounds, rolling hills for kids to roll down or slide down on a piece cardboard. A food forest where kids can meander through and find food to eat as they go.

garden has definitely been removed from most people’s daily activities.

If you had all the resources you could possibly need to design your perfect community garden, share with the audience your vision for a community garden that would be completely exciting to your mind.



For me, the first thing that comes to mind, is just this magic kind of buzz in this space. It’s people from all different and diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and different types of abilities, just coming and working together to create something absolutely beautiful. And what I mean by beautiful, is massive trees, the coolest playgrounds, rolling hills for kids to roll down or slide down on a piece cardboard. A food forest where kids can meander through and find food to eat as they go.

There’ll be lots of opportunities for people to interact with animals, whether it be pigs or chickens or it could be rabbits. It’s just a really magical place.

Everybody’s there, expressing their own

art and culture. I imagine opportunities for people to come along and just cook together, and it be free too. I want to provide this amazing kitchen, outdoor kitchen, indoor kitchen space. Where mums can come together on a Monday and cook enough to feed their family that night, but also enough to leave in the freezer. And it’s just wholesome food that’s come direct from the garden, with a little bit from the local health food store in terms of beans or legumes.

Teaching people that you can go out in the backyard, or you can go to the community garden and find yourself a meal quite easily.

If a community is reading this, and they’ve been thinking about establishing their own community garden, what do they do?

So, there were lots and lots of different conversations. Lots of people have been involved with the project. I think what you’ll be talking about, Kelly, is groundwork, and creating a culture of what you want to feel in this space, and how we want to interact with each other, and how we want to behave in some ways. Which is quite different



to just digging in and doing it. I think community engagement is really big, and having a look where the energy is within the community, or where the interest and the curiosity is. Number one is working out what the need is, and what the purpose is and then watch the magic happen.

Is there much money available to support community gardens in their creation process?

What I’m finding really interesting in the grant’s application space, is that there’s a lot of money, and opportunity, if you’ve got your ducks lined up and you’ve got your development application, your plans all done. There’s money there for infrastructure. But there’s not money necessarily for funding people, and that what’s I’m finding a little bit tricky. So, I think it’s about, if we could find some funding to actually value people’s contribution, and value community connection and community engagement.

If we were to look at Inverell, with a population of around 12,000 and there

was some form of natural disaster, and the food chain got stopped and suddenly Inverell was expected to stand independently and feed its population.

Could we do it, Jane?

Not at the moment, though it’s massively important. It’s about our survival. It’s paramount. It’s going to be interesting.

I don’t know what’s going to happen.

I think there’s going to be a lot of uncertainty, it’s very emotive. Food is a really emotive subject. Water is going to be hugely emotive as well. I don’t know whether it will come as a shock or whether we will slowly move towards really thinking about them seriously. You can only hope.

What would Inverell have to do, at its current population rate, to ensure food security? What would we, as a community, as a culture, have to do?

Oh, look, we’d definitely have to work together. That would be a start. Instead of working in silos and different businesses.

There would have to be so much more connectivity. Many more partnerships.

I’d think we’d have to, pretty much, take

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It’s time to start valuing people again, rather than infrastructure. We can build whatever we want.

A garden isn’t about buildings. A community garden is about people, and connecting people, and facilitating people.



every vacant block that we’ve got in town, and grow food. I really don’t know. I’m not an expert in that area. I’d love somebody to come along and have a little estimate on this sort of thing. That’d be fun.

It’s kind of a cool competition you could actually run at the Gardens. For someone to design an answer to that question. A town with full food security.

What a glorious vision that would be.

Because food of course means beauty.

Absolutely. Because there would be so much growth, and so much vitality, and so much energy. It’d be pumping. And the smells and the bees and the colour.

And the whole town would look and act like a giant community garden....

Yes, the gardens would be so interweaved within the community that the schools would also be primarily a garden.

Wherever the schools are right now, they’d be all gardens. You’d go to sport on Saturday morning, and you’d come home with this amazing box of veggies.

You don’t have to even go anywhere.

You’d just walk home [laughs]. Fill your backpack. It’s a really amazing vision.

I don’t understand why councils are so slow on the uptake of understanding that food growing is beautiful, and beautiful means a beautiful population, and a massive boost to tourism. It’s a very good question. Even at the end of our lives, the community gardens being such a vital part of the connection of our whole culture, should essentially be where people are buried. People’s graveyards should not be so set in stone.

They should be beautiful trees that form a beautiful ancient garden that honours our families that have passed on.

You know, we are part of the system. Our own bodies, and the decomposition of our own bodies can put so much richness back into the cycle, to that natural cycle.

We’re just going to look like a beautiful tree. And that is amazing biodiversity.

Imagine a graveyard in Inverell, over the last 200 years, they all had fruit trees growing instead of stone graves, all different trees. Imagine the amazing forest that would be there now. And you would be able to see the age and the richness of that community. So, you’re keeping the heritage of those seeds alive. The vision’s just amazing. I think of some of the graveyards I’ve known in England. Some of these are hundreds and hundreds of years old. Imagine if they had ancient trees on them.

Absolutely beautiful. You could look at that 400 year old tree, and go that was my great-great-great grandfather. That, to me, is an amazing thing.

What’s been your greatest success story?

< section title > additional title

There’s lots of little moments. Look, for me, I’m not going to say it’s one big event.

One was a fellow with a disability. And they were visiting our gardens, and, I showed him a broad fork. And this fellow got really really excited, and worked out how he could use it. And go, I can do this. The joy of watching him navigate that, and the sense of achievement from working it out.That was a special moment for me.

Another special moment is when a volunteer who had been with us for a few months said, “This place is what keeps me alive right now.” She had been through a pretty bad patch, and she really didn’t want to live. And, having a place to come each Saturday, and volunteer, and be appreciated, was life giving, for her, literally.

And there’s one other moment. Another fellow that has volunteered over the years who told me “my father-in-law speaks to me now because I go out and I’m able to work and contribute. And I’m getting married.”

So, it’s not… As much as I love the beautiful big events, and the electricity we create, for me, it’s not a big thing. It’s those little, tiny conversations that I have with people.

So, it’s basically people?

I’m speaking on behalf of an amazing community of volunteers that are holding me, and supporting me, and we’re holding each other. We have an amazing 70-something year old woman, and, honestly, she’s in there every day, every second day. And that question about can a community garden become sustainable? It can because we’ve been paying our bills with the produce that we’re selling on Saturday mornings that she champions each week.. There’s $8,000 in that bank account. And that’s because our amazing 70-year-old that is committed to turning up, showing up. I am blessed.

PHOTOS - FB INVERELL COMMUNITY GARDENS

People’s graveyards should not be soset in stone.

They should be beautiful trees that form a beautiful ancient garden that honours our families that have It would be an extraordinary social experiment, if one township would aim for total food security. In doing that, cure all the illnesses and diseases. Increase the genius, creative force of their population. Inspire a whole new level of thinking, and music and art, all because everyone’s feeling so well.

www.facebook.com/InverellCommunityGarden

www.integritysoils.co.nz

FOR THE LOV E OF SOIL ‘For the Love of Soil’ is a land manager’s roadmap to healthy soil, revitalized food systems in challenging times. This book equips producers with knowledge, skills and insights to regenerate ecosystem health and grow farm profits.

Globally-recognized soil advocate and agroecologist Nicole Masters delivers the solution to rewind the clock on this increasingly critical soil crisis in her first book, For the Love of Soil.

She contends we can no longer treat soil like dirt. Instead, we must take a soil-first approach to regenerate landscapes, restore natural cycles, and bring vitality back to ecosystems.

This book translates the often complex and technical know-how of soil into more digestible terms through case studies from regenerative farmers, growers, and ranchers in Australasia and North America. Along with sharing key soil health principles and restoration tools, For the Love of Soil provides land managers with an action plan to kickstart their soil resource’s well-being, no matter the scale.“ For years many of us involved in regenerative agriculture have been touting the soil health - plant health - animal health – human health connection but no one has tied them all together like Nicole does in “For the love of Soil”! “ Gabe Brown, Browns Ranch, Nourished by Nature. “ “William Gibson once said that “the future is here - it is just not evenly distributed.” “Nicole modestly claims that the information in the book is not new thinking, but her resynthesis of the lessons she has learned and refined in collaboration with regenerative land-managers is new, and it is powerful.” Says Abe Collins, cofounder of LandStream and founder of Collins Grazing. “She lucidly shares lessons learned from the deep-topsoil futures she and her farming and ranching partners manage for and achieve.”

The case studies, science and examples presented a compelling testament to the global, rapidly growing soil health movement. “These food producers are taking actions to imitate natural systems more closely,” says Masters. “... they are rewarded with more efficient nutrient, carbon, and water cycles; improved plant and animal health, nutrient density, reduced stress, and ultimately, profitability.”

In spite of the challenges food producers face, Masters’ book shows even incredibly degraded landscapes can be regenerated through mimicking natural systems and focusing on the soil first. “Our global agricultural production systems are frequently at war with ecosystem health and Mother Nature,” notes Terry McCosker of Resource Consulting Services in Australia. “In this book, Nicole is declaring peace with nature and provides us with the science and guidelines to join the regenerative agriculture movement while increasing profits.”

“All of the focus in these emerging new farmers spaces is around the ‘how’ and not on the ‘who’ and that’s where the Young Farmers Connect network is really different.

We are focusing on who the hell is going to grow the food into a regenerative future, not so much - how it’s going to be done.”

Meet Joel Orchard Food activist, f reelance farmer, Northern NSW Founder of Young Farmers Connect youngfarmersconnect.com.au futurefeeders.org facebook.com/FarmerJoel

I am particularly interested in exploring an emerging culture of young people engaging in agriculture and looking at how young people are now transitioning into agriculture from non-traditional farming backgrounds. I think this is opening up a new space where people are getting involved in agriculture and food systems from a real range of diverse backgrounds. Regenerative agriculture is not an aspiration for a lot of new young farmers; it’s a baseline: sustainable food systems; local food economies; creating community. Those seem to be fairly fundamental ideas for this new generation of young people who are moving into food production.

My passion has really been around creating a movement for young farmers, and a network and broader communities to support this emerging demographic.

But also, to advocate for policy change and industry support because the small scale farming sector in particular doesn’t often get the recognition that it needs and it doesn’t have the appropriate support services surrounding it - and yet this is where a heap of our new growers are getting into the industry. There are still some traditional approaches through government agencies, and mainstream farmer groups, which typically support the export market & commodity-driven industrial agriculture methodologies.

Which we know are creating all of the issues that we are, for the most part, working

against; the really high fossil fuel users, the carbon emitters and soil degraders So, I’m keen to ensure that there’s a voice that recognizes there are a lot of people, young people, coming into the agriculture space and targeting innovation in sustainability, and also providing positive impact into reviving local economies.

Regenerative agriculture is for this new demographic, pretty much standard practice - because it is a toolkit that makes sense, heals the landscape instead of destroying it and is based on increasing prosperity through fertility.

How did you personally get into this? Were you born into a family that were food producers?

I put myself in the same category as the young farmers I’m surrounding myself with. I finished a science degree, and was living in the city before moving to a rural community.

I got into growing my own food through the influence of Permaculture and the desire for sustainable lifestyle and then wanted to turn that into a business. But I found it hard to enter into agriculture: access to land is impossible and access to finance and capital is impossible for startups.

There are all the regulatory challenges with it as well.

And so that’s what creating a young farmers network is about, identifying where those issues are and the fact that we are all challenged by those same barriers.

So, I started out with a couple of small ventures and then a market garden in Mullumbimby in the North of NSW. I tried to bring other young people together who were struggling with the same sort of barriers trying to enter the industry. And simply the fact, you can’t get paid experience in the industry when there’s few employment pathways. And to start off a new enterprise and start your own business is fraught with a lot of risk and a lot of expenses. And coupling low return on investment with that

risk and all of the rest is a real challenge…and farming has never been sold as an exciting and viable profession! So I figured it would be good to explore the stories and start promoting a different kind of culture for farming.

Fundamentally for me, it is the social sustainability of farming that I think is where the young farmers networks really can have a bit more of a say.

That’s a really powerful model and I think that’s a really great place to start the conversation. You think about agriculture and farming; it seems to be consistently a generational process. I guess that conversation isn’t actually highlighted very often, even in the regenerative conversations that we have.

Let’s talk about it. I want to know… Land. That’s a massive problem.

Yeah, well, land access and acquisition. Or even just security of tenure is a really big challenge for the new generation. And I think with that conversation I would broaden to say that, all of the focus in these emerging new farmers spaces is around the ‘how’ and not on the ‘who’ and that’s where the Young

When I started thinking about the ageing farmer population and young farmers in 2014, it still wasn’t really a conversation that was on the table. I’ve certainly seen a lot more activity in that space over the last five years, which is comforting. Government agencies and the industry are starting to look at it more seriously.

The average age of an Australia farmer is now nearly 60.

Farmers Connect network is really different. We are focusing on who the hell is going to grow the food into a regenerative future, not so much - how it’s going to be done.

Workshops on regenerative farming, holistic management, biodynamics, and sustainable farming are a dime a dozen now. But there’s not enough workshops on how to start a new farm business; how to access land; how to form a lease agreement; how to work through things like succession planning if your parents don’t own a farm.

And what’s interesting to me is that the networks and the organisations in say, the US and Europe that I’ve been inspired by, like The National Young Farmers Coalition, The Greenhorns, The Young Agrarians groups in Canadathey focus on regenerative farming and soil management as well but it’s centred around the who and the culture of agriculture. The young farmers movement has a clear focus on these new forms of sustainable-regenerative farming methods and is normalising them.

How has the issue being addressed here in Australia?

How have we actually started

to look at the “who”?

I guess the US and Europre groups are a bit more developed. Those organisations have been established and really had a fairly powerful movement going for over 10 years.

Whereas, in Australia, when I started thinking about the ageing farmer population and young farmers in 2014, it still wasn’t really a conversation that was on the table. I’ve certainly seen a lot more activity in that space over the last five years, which is comforting. Government agencies and the industry are starting to look at it more seriously. The average age of an Australia farmer is now nearly 60 so statistically, there’s enough data out there that demonstrate just how big an issue it is. The EU’s just done a massive research study on aging farmer populations; and they are investing heavily to tackle this problem. In the US and Canada, it’s been a big deal for some time. So, we’re slowly catching up. As everything in Australia, it’s a decade behind.

But really, we need to look at advocating for policy change to address some of the fundamental issues in the food system, the

dominance of BigAg and the corporate-consolidation of large industrial poultry, beef, dairy, cotton and grains.

Our role is to build viable and sustainable alternatives through a mosaic of small and medium-sized farms and food businesses. That means we need more small processing plants, makers, butchers, bakers, more locally owned grocery stores, providers and entrepreneurship at all levels.

And also combating what we’re seeing as urban sprawl; the breakdown of agricultural land into more residential areas. Land use conflicts; and even just affordability.

There’s a whole range of issues that is making farming impossible for new entrants into the marketplace if they don’t inherit farm lands. That’s certainly something we need to address.

Do you think that’s been by design?

The current design is leaving us with a mess, sending farmers broke and the land barren. Farmers have been pushed to get big or get out. So, yeah, it’s a symptom..

And, unfortunately, with the standard rhetoric that we’re stuck with, It’s “we’ll wait until the problem is too big, and then just put a bandaid on it.”

There’s a few organisations and players that are looking at combating the land access space. Sam at ‘Cultivate Farms’ is doing a lot of great work linking new-young farmers with land and investors. There are a few projects that are being designed to help young people into farming. I’ve done a little bit of work with the NSW ‘Young Farmer Business

@ROLYPOLYFARM

Program’ that are effective in this space. But really there isn’t a lot looking at non-traditional farming methods, or alternative food systems.

And certainly, small scale farming and local food economies don’t even really register with traditional industry groups. In fact, it’s taken years of my kind of pestering to have small scale farming even really looked at as a serious sector.

Is there any government subsidies for young farmers to buy land? Does anything like that exist?

I know a few of the State agencies are looking at initiatives to reduce things like stamp duties and stuff like that. When you think about the issues that young people are facing getting into the housing market these are exacerbated when you’re looking at getting into the

farming market. You can’t get a residential loan for a commercial farm. Trying to support under 35’s to get into farming is hard when there’s also few under 35’s that have money to shell out to buy farms, and then fund new start-up business : so we have got to look at different land use models. Really, what we need to look at is alternative routes for ownership, and that’s what Sam’s (Cultivate Farms) is doing.

So, investment and equity models are one way but we need to consider that you don’t need to own the land to run a farm if you have got a solid land use agreement. So looking also at structuring sustainable long term tenancy options so that farmers can have security of tenure on parcels of land that aren’t being utilized productively.

So, where I am here in the Byron Shire it’s a classic issue. We have tree-changers buying

100 acre blocks, on every second street, and not farming it. We have all this amazing farmland sitting vacant, unused, and becoming weed infested on state significant soils. And yet, we’ve got young people who can’t afford to live in this area anymore. Trying to match those two things up, I think is really important.

Especially when we look at the Eastern seaboard of Australia, really it’s becoming the only place with enough rain to do any serious horticulture and agricultural work. All the intensive agricultural systems are going to end up on the coast, which is where the population is, which is where there will be increasing land use conflicts. So, we need some serious thinking to balance all those things out.

And then, I guess that moves really strongly into the whole notion of localising food economies. Growing food where the population is rather than transporting it from much further away. There’s increasing pressures on land use for farming everywhere.

The argument here is that there’s lots of land but you might need $50,000 to set

up and operate even just a simple 1-2-acre market garden business. And in your first few years, who’s got $50K to throw at that, and then work for free while your building a business ? Especially considering adding in the cost of living.

What solutions have you started to advocate for in this space?

I’m really pushing for support with local government to look at better policies around secondary dwellings so that land owners can invest in farm managers’ cottages, and things like that. In highly trafficked areas, like the Byron Shire, there’s issues with that becoming exploited for AirBnB. That becomes an issue in itself.

I’m looking at developing a micro-financing system so

“I’m looking at developing a micro-financing system so that young farmers can access really low interest loans to put into structures and equipment for production efficiencies. that young farmers can access really low interest loans to put into structures and equipment for production efficiencies.

Because I guess, when you track it back, if a young farmer gets going on a really lean budget, and starts off just with basic hand tools - and many do; they never have the efficiencies in place to be able to profit enough and reinvest in the business or afford the next level of their tools and equipment. And the banks simply won’t loan money for you know small power tools, walk behind tractors, irrigation,

or poly tunnels. There’s no good templates for tenancy agreements for young farmers to look at to scope for forming long-term agreements with landholders. And because landholders are increasingly becoming city folks, they need education around share farming. The whole notion of share farming is disappearing with farmland being handed over to rural lifestyle.

And then, on top of that, you’ve got land being sold like Monopoly. Which offers the lease farmer no security

at all. I’ve known a number of local young start-up farmers who have lost access to land in the last few years because it has sold unexpectedly from beneath their feet. You can’t afford the risk just to get into the game or to invest in a business on that kind of a tenancy, especially when we’re looking at building soil, which you can never take with you. Certainly, infrastructure you can move on. But how do you get a return on your investment if it’s in the very land that gets sold?

I haven’t ever heard anyone link AirBnB to an issue with youth in farming. To think of it actually taking away from young farmers actually getting a start, that’s pretty poor.

It’s definitely exacerbated in areas where the whole tourism market has exploded. The Northern Rivers is struggling with this now, it’s excluding a lot of people from living here.

There is high unemployment and people are moving away because they cannot afford to rent anymore. Byron Bay is now the most expensive place to live in Australia.

When I started out looking at the young farmers issues I thought, well, land access is THE number one problem.

And then you look around, there’s so much land not getting used. But people can’t

Preserving farm land in perpetuity so that it’s not affected by exploding real estate markets (like air bnb) and becoming unaffordable. In these models, the community owns the land, leasing it to families or farmers with a lifetime lease that can be passed on or transferred to other farming families.

afford to live here in order to use it. You’ve got farms around here that are selling for prices that you can’t actually ever conceive of making enough money from to be a viable farming operations.

We’re losing some of the best farm lands in the country on amazing soil with some of the most secure rainfalls zones in Australia.

Are you advocating for a legal structure around gauging the use of that property in the past, and the soil that is part of that property now, in relation to who can actually purchase it, and what it can be used for?

Do we need a legal change like that?

I think there’s a number of levers that we can pull. At this point, with developing the Young Farmers Connect network, I don’t think we have the capacity for a political advocacy line. Really, I’m just trying to get people engaged and build a membership so that we’ve got a voice.

Then over time, we’ll move more into an advocacy role.

Following in the steps of, say, the National Young Farmers Coalition in the US. They’ve done a really great job with that. I think, designing some support services around sharefarming agreements and things like that will be really helpful and fostering a culture

of information and even tool sharing. Pulling together some packages of education for new land holders and helping them work through models to share farm and tenancy agreements would be helpful. I think we could move towards looking at community farm land trust models, as well. So, preserving farm land in perpetuity so that it’s not affected by exploding real estate markets and becoming unaffordable. In these models, the community owns the land, leasing it to families or farmers with a lifetime lease that can be passed on or transferred to other farming families.

Plus its a great community engagement model.

I think there’s a lot of work that can be done around sustainable urban planning, locking farmland down as farmland - creating farmland preservations.. Zoning it, a little bit like what we do with environmental protection or voluntary conservation agreements, but using that same sort of tenants for food production.

And then a lot of things that are also challenges for young farmers including market access. Certainly, as we’ve found around here, the farmers markets aren’t necessarily open to everyone and are excluding new entrants from accessing the

markets, They are managing their own supply and demand but essentially they’ve become anti-competitive.

The farmers markets are excluding young farmers?

Is that what you’re saying?

That’s the opposite ethos of a farmers market.

I agree. And especially when you think that a farmers market is a place where a new grower can learn a lot about developing their business, their practices, production consistency, community engagement, product management.. where else do you go to learn those skills if you can’t get into a farmers markets.

I think the vast majority of the public would assume farmers markets are the community connection hub for farmers of all descriptions.

They’re the place you go for local produce. It would be the place to support people who are growing local produce.

I’ve never considered there being an issue with turning young farmers away.

I think it is limiting both their growth and the publics access to local food, its stifling to new forms of creative engagement, diversity and regional distribution opportunities. It’s the old fear of having to split the pie into smaller sections to go around. Whereas, what I genuinely feel is the case with the young farmers, is that we all view our role as growing the pie bigger for everyone and it is our mission to get more customers out of the Coles and Woolies model which you can’t do unless you have a bigger and more effective local food marketplace. So, it’s counterproductive to alternative food systems to be regulating

farmers markets through protectionism.

I personally would love to see a hundred different versions of garlic to choose from.

And collaborative economies is a big part of what we’re trying to do at Young Farmers Connect too. That’s the reason to get young people who are farming together, to look at how we can build more robust systems and economies, by collaborating instead of being in competition and building a regenerative culture.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s not like we would need to have a youth conference teaching young farmers about regeneration. It’s

innately in them. But we do need to reach some bridges between the old ways and resources and the new ways.

We definitely need bridges because I also acknowledge that we need the experienced farmers for their mentorship and their wisdom and their experience. I feel that young farmers hold the key to radically transforming the entire agricultural system, because they’re not old dogs learning new tricks, what these new growers and producers lack in experience they make up for with a huge range of professional skills. From environmental science, marketing and media, engineering and trades.

Agriculture is going through

some pretty radical changes, and going to need to come up with some radical solutions in the face of climate change and growing populations. Farming is not going to be replaced with drones tomorrow, but embracing technology is certainly an important tool for new farmers.

As a result of industrialisation, we have fewer farmers managing much bigger pieces of land. And so, we are losing an opportunity for knowledge exchange. We are also seeing that effect on intergenerational experience, especially with the trend of farm kids not staying on to inherit the family farm. We will likely see this get even worse with the impact of the drought.

I think these are also important factors when considering the issues around mental health - we are really seeing the impact of this on the farming community.. This is a big driving factor for me, around creating communities because we’re working in the space where, traditionally, farming is professionally and socially isolating.. By nurturing peer-support communities around these farming groups, we’re providing conduits for emotional connections and places for people to support each other. There are really strong reasons to do that.

I think its also really interesting to consider how regenerative agriculture and regenerative culture can have a positive impact on this issue. Even just moving away from industrial models and into more human centric and smaller scale models where there are heaps more jobs and connection.

I went to a Young Farmers Connect field day on

Saturday. We went to one of our members farms, and they’ve got a hundred acres and because of the way they’re shifting their model, to utilizing the land better, stacking multiple enterprises into the farm ecology, and owning the entire value stream it’s going to go from a two-person operation to employing 20 people on the same 100 acres over the next 24 months. That’s a completely different way of managing farm land and it brings people together.

There is so much scope…

Obviously, the power of resources is driven by the consumer. The energy of the consumer is what drives any change, and we’ve got this huge rift of understanding around nutrition. If we adjusted the nutrition in our food back to the optimal levels, we would be talking about a total shift in human consciousness, health and genius-ness in a generation.

Yeah, the framework that I find useful is to think about ecology, and we know that ecology’s are successful in nature because of diversity.

We’ve eliminated diversity from every part of the food system through industrialisation; everything has become streamlined, straight lines, monocultures, and we have significantly reduced the diversity of the foods that we eat. And we don’t have enough diversity within the ecosystem of farm businesses

anymore. That, for me, is the lens that I use,to think about how we can solve some of these big issues.

Are there a lot of young people interested in returning to farming?

We have really just launched as a national network, and we are now building an official membership base so we have got better data and ways of connecting our community. It has emerged just through Facebook which is pretty easy to manage. Certainly, the case studies and the surveys that I’ve done over the last couple of years indicate that more and more young people are moving into farming careers not from traditional farming backgrounds. I guess it’s sort of a bit of tree-change, people are recognising that they want to live healthy lifestyles and live close to the land and form those connections, which they can’t do in the city. The rural lifestyle is appealing, and finding a way to be able to sustain and support yourself in that

environment is key - so we have to be creative. And I think there is also a recognition that the only way to be successful against the tide of a mass produced commodity food system, is to work together. I think we are seeing a shift in attitude towards alternative food cultures, which is from both the consumption and production ends of the food system.

Does the Council regulations advocate that farming land be protected, or maintained?

Is there any focus on that at all?

I don’t think there’s anywhere that its happening enough in Australia, at all. There’s nowhere. Probably the most crucial areas are around the cities which used to have extensive market gardens and foodsheds.

How have we lost our way so much? ‘ Follow the money. We just need to look at balancing increases in population with the shared pressure of protecting the best farm land that we have. There’s no point in putting roads and houses on

the best soils, and wondering why we can’t put farms on hillsides, rocky outcrops and degraded soils where there is no water.

I remember growing up and everywhere you go, there’d be these roadside cupboards, or wagons, that would be selling food. You don’t see them as much. They seem to be a vintage aspect of our culture.

Yeah. And I’d say that’s because people have been moving from the city for a country life and bought farm land for lifestyle and aren’t interested in farming. Now they’ve just got nice large lawns.

Oh, lawns. Say something about lawns, Joel. Give me a lawn quote.

Don’t even start me on lawns... [laughs] There’s your quote.

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GUNDI RHOADES

The world our Belove of our Chi of the soil.

Farmer an interconn

d of Organics, Regenerative Agriculture, ved Pets and the future health and wellbeing ildren all point back to our understanding l. We talk to Gundi Rhoades, an Organic nd Master Vet about how these are all nected.

GOWRIE VETERINARY CLINIC PH: 02 6721-2277 131 Yetman Rd, Inverell After Hours : 0427236204

How did you come across the words, “regeneration” or “regenerative agriculture”?

I’ve been involved in nutrition and in organic farming for two decades, if not three and I grew up with a very green thought process. Regenerative farming was developed originally from organic farming methods. I had my own farm, and I had it organic and I know what it involves, and I know what it entails, what the allowed inputs are and what you are not allowed to do. And probably where organic lets everybody down a little is they tell you what not to do but they don’t tell you how to make it that much better. And regenerative farming, I don’t know where the term came from but it is an evolution of organic. Organic, then sustainable and then regenerative, because we realise “sustainable” is not going to cut it either. Because you don’t really want to sustain all the nasties, the broken-down farming methods. You want to actually get it better again; you want to regenerate. So, I think it’s a great term: regeneration.

Would you say organic and regenerative are essentially the same thing?

I think regenerative is a little bit broader and nobody has yet, as far as I know, put a definition to it. It’s a very loose conglomeration of people who have got the same mindset. There is no rule book. Organic is definitely a rule book. You have got in Australia, two main certifying bodies. It’s just like a law; it’s a written rule book. What you are allowed to put in and what you are not allowed to put in. So, you have inputs allowed. Certain minerals on your soil. Or you are not allowed to treat your animals with antibiotics unless you put them in a certified area which is like another little paddock, and you have to keep them away from the others for so much time.

So, if it says organic, the label actually means organic. You can trust that there is no pesticide or herbicide on there. It’s all controlled. But regenerative hasn’t got a rule book but it might happen in the near future.

Do you think that is missing, the labelling that actually identifies regenerative food growers and practices for a consumer market?

Absolutely, because how else will the consumer know? So, we have to sit down and define what it means. What is allowed.

You have to have some rules and when you have got them, then you can put a label on it.

Because ultimately, it’s about the consumer that has to buy the food that the farmer produces.

It would be beautiful if everyone could be a regenerative farmer but that is not the case. You want to have farmers getting paid for that. I as the consumer go into Woolworths or Coles, and I can either buy something that is not labelled at all like apples, and you know that they’re going to have poison on them, but if amongst those apples would be apples from a regenerative farmer, I could not tell the difference. So, then you have got the organic shelf where it is labelled and then there is everything else all mixed in together. And there is such a strong link between autism and glyphosate on the health of unborn children.

And who makes the glyphosate in the first place? You know, are there some factories in China?

I actually do not know where they make glyphosate but a lot of our agricultural chemicals are made in China, and we have whole towns that are sick. So in a future regenerative rulebook i

hope that glyphosate is definitely not allowed, along with other pesticides and herbicides because that would really defeat the purpose. So, then, if you say ok, by me buying this organic egg, chickens are happy, my children are healthy, the farmer is healthy, the farmer’s children are healthy, the grain is grown for the chickens, that farmer is healthy, and the people that would have produced the poisons, don’t produce the poisons so they are healthier too. So, it’s a real down effect. By giving you as the consumer a choice, you get to make the right choice, but you have to know if this is regenerative.

then you kill the bacteria in the soil. And the whole regenerative movement is based around the soil. You know, have healthy soil that is pumping with lots of microbes, lots of fungi, that do amazing things. Incidentally, through encouraging them, and encouraging humus production, which you will get, you draw down that much carbon that climate change will be super super impacted and hopefully eradicated. By making the

Organic is primarily about getting the chemicals out of our food chain but regenerative is about that and healing the whole environment around the

And probably where organic lets everybody down a little is they tell you what not to do but they don’t tell you how to make it that much better. food chain..

Yes. The whole point is if you put chemicals on… you know, glyphosate kills. It kills plants but it also kills fungi, and it also kills bacteria. And if you eat it, it will kill the bacteria in your gut also. So, if you put glyphosate on, which is the most common used one,

consumer choice of going to regenerative products, and buying them, you support all of that, you know. Health, climate change, your children and so forth. But you have to have the soil pumping.

Do you know what I mean by pumping? Pumping means you have got living earthworms, fungi, microbes, and they can take the nitrogen out of the air. They can make your minerals soluble so that the plant can take them in.

If the plant has got it, then either the cow or you can eat it. So, by putting artificial fertilizers on, Nitrogen fertiliser kills the soil.

Glyphosate kills the soil. Other herbicides and pesticides kill the soil; kill the microbes in it.

So, you’ve got dead soil. With

the plants, they become so sick, that they can’t fight off disease, therefore, the plants gets sick and the farmer to save their crops, because they’ve got lots of money invested, they put on more fertiliser and more pesticides.

Then the bees are dying.

Yeah, our planet is going down the drain. Ultimately, we can’t live without nature, so we will go down the drain.

At the moment, we’re killing ourselves very nicely.

Where did the passion come from, as a vet, to link you to the nutrition of our food chain?

My journey started when I was 21 and my mother had breast cancer. Everybody’s got a sob story behind them but my mother is not a sob story because she’s fine. She did not just get chemo, and her breast removed, and radiation. She just went full blast into nutrition. There’s a really good German doctor who taught… This is going back now 32 years, about the link between any disease, like asthma, depression, diabetes, heart disease, and so forth, and food and nutrition. He went down to Weston Price.

We all know Weston Price, who went around the globe and had a look at indigenous societies and how healthy they are. How healthy their jaws are.

You know, but it will not just be the jaws, it will be their whole body.

And what they were eating. And then he referred to tests done with rats and with cats.

And if we eat white

I as the consumer go into Woolworths or Coles, and I can either buy something that is not labelled at all like apples, and you know that they’re going to have poison on them, but if amongst those apples would be apples from a regenerative farmer, I could not tell the difference. refined flour, that diseases will start from there and so forth. So, the whole health link to disease.

So, I’ve been doing it for over 30 years. And my degree is science. I do science every day. Been a vet for nearly 30 years and then I came and married a farmer. And I was always really green.

I love nature. Love this planet. It’s amazing. And the more I learn, and the more knowledge I have, the more I really know how absolutely amazing our bodies are.

But what does a vet have to do with it? I have a science degree and I do it every day.

So, I see sick animals. I had my own farm of organics.

I learnt about the soil and organic systems, and about rotational grazing, and so forth. But the amount of allergies in dog and cats, I started just treating them like everybody else, with cortisone, or standard drugs that you have. Never thinking why are they there in the first place. So, we learned that it’s an IGE, a hyper response, but not why. So, in the last few years, it’s been really interesting how all these little dots connected. What we do to the food chain. And why do these allergies appear?

Why have soooo many dogs

got the itches? Or cancer? We do a lot of cancer in dogs as well. Not as many as in people but there are these problems. That’s one thing. But the other thing is that, through my door when you talk to people, let’s say I’ve got 20 clients a day, I would say that there is not one family in there that hasn’t got cancer, diabetes etc. I’ve got a client coming through the door. They’ve got a little white dog that’s itchy. And I start a conversation about what the dog is eating. Then they say it’s on a commercial kibble. Then you start talking about the fact there are 60% starches in there. Why a dog should not eat 60% starches.

People don’t know. They think they are doing the right thing.

Then you start talking about Roundup-produced grain. Then you start talking about the gut health which is part of that.

Then you explain what a hyper response in an inflamed body is.

And I can guarantee you, like 9 out of 10 people that come in say, “and yes, I have got diabetes too.” Or “yes, I have actually just been on chemotherapy.” Or “my husband has got leukemia.” Or “my wife has got breast cancer.” And all the young families, especially the families where you know that they don’t know about medicine, and they don’t know about food, and they are overweight in our little country town. And bless them.

Love them. They’re my clients and I love them. But you can nearly guarantee that they say “and my 9yo is depressed,” “my 10yo has got autism,” and “my 11yo tried to kill herself.”

You’ve got physical health problem and you’ve got mental health problems in the population. And then… well, you start looking into it and then you can see how the numbers are phenomenal. In America, one in three in 2030, one in three children will be born with autism.

So, I can see the health crisis for what it is. And, so with my medical

knowledge, and knowing about organics, and knowing about the soil, and knowing about nutrition in people, I could go on and tell you about the consequences of us having not enough magnesium, not enough zinc, not enough fats, the right fats, and not enough B vitamins. Which is how we produce food. How we process it. And what stuff of that do we

And all the young families who dont know about food, i can nearly guarantee that they say “and my 9yo is depressed,” “my 10yo has got autism,” and “my 11yo tried to kill herself.” eat. So, you can see it. And it’s inevitable that we are in a health crisis. Absolutely. To turn that around it’s all connected to how we farm and what we eat.

We actually live out here in Australia’s agricultural belt.

And I agree with you. Everyone I know in the general population

have got cancer or some form of mental, physical health issue [Gundi: Yes]. And it’s so strong out here. And we’re meant to be in the healthiest lifestyle Australia can offer.

It’s not at all like green and clear Australia, which is what the politicians want to say. It is not. We, here, still in cattle area; there’s only a little a bit of farming around. I tell you what, I would never live in or near Moree. The people over there are so sick.

One of my old clients, she’s dead now. She had the same lung cancer as everyone else in her street in Lindendale. When you spray over there, the insects die.

The drift comes over. I’ll never forget this property that I went to, and I pregnancy tested some cattle over there. Drove over, got up really early, and it was just dead. And the farmer said to me, “when the neighbour was cotton spraying that morning it’s like dead silence comes over the whole property.” There is no sound of life and that then lasts for a few months. There is no bird. There is no bee. There’s no buzzing. There’s not even flies. And this is how we produce food. Not just a chemical that you put in your engine in your car. This is how we produce food.

So, let’s go back to the health of pets which I think is an excellent conversation to have around indicating the health of the owners and the health of the population. Have you seen a change?

It’s really hard to say, actually. I started 28 years ago being a vet in England. And my thinking wasn’t as evolved then. You presented me a case and I would solve it, like school medicine. So, I didn’t think that much further and I just trusted that the dog food in the bag is good stuff. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve really had started to look into it. Like the dots are connecting. And it took me over 20 years to do so. I think even 30 years ago, everybody ate dog food out of the packet. But what always baffles me, is why are there so many allergies?

You know, why do cats get diabetes? Why do cats get kidney failure? This is a really weird one.

When I started, yes, there were lots of cats get kidney failure. That is just a given. That’s what we learned. Old cats would die. They die, probably because of kidney failure. And it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve realised, hey, there’s 60% starch in cat food,

but a mouse is only 6% protein… sorry, 60% carbohydrates in cat food. They’re hyper meat eaters.

They should only have 6% of carbohydrates. So, there is… And the minerals that come with the grains, some study in Munich at Gustav Ludwig University over

You have cattle in the landscape. That’s a pretty healthy ecosystem…Let’s talk about how cattle regenerate the soil.

Allan Savory’s TED talk is brilliant. there. They put cats on x-cat food and bang, within 28 days, they had kidney disease.

So, now I start questioning is this just a given that cats get kidney disease or is this probably foodrelated because they are on the packet all their life? Like, when you think about how cats were kept before they went out and

got mice. That’s what they ate, the whole lot. Then a rat, then a rabbit.

Then you try to mimic that. People would give them… fresh meat.

Then the pet food companies say, “oh, you can’t do that because they will go blind because of taurine deficiency.” Taurine is in fresh meat so, as long as you don’t cook it, you should be alright.

It’s quite symbiotic between the health of animals and the issue coming from their food chain, and the health of humans and the issues coming from our food chain. I mean, all of the solutions are coming down to one thing, which is…the the food and how it’s produced and then what we do with it.

We as veterinarians, most of us, and the doctors, we are all just treating the symptoms. We are treating the end-game. We are treating the cancer. You have blood pressure, you get a blood pressure tablet. What if that’s just a lack of magnesium because magnesium relaxes your smooth muscles. And your smooth muscles are in around your blood vessels in all your arteries.

Modern medicine treats the symptoms and the end product of years of neglect, health wise, it’s

through food.And it all starts with soil really, doesn’t it? So, our soil is, basically, in so many places, dead or mostly dead.

the centre of the whole…

1% carbon, that’s pretty common out here, and that’s pretty dead.

Yeah, and that is depleted in everything you can imagine.

So, then when farmers use it to grow our food, they have to use something to get those minerals back in there to grow the food. Once you understand the brilliance of soil and how it works together, how the microbes get fed by the sugar that’s produced by the plant, and it rots material and makes it available for the next lot - that’s the cycle of life. It’s a carbon cycle. It’s a brilliant system.

A massive part of the population is removed from soil and their food.

It’s like they know abstractedly it’s out there and needed. But, actually, because all of our food is purchased in tins and packets, you can’t see the soil in it and you don’t eat fresh food. Many actually exist with very little fresh fruit and vegetables in their diet. And even if you do buy those fresh fruit and vegetables, as we have proven over and over again, the mineral and nutrient content is so down nowadays, because the soil is so bad, or it’s grown hydroponically, that even if you do eat the vegetables, you’re not going to get the right thing.

And we discover more and more.

Gut biome, microbe biome. What a brilliant system? We’re meant to have, 30,000 different species in our gut? And guess what? In the soil, the same happens. It’s such a symbiosis. And then we disinfect our guts, and we take antibiotics, and antifungals, and preservatives, and chlorinated water. And a lot of babies are not even born naturally. Then we have them in sterile environments, and bang, nature will give you a slap behind your ears because your children will get leukemia So, it’s really all connected, and the soil is

For many the strongest relationship to fresh food is meat, and then they don’t even think what’s going on to grow that meat. The growing aspect of the food chain seems to have been veiled somewhat from the general public.

Yeah, it’s completely disconnected. And just one quick thing about meat. There’s nothing wrong with meat. But we do not need feedlots. As soon as you put cattle in feedlots…

It’s not a vegetarian, or vegan, or meat-eater issue. It’s actually

how we produce the meat. If we produce meat out on grasslands, any grassland, any paddock, like my property, is so much healthier than anything. Whereas you grow tofu and the problem is soy.

You know, the whole of America is full of soya beans. And guess what? They’re 100% genetically modified. 100% grown with Roundup. Genetically modified food, and that is then meant to be vegetarian healthy.

You have cattle in the landscape.

That’s a pretty healthy ecosystem…

Let’s talk about how cattle regenerate the soil. Allan Savory’s TED talk is brilliant. 22 minutes of your time. Have a look at it. If you have got a herd of bison, and they go through American grasslands, and they eat, and they pee, and they poo and they trample and then they move on. And then they come back 3 or 4 months later.

That’s a natural system. And what will happen is that they eat the grass, and then they trample the remaining grass that it comes in contact with the soil. The good old microbes that are in there will rot it, and take the fibre, and make this brilliant stuff called humus out of it, which is like a sponge for water. And the sponge for bacteria. The urine and the poo do the same. They fertilise it. And then, when it’s all eaten, they have

to move on. They can’t stay there because the food is gone. That’s one aspect.

The other one is when grass grows, and you can see that on the roadside of Australian landscapes. Grass, as anything, anything, animals, people, plants, flowers, anything will just want to reproduce for the next generation.

So, the grass grows. It gets a grass seed head on the top. And when it’s done that, it can die because that’s all it’s purpose in life. So, you see when you drive around the roads, you see grass heads about a metre high. It’s dead. It’s brown.

And it will, if nothing eats it, it will actually then sit there for the next 10, 15 or 20 years until it evaporates into carbon dioxide and becomes dust. So, nothing will happen. So, once a grass has put its head up, his seeds out, and it’s dead, it will also shade down. There’s lots of shade, and you will actually not see that much green stuff on the bottom. Because the shade stops it, it’s dead but it also occupies space for something that could actively grow. So, it’s not actively growing anymore.

You know that from flowers. If you want to grow beautiful roses, as soon as the flower is spent, you cut it off. When you push a herd of cattle through and they eat that tall grass with the seed and they knock it down again, let’s say to 10cm, the grass just wakes

up and thinks, “ooh, gosh, I have to reproduce. I have to wake up.”

So, waking up for grass means, I have got green leaves, I have got chloroform in them. I will take the CO2, you know, that nasty carbon dioxide, out of the atmosphere. I take six of them, six of the CO2’s, make one sugar out of that, pump it down into my roots system. The bugs love it because they eat the sugar and they can grow. That’s their nourishment as well. The plant grows, and then it will put another seed out again, because that is what it wants to do. And then, hopefully, your herd of bison will come back and eat it down again.

And when you look at that in a time sequence grass would grow, gets eaten down, it absorbs a huge amount of carbon. Sugar, glucose is six carbons. So, six times CO2 and it’s made into a ring of five, and the sixth one is sticking up. And during that process, we take the C’s, the carbon atom, but the O2, the oxygen, goes back into the atmosphere. So every time something grows, and something makes photosynthesis, most people have heard that, we produce oxygen. Oxygen’s great stuff. Carbon out of the atmosphere. But you only get that through active growing processes.

So, if you have got enough cattle in the landscape that do that, you can make deserts green again,

which is absolutely amazing you can do that. And the more you push them through the carbon sugars split up into more. Every time you do that, you get more of that in your soil. And that’s your organic matter. And if you build that up from, let’s say, from 1% to 8%, and you do that on a big scale you are a carbon farmer. So get the cattle moving through the landscape and you get this massive carbon drawdown.

There’s nothing else on the planet that can draw that much carbon down than cattle moving through landscape.

If you mimic nature, and you move your cattle through, move them every three, or four, five days, from one paddock to the next, to the next. Make your paddocks small. Trample it down. Come back three months later. Then you will get the same effect. And that is what’s called regenerative farming. Because that is your regeneration. So, feedlots are kind of like dams, in a way. They’ve blocked the natural flow of the natural rhythm of things moving through the landscape, taking on the nutrition and active regeneration. The feedlots are so bad because a) it’s not very nice for the animals.

And b) I can tell you as soon as the cattle get that much grain to eat, their rumen becomes very acidic and that’s called rumen acidosis.

And liver abscesses, death, pain,

all of that is associated with that.

So we feed them grain, high amount and counteract that so they don’t actually die from it, we feed them antibiotics. It is a big topic right now with the Vegan and Vegetarian communities protesting feedlots. Vegetarian and vegans, they’re the wellness meaning people. They want to eat healthy. They want to do the right thing. Their motives are absolutely adorable. I love it. [Kelly: I’m one of these adorable vegetarians. laughs] [Gundi laughs]. Everybody makes their own choices. Just don’t think that through not eating meat, you’re making the planet that much better. A lot of vegetarians are depleted in B12 and become very anaemic.

If you are a vegetarian or a vegan, and you’re not choosing organics, and you are eating more vegetables than most, and that’s your main diet, and they are filled with chemicals you’re actually, probably, least healthy amongst us. And if you eat bread, which is grown in intensive farming. Again, you got to go to organics because otherwise, you eat so much rubbish.

Cattle are not meant to eat that much grain. But cattle in grasslands also produce a better fat. And just, last thing with the fats, it’s proven now cattle in feedlots produce too much Omega 6. Our brain, going back to the mental health crisis, our brain is made up of 40% fat.

Hence, the whole cholesterol myth. It’s a myth. We need cholesterol. We need fats. We can’t live without them. But good fats. Not highly refined vegetable oils. We need animal fats.

Omega 3’s and Omega 6’s, which are like everybody is talking about them. The Omega just means where the little OH group is sitting. So, chemical formula. Omega 3’s react as antiinflammatories. And incidentally, they are high in fish and in

grass-fed cattle. Or sheep, for that matter. And Omega 6’s are pro-inflammatory. So, they make inflammation. And they are high in grain-fed cattle in a feedlot.

Inflammation is your joints getting stiff. Inflammation is asthma.

Inflammation is any allergy, any itch that you have. Inflammation is depression because your serotonin and dopamine go down when you are hyperinflamed. It’s your rheumatoid arthritis. It’s your auto-immune diseases. And, you scratch yourself long enough somewhere, you will get cancer where you are scratching. And heart disease is a lot of to do with sugars. So, again, the natural system of having cattle fed outside, on grass, in the landscape, turns out to be miraculously better for us.

There has to be a big shift, and the shift has to come from the consumers because I don’t trust that our political elite actually knows what they’re talking about.

And, if they would take advice, good advice from people that might know. But I think it’s so far removed from them. City people are so far removed from what’s actually happening. They really don’t know. And I don’t blame people. Because why would they know? I have been involved in this for 30 years, and I just find it absolutely fascinating. And I see so much hope in that.

There is so much hope. Anybody out there, any consumer, can make a choice to and there will be a label, regenerative, sooner or later. In the meantime, just go with organics. You support all the organic systems. Better for you.

Better for the planet. And there is so much hope in that. I see it in one my friend’s young brother.

He’s 20. He’s suicidal. What does he eat all day? McDonalds and KFC. So, you can see how it happens.

Absolutely. Plus, the majority of consumers that order salmon and kale as a super food for

don’t release but salmon is one of the most toxic foods in the world now. And kale is number one on the list of chemically poisoned vegetables. And you think about the cities, most people eat out three, four times a week, so they’re getting cooked for three or four… And these chefs are making this food out of these ingredients that aren’t organic, that aren’t regenerative and actually, without realising it, potentially harming their customers.

So, we have to have a paradigm shift, of having as the number one reason of producing food; to produce something that’s actually wholesome. So, there is a massive gap about what people know and what they don’t know. There’s a lot of education that has to happen.

You could be a blessing or a curse with your consumer dollars.

But then, we have gone in one way where we have really destroyed this, and we destroy the other lifeforms with it. That’s what I’m really cranky about. It’s not just us that we destroy. We destroy the beasts, the butterflies, the ecosystems, the fish.

If we could add up what it would cost a child to the age of 18, eating organic food versus the medication needed for an adult not bought up on organics.

What’s going to cost more?

Essentially, people are beautiful. It would be a shame. I think human kind is amazing. It has so much goodness. So much beauty, and music, and dance, and love, and connection. We could actually be so awesome, and we are. It all comes down to the choices that we make.

Water The Mind Grow The Soil

Kate Spry, a teacher championing a regenerative agriculture curriculum into Australian schools

WATER THE MIND GROW THE SOIL

I am a farmer and a teacher. I became really interested in regenerative ag about two and a half years ago when I went and saw Colin Seis speak at a Landcare day.

I came away from there with so many more questions, that I just became really really interested. And started researching.

I connected with Landcare and set up a Dung Beetles and Carbon testing project around our local area. That developed my passion and where it all started.

With the regen ag curriculum, I was teaching a Science lesson, I think it was early last year, and there was a component of the Science syllabus that stated something to the effect of, if we emitted all the cattle, we wouldn’t have an emissions problem. I remember thinking to myself, “That’s actually not right. I don’t feel comfortable teaching that.” And so, I started looking for regenerative ag resources but I couldn’t find one.

Then I did a leadership program, mid last year. We had to do a project. I connected with the national Regenerative Agriculture Day and with ‘Kiss the Ground’ in America.

I asked ‘Kiss the Ground’ if we would be able to Australianise their school syllabus on Regenerative Agriculture. They said yes and I’m very thankful to them, and thankful for the connections there. And thankful for the facilitator.

SCHOOL COLOURING IN PAGE. DOWNLOAD, PRINT AND PLAY. There’s been a great process involved. And Charlie Arnott’s also contributed to it. That’s a little bit of the nuts and bolts of how it’s evolved.

You’re looking at creating a syllabus for school children?

Yes. This Unit is ready to teach, ready to go as it is. If we look at it, it’s the start. Focus is very much around the soil. Yes, it’s ready to go into schools. I would love to see it in our syllabus at some point but small steps.

At the moment, it has been absorbed by quite a few teachers.

What age group of students has it been written for?

From Stage 2, which is 3 and

4, right through till Stage 5, up until Year 10. It can be adapted to both of those stages. But it is a predominantly a Stage 3 and 4 unit, which is Year 5 & 6, and Year 7 & 8. But it can be adapted to those other stages that I mentioned.

Why is it so important, Kate, to get regenerative agriculture information to schools?

Just looking at the whole, where we’ve been, where we’re going, there’s got to be a better way. We’ve got a lot of illness and sickness around nowadays, and making the linkage between healthy soils and healthy humans I think has been paramount in terms of this… There’s still that

(new colouring in book being released for NRAD 2020)

concept of using the word, ‘sustainability’ in schools, and that’s great, but let’s go on to the next phase, and let’s teach them about regenerative processes. Just making that link and connection between healthy soils and healthy humans. For me, I look at the word ‘sustainable’ as remaining the same. If we look at ‘regenerative’, it’s a whole new platform and we can use a process based around that. We don’t really want to stay the The next lesson is on Photosynthesis. and then we look at the role of soil microbes and how they play into the Carbon Cycle, which is based around the Healthy Soil component of the module.

From there, we roll into food

and farming and the final module of the Unit is called ‘Taking Action’. That looks at what role we play in the Carbon Cycle. From here, how we can better the environment with more regenerative practices.

There’s a lot of project-based learning encapsulated in the Unit. All the handouts are done.

It’s a complete and ready to teach.

Brilliant. As far as this getting into schools, what is the process you have to go through?

I’ve just been talking to teachers about getting it.

They’ve been contacting me, and I’ve been sharing the Unit via the ‘Kiss the Ground’ site.

And we’ve just started the ball rolling there.

Could teachers contact you if they read this article and were interested in teaching RA to their students? Are they able to bring it through their curriculum individually?

What teachers have been doing individually is taking it into a meeting with their school principal and to their curriculum-advisory group. I’ve just started receiving feedback about it now, through the teaching process. And they have basically gone to their Principal and advocated for the Unit to go into the school as individual teachers. The ones that have done this have had great success in the classroom.

So, this is an official call out for the teachers of Australia, those passionate about regenerative agriculture, that if they want to bring this in to their teaching year, to make direct contact here, with the contact information provided.

And they can go through the Teachers who are standing up and wanting to passionately impact the minds of their students in a way that will

help the future of this planet.

So, it’s something that has to be done individually. Correct?

Absolutely. Wow. That is absolutely fantastic call out there. Yes, everyone needs to do their bit, get on board, and we just all need to be thinking along those line, if we can.

How many teachers would you have to have to get involved and go through this curriculum to have enough of a sway to get it put into the official NSW curriculum, and across the Australia’s education curriculum. How do you go from individual teachers to be a formal and included part of the teaching year?

I have had some very passionate teachers come to me, saying the same thing, “We would love to get this in. Would love to have this in the syllabus.”

I have started the process, but I can’t answer that, at this stage yet.

We’re all at the beginning of every process. I think there’s a really good opportunity for us to promote this very strongly in the next NRAD year.

Wow. Yes. It would be amazing even if it changed a few teachers way of thinking. That would be really positive. Even if it questioned people’s thinking, that would be one positive from it.

What would be your ultimate outcomes? If you were to sit back in five years from now and say, “Wow, we did it!”

What would that look like?

Ultimate outcome would love to think that a regenerative agriculture component was in our syllabus across Australia.

Are you bold enough to agree that so much of our current education, on these topics, is outdated.

I do believe there is some outdated information out there. I don’t know if the term “outdated” rather than “a different perspective’, maybe.

A different perspective, I think, coming from regenerative agricultural background.

Reading Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu’, is not what I was taught at school. So, definitely, in terms of that, I think we’ve come in leaps and bounds, in terms of some great researchers and people that have developed concepts.

”Dark Emu. What a fantastic bridge.

It’s providing teachers to link history with healing the Earth today and the people of the earth.”

As far as regenerative agriculture goes, and to understand that we’re just returning to what our Indigenous did with their agriculture, exposing the idea that they even had agriculture. It’s such a wonderful cycle to discuss with kids.

Absolutely fantastic. That has been a fantastic source.

And ‘2040’, which is not incorporated in this because it was developed prior to that but have been trying to get that message out as well. There are some great resources out there now, that look at regenerative practices. It just goes to show there’s other ways to do things.

What would you like to say to the teachers of Australia’s young mind? What you like to

say to them on this topic?

If I incorporate the farming side of things with the teaching side of things, I suppose, I grew up in a very conventional farming system. In the last two and a half years, I’ve learnt so much.

I would love teachers to look at, potentially, that there is a different way going forward. ‘ There is something to say about the change in language because when you start using words like ‘regeneration’, you start using words like ‘restoration’, and ‘rejuvenation’. And we can start to bring in the language about how quickly the Earth can do these things, when supported. How quickly it can restore itself.

Absolutely. It’s a very positive thing. And I acknowledge there’s no silver bullet. And everybody will be on a different journey but it’s definitely worth a look.

I think, there’s a genuine thirst for more knowledge, and I think we’ve got a potential way in with regenerative agriculture here.

There’s something so powerful about inspiring hopeful words versus fearful words. Hope is such a better educational tool.

And keeping the language positive. Look, you can’t go wrong if we’re building healthy soils to build healthy humans.

That’s how I look at it.

On the last note, aside from everything else, we have no choice now but to take action, to heal the heart of our food chain. That has to be understood. We’re on the third generation of extremely

low nutritional food. And as a result, the majority of issues teachers have in the classroom, with Attention Deficit Syndrome, with ADD, with autism, with so much of what goes on in the classroom, in a discordant manner, is a result of low nutritional food over three generations now.

Absolutely. I think we can, I suppose, in the last 20 to 30 years, that has become far more evidenced. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a different way, or another way

that we could do that.

Can I ask, in terms of you working with children, and your journey with starting the curriculum, how are the children responding to the new learnings. Or are you seeing something different in them, that feels different?

What’s the thing that you’re seeing that’s different?

I’m going off teachers feedback here. They seem to have a thirst for it. They seem to, once they get a little bit, they want a little bit more, Certainly,

with the students that I’ve had dealings with as well, “but why is that happening? I don’t understand.” It’s been a great Q&A session. Some really great project-based learning around it, which is fantastic. They seem to have a general want to understand it. They’re quite interested in the concept.

What subject is regenerative agriculture taught in?

The key learning areas are based on Ag, Ag Mandatory, Science, Science and Technology, Geography and History. So, it goes across key learning areas. And there’s a History component there, with some of Bruce Pascoe’s work that’s based around the ‘Dark Emu’. That’s how we’ve incorporated the History into there.

From a broader perspective of where the schools currently sit with this topic- what is the consensus within our education system on the notion of regenerative agriculture?

From the teachers I’ve spoken to, there seems to be still that notion of sustainability. I think, there’s a genuine thirst for some more knowledge, and I think we’ve got a potential way in with regenerative agriculture here. Rather than talking about sustainability, talking about regenerative agriculture as a process.

What are the main subject areas you are focussing on?

Earth Systems, Photosynthesis, Healthy Soil, the Regenerative

Process, and then, how to take action which encompasses the climate component of that.

Give me an example of a lesson plan?

Earth Systems which is the first lesson explains to students about carbon; where Carbon is found on Earth, what Carbon is, and why it is so important. and why that’s important for regenerative agriculture.

We basically gives a Q&A for students.

Thankyou Kate for doing such great things for our kids. We really appreciate you. Love Regener8 Magazine.

DOWNLOAD THE CURRICULUM HERE

WATER THE MIND GROW THE SOIL

THE NATIONAL REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE DAY 2020

Without seeds we have no food.

Civilisation literally arose due to seed saving.

90% of our caloric intake directly or indirectly comes from seeds.

More than 93% of the variety in our food seeds has been lost as multi-national corporations have swallowed up smaller seed suppliers for profit alone.

Preserves your heritage and bio-diversity.

As seed saving began to disappear, so did the native diversity of plants and animals. As a result, heirloom seeds that our grandparents used to consume are disappearing. This impacts the bio-diversity of local landscapes, our cultural diets and the access communities have to traditional, nutritious foods & medicines.

Seed saving enables you to build your own SUPER crop as seeds adapt to your environment.

Increases insect and plant bio-diversity by allowing the crops to be pollinated.

While more than 6,000 species of plants are currently cultivated for food, only nine are responsible for more than 66% of total crop production.

Seed saving puts the power in our hands and provides us with a regenerative cycle that can heal our foodchain.

Welcome to Ground Cover. A podcast created for farmers, by farmers. Ground Cover is a uniquely Australian podcast series exploring real life stories of land managers who have undertaken the transition from conventional farming to regenerative agriculture.

In this series, we share unique and honest conversations about the challenges and opportunities of regenerative agriculture, so you can make informed decisions about how to best manage your land.

Proudly brought to you by The Regenerative Agriculture Alliance and Southern Cross University.

Listen to the episode: https://pod.link/1479675823

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