There’s a new generation of farmers emerging around the world – changing the narratives, the ways of growing food, the way of being in connection with the land, the food system itself.
Here in Australia, Joel Orchard, founder and coordinator of Young Farmers Connect. Young Farmers Connect is a not for profit organisation setting out to support younger people to gain the skills, support, and community to step up and thrive as contemporary, regenerative farmers/agrarians
Download this list of 10 of Morag’s favourite books.
Morag’s 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.
Did you know that the average age of a farmer in Australia is almost 60! That’s almost retirement age. Who are going to be the farmers of the future? These young farmers aim to inspire others to get involved, and help others gain an appreciation for what farmers do and to thank a farmer for each meal.
Join Joel and me in conversation in this podcast episode as we explore the work of Young Farmers Connect, food systems change and how permaculture is part of this new story.
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Read the full transcript here.
Morag Gamble:
Welcome to the Sense-making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble.. Permaculture Educator, and Global Ambassador, Filmmaker, Eco villager, Food Forester, Mother, Practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it’s been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life we first need to shift our thinking. The way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever. And even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on? So our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, and reconnection. What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation. In this podcast, I’ll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.
Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face. I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration. This is why I’ve created the Permaculture Educators Program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online dual certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global Permayouth programs, women’s self help groups in the Global South and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the Permaculture Education Institute and our Permaculture Educators Program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life. We’d love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly, and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land in which I meet and speak with you today, the Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.
In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, it’s my great pleasure to share with you this conversation with a friend of mine, Joel Orchard, who is a food systems advocate, coordinator and director of Young Farmers Connect and not for profit, dedicated to cultivating networks, community and resources for young farmers in chapters around the country. He’s also the founder of Future Feeders and Movement for Next Generation Farmers and the co-founder of the CSA network of Australia and New Zealand. That’s the community supported agriculture network. We each have chapters too in the book reclaiming the urban commons edited by our collaborator at Sustain Australia, Dr. Nick Rose, who I’ve interviewed before on this podcast. And he’s a photographer too. So I warmly welcome you to join me in conversation with Joel Orchard. Well, thanks for joining me on the show today, Joel, it’s a real pleasure .And I looked at some of the things that you’re doing, it’s really remarkable in the way that you’re supporting young people to step into farming and, you know, you’re young yourself. And one of the things that I noticed that you’re doing is really helping, as we’re just talking about before, is clearing a pathway for young people to enter into farming. And, you know, you and I both have this great love of community, food systems and local food systems and food systems that nourish the planet and nourish people, nourish communities. I wonder maybe we can just start by, where did, how did you land in this world? Because I know you have a background in scientific photography, how did you land in local food systems? Where did that begin for you?
Joel Orchard:
Hmm. Well, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to have a yarn with you. I’ve always enjoyed the times we’ve got to chat. So yeah, it’s nice to dive into things a bit deeper. I think both those questions are very similar answer in that I am passionate about supporting the next generation of farmers that come with a particular ethic towards land stewardship. And they also seem to be people that are deeply interested in connecting through food with their community. And that was the vision I had for myself as a young farmer. And I think I’ve always kind of been involved in some way around growing food, participating in food, I probably came onto this journey as an environmental activist first and foremost, and at that point in my life and career, I thought that was something I very seriously wanted to take on, but realized that I needed something more tangible and farming just became a lens through which I could express a need to nourish myself, nourish the Earth, be involved with community. It allowed me to express my passion for political and social activism, all in a really nice little neat package that also gave me cherry tomatoes and strawberries. So, you know, it felt very natural.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, it does. And it makes so much sense, doesn’t it? Like you said, it’s very tangible and accessible way to be an activist. I wonder when I began my journey too as an environmental activist, I wonder what were some of the things that activated you? What fueled your flame in becoming an activist?
Joel Orchard:
I think, I mean much like it would have been for you and certainly now we’re seeing in the younger generation, like, it’s very obvious that we need to do something and probably for most activists that starts as a way of expressing one’s concern, to wanting to feel heard and wanting to change the world to make it a better place. And I think as we walk that path, we learn and evolve as humans and, you know, it gives us an opportunity to gain insight and to research. And, I mean, my mind is infinitely curious and I love to dive deeply into these issues, and probably I started to get more involved with the likes of GreenPeace and other organizations at the time we were doing some work around the radiation of fresh produce which was a policy that was being reviewed and technologies and things like that, that were concerning to me and to others around the impacts on human health. Certainly it was a big issues around unsustainable land use practices and the issues that were important to me at the time were chemical use and how that was impacting biodiversity. And again, people’s health. And I guess the last activity I was involved with, which I think really made the penny drop, was we were doing protest work around the rampant use of genetically modified soy in the feed of the industrial meat chicken industry. And that just opened my eyes to food as a more holistic system because it incorporated then, animal welfare and destruction of the Amazon. And like just the totality of this one thing, which is the thing we put in our mouth and food and just how big an issue that was and how combating these issues and systems allowed us to have a bigger impact on social, environmental, ecological, economic, all these different parts of the system. So, yeah, I guess it really inspired me to look at, not just being combative and I didn’t want to just sort of chain myself to things that disrupt events and conferences. I wanted to do something and growing food for myself and for others felt like really the most powerful thing I could possibly do. .
Morag Gamble:
And you know, what it is a form of disruption of the system, but in a different way, isn’t it in a really creative and positive way where you have something. So, yeah.
Joel Orchard:
I think, increasingly becoming one of the most radical acts one can do. I mean, there, you’re actively trying to strip away our rights to be able to be self-sufficient in those ways. The system is designed to have us very closely tethered to an industrial food system and take all of those powers and control away from us and choice and yeah, growing food brings all of that back.
Morag Gamble:
So before we dive into the sorts of things that you are doing, can you just tell us a little bit more about what you see is happening in the food system that you think needs to shift? What’s going wrong in the food system?
Joel Orchard:
Well, from a production perspective, we know that, like the figures that are thrown around are like, how many decades left of topsoil we have, like those figures are extraordinarily alarming. We know in Australia, years and years of industrial farming has eroded the soil’s fertility, you only need to get another drought that we’ll see most of our top soil on the Hills of New Zealand across the coast, you know, like we’ve seen the impacts of devastation on biodiversity loss, clearing of lands. And when we have those big droughts, we really realize just how fragile those ecosystems, which are our food system are, really are. And then I think, you know, so that’s from a practice perspective, there’s so much going wrong with the industrial food system at a very practical and pragmatic level all the way through to food distribution. And we know like a hyper concentration of ownership, corporate ownership in Australia for food distribution, like we’re one of the few countries that has allowed such a high concentration of ownership of our food distribution. Like we now really have two, with a close third, company almost exclusively owning access to food through the food distribution system, which is unique in the world, and then even with like recently the merger of, I think it was Coles that bought out PFD, one of the largest distributors, wholesale distributors, which will impact the hospital systems, aged care facilities, prison systems. So, you know, we’re now putting all of our eggs in one basket and hoping to dear life that they’ll pull through. And, you know, COVID showed us that actually, they weren’t very good at that, and supermarket shelves were empty for lots and lots of people. So what is going right about the industrial?
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, that’s right. What did you notice at your place during COVID when all the shelves were going empty?
Joel Orchard:
I guess I reflect on a few things like the culture of panic buying is alarming. Like it’s alarming to watch, myself as someone that has built a permaculture garden in my urban setting in Lismore. So I’m in Northern New South Wales Subtropics, beautiful Bundjalung country here. And I am really fortunate to be able to grow so much food in my backyard. I’m in a rental, but I’ve just gone for it and grown as much food as I can. We’ve built a little stall at the front, we share our excess with our neighborhoods. I, through COVID got a little bit stir crazy and started a mushroom farm in my shed. So, you know, like I’ve got an abundance of foods right here, and I’m probably adept at finding local foods in my surrounds when I want needed. So from a personal level, I didn’t feel like my food security was threatened, but for people who depend on the industrial food system, I imagine it was frightening.
Morag Gamble:
That’s something really interesting what you just mentioned though, that, that idea of permaculture, permaculture gardening and is a real form of, of security. Isn’t it? I mean, it’s, uh, something that, it’s not necessarily having a whole lot of money in the bank or feeling really secure in that way. It’s actually being surrounded by food and a strong community. Hmm
Joel Orchard:
Hmm. Yeah. I think it really builds community like we made a real point of connecting with our street through COVID in order to show them that we had the capacity to support them with excess food. And we felt really comfortable in building that as an offering and also relating with people that we hadn’t met in the street before. And I think that’s a common thread through the COVID experience for a lot of people meeting and connecting with neighbors through the culture of support that perhaps they hadn’t had the need to do before. So that felt really good. And yeah, I think permaculture is beyond just what you can do to subsist for yourself. It’s about building your village and your plan around you and making sure that everyone is okay. It’s, yeah, that’s the beautiful thing about it.
Morag Gamble:
So, but you’re not just doing backyard gardening. You’ve got something all whole else going on. So maybe you could share a bit about that, cause there’s a whole, there’s many different aspects to the work that you do from the global, like connecting globally, connecting nationally and working with young people. I don’t know where you want to start with that as an entry point to it, but can you sort of paint a bit of a picture about the work that you do in our community food systems?
Joel Orchard:
Well, maybe we start with the notion of interconnectedness because that I think is a big part of what drives me, and whether that’s at a local street level, a community level or regional level, a national level and international level, I’m interested in how we can build communities of support. I really value the digital interface to provide me with a platform to communicate with my peers who, you know, in only a decade ago, we simply wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do, it’s fast-tracked my learning, and it motivates me and inspires me to connect with other people that are passionate about this space all around the world. It’s provided a lens for building solidarity with people who, in every other way, you would have had no possible points of connection. So that’s, you know, it’s a real wonderful thing that we have, for all of the issues that the internet creates. I like to look at that as a huge positive. And so I guess I started a career as a young farmer in local food systems and realized that there was a lot of other people like me, first-generation farmers, people that had a yearning to reconnect with the land and through food, and understood just how many barriers there were to doing that and realizing that I wasn’t the only one. And so I have had a desire to facilitate the building of a community around that as a central issue in order to, I guess, sort of firstly understand the challenges and the barriers and realize that they’re not unique, that young farmers actually all over the planet are having the same problems. That’s very, very clear, and that there is a desperate need for us to return to more agro-ecological ways of producing foods for our entire communities, not just at a very sort of hyper-local level, these are issues that need to permeate into our cities and throughout countries and linking countries together. And so I guess a Young Farmers Connect evolved as an organization to try and hold a space that young people, younger farmers, new farmers, aspiring farmers could come to, to share that experience and learn from each other and hopefully build a culture of collaboration as a way of combating, what has previously been a very competitive space and farmers haven’t traditionally been very good at communicating with each other and looking at well, how can we disrupt the food system by producing food together in a different way?
Morag Gamble:
So can we just take a step back to what you were saying about what you’re seeing there being similar challenges that young people are facing in getting into farming or when they’re farming around the world and, you know, I’m really fascinated to hear what you see are some of those common threads around the world?
Joel Orchard:
Well, a good example is, so Young Farmers Connect has been invited to participate in, like a group statement for the G20 as a representative of young farmers throughout the world. And a couple of weeks ago, we came together as a group of representatives for zoom chat, so amazing opportunity to meet leaders of young farmer organizations all around the world. We had South Korea, heaps of European nations, Canada, North America, into Africa. So inspiring to see, and we have been able to sort of nail down to like a top five high priority issues and then they’re the same for everyone, everyone is concerned about land access, everyone is concerned about equitable investment to support young farmers, to start businesses and be financially sustainable. Everybody is concerned about the impacts of climate change on food security. I mean, these are all issues that are echoed by everyone. So it doesn’t matter whether you’ve come from a wealthy nation or a nation that’s been impacted by the colonial mindset, these are the challenges that we’re all facing. So to feed our communities, we need to do something about it.
Morag Gamble:
And particularly, I guess, with young, I mean, yes, those are, I think everyone would be affected, by the older farmers as well. And I’m wondering whether what particular strategies are you seeing though that are helping younger people access land? I mean, I can see this is just such a huge barrier for young people being able to get involved in it. And I know there’s lots of different ways that you’re involved in. I’d love to hear some of those.
Joel Orchard:
Well, I guess in Australia, I have tried to spearhead conversations because we literally are 10 years behind many other countries in dealing with these issues and being proactive and finding solutions. But it’s very clear that there are some great programs and initiatives happening around the world that we could very easily emulate here. So I’ve tried as I can to raise the profile of the problem, but also meet that with suggestions around solutions. Some really good work being done in the farmland trust model. So taking land out of the real estate market and holding it in perpetuity for food production indefinitely is a really powerful tool that’s being utilized well throughout the world. I guess land access through land sharing is something that we do in Australia, but on a very interesting scale, hasn’t translated well to the small-scale farming sector. And that’s a piece of work that I’m really trying to build capacity for through Young Farmers Connect.
We’ve done a pilot model on, like a land sharing portal so people can offer opportunities to share their land. And then we’ll try and match them with young farmers that are interested in being a part of a shared farming agreement, but what we’ve recognized through that process is that there needs to be some really good supporting documents around legal support and lease agreement templates and different types of share farming agreements and case studies because that kind of intellectual knowledge has almost been lost as farmlands transitioned out of the farming community and more into the regular community as people are buying lifestyle farms. Um, as we know around sort of most of the Eastern Seaboard now, the farms are getting smaller as they’re getting broken off and they’re being bought by people who want rural lifestyle, but haven’t, don’t have a farming experience. So we’re having to educate both the new type of land holder and the new type of farmer.
Morag Gamble:
So this is interesting, like the, mean, it’s happening here just even across the road from Crystal Waters there’s old farms that are just getting broken up, and just to small farms that really, in one way and no longer functional way. They’re no longer functional in the way that they’d been farmed before, but I wonder whether they could be functional as a smaller scale agroecological system. You know, I wonder in what ways can we reimagine these areas?
Joel Orchard:
I think that’s where the, that’s what’s exciting to me like the innovation that can now happen in that space. And I think creating ecosystems of enterprises that can stack on land for the multiplicity of function, but also viability. I mean, where we used to see land cleared to put cows for dairy could also be land that’s followed by chickens, that’s followed by cropping integration of vegetables, put some bees on there, forestry, you name it, like I think also the small scale farming sector is increasingly demonstrating just how much more profitable they can be through intensive sustainable agriculture on a small footprint than the traditional bigger and bigger and bigger farm model.
Morag Gamble:
And I think that as soon as you start to enter into that space too, you start changing the way in which the food is harvested and sold and distributed because you need to change that. And you can’t just kind of do one big harvest, send it all off through the normal system. So what’s that new system looking like, that you see that works really well to support small farmers.
Joel Orchard:
I think small farmers in many ways growing, like what you would call food instead of growing a food commodity, it’s something that can get harvested, passed to a consumer through one handshake exchange and can be readily consumed by a household. It doesn’t have to be processed, it doesn’t have to be packaged. Whereas the larger scale farms, because of the model that they’re involved with, it has to go through such a long and complex supply chain before it can get to a person’s table. And so all of those steps in that complex supply chain, you would say there’s wastage, there’s resource usage and there’s risk, but when you’ve got farm that grow food for local community, and it’s through a direct consumer relationship, you’ve shortened that supply chain down to its absolute simplistic form. And you’ve taken out all of the excess and resources, cold transportation and shipping and all of the rest. And you’ve de-risked it as well, farmers then can have knowledge around exactly what their consumers want. They can have those conversations, they can grow exactly to what the market demands, rather than these kinds of models, which depend on the ebbs and flows of economies and buying habits and seasonality for consumer behavior. And I think these are the ways that the small scale farming sector is demonstrating that it’s much more resilient to things like COVID, which we saw, you know, like supermarket shelves empty, farmer’s markets full, perfect example.
Morag Gamble:
So this is, you know, it is so obvious when you look at it from any different angle, whether it be a health angle, an ecological angle, economic angle for farmers and all the social arm and all these different things. So what are you saying from say, government? Is there a recognition that this is, I mean, obviously the fact that you’ve got these conversations happening that you talked about just earlier, but where are you seeing any shift or change or noticing anything there, or are you as a national group finding you’re able to get a voice in these kinds of conversations?
Joel Orchard:
I’m still finding it very difficult. I think, as with all transition cultures, it takes a long time to filter all the way to the top of government, which we know is unfortunately still very beholden to the stakeholders that can push their weight around and make sure that things happen for, in their favor. I mean, COVID is a good example where we saw Coles and Woolies are allowed to stay open because they were a service to society is food needs, but, you know, and then to have find small scale retailers impacted, small scale distributors being regulated out of operations, the threat to farmer’s markets being closed down because of perceived health risks. We should, like, hang on a minute, how about we close down the big shops and let the small businesses thrive through this period. I mean, it’s really weighted in one direction, so different too. We’re seeing in the energy sector and continuously propping up unsustainable and non-viable fossil fuel industries. I mean, yeah, these are the biggest, yeah .
Morag Gamble:
I’m just curious because we’ve seen the cracks and because we’ve seen how resilient the local food systems were in the face of all that, that you might’ve noticed that some growing level of attention and interest has been, heading your way, but, you know, I think the thing is it takes a long time, like you said, to transition, it takes a long time, so you just kind of need to keep going and people get attracted to the kind of work that you’re doing. And young people are also starting to see new possibilities in that. And, you know, maybe we could kind of focus a little bit there at the moment. So where, if some young people are listening to this and they think, oh, actually, yes, this is a kind of future that I see for myself. This is what I’d like to do. It’s something that I can do this practical, it’s positive, it means that I can do something that’s supporting people and the planet and I can be outside. And, and it’s, uh, resilient work that I can do, but I’ve got no idea where to start. What do you suggest to young people, whether they’ve grown up in the city, but they see this as something they’d love to do? Like what kind of programs do you have or see around the place that can support young people making this transition into a farming future?
Joel Orchard:
Well, you know what I think Permaculture has become a really great entry point for a lot of people in considering a slower worldview. And I think a big part of, I guess, what we’re trying to do in the small-scale farming sector is like, de-growth the economy and come back to a more resilient way of doing things. And that’s not just from an ecological resilience, it’s from a human lifestyle resilience perspective. We’re all really burnt out as human beings and having a lifestyle that revolves around working alongside and with nature is deeply healing. And I found that as a farmer as well, my mental health has never been better than when I was farming full time and I’m not working in that space now and have a yearning for it because I just realized how healthy it was for my mental state. Not to mention the nourishment that you get through your own food growth and, you know, having food as fresh as it can possibly be. Like, there’s nothing you can eat that’s better. And I think that is inspiring for a lot of younger people to have that working lifestyle. But I think it’s important to reflect that I don’t personally believe we need to aspire to a resurgence in a form of peasantry. I think we need to really value the incredible skill set that it takes to be a food grower and to recognize that farming is a business like any other, and that one needs to be very savvy in business in order to be a successful farmer, but they also have to wear all these other hats. And that is an incredible skill set that one needs to learn and adapt to, which is why, I guess we’ve advocated for more pathways and platforms that can really support a farmer to learn while not holding all of the risks of the failures, which are inevitable as you learn to be a farmer it’s too expensive to fail year after year, you need somewhere where you can learn to do all of the skills that’s required to grow food and run a business at the same time, with support and mentorship and access to equipment and things like that.
Morag Gamble:
So what does that look like? What kind of, so is this a program that you run or is this, how does that matter?
Joel Orchard:
There’s limited opportunities in Australia, which is frustrating to me and something that I want to combat head on. There’s a few farms around that offer sort of internship programs. I mean the old way of learning was you either grew up on a farm and you’ve worked since you were three years old and could drive, or you would get a job in the sector and learn through employment. There’s very few jobs in the small-scale farming sector. Most small-scale farms are owner operators, and the few opportunities that are available have been mostly taken up through sort of volunteer workforces. And for all of the benefits of things like WWOOFing as a way of getting experience, if the small-scale farming sector has become dependent on that as an availability, just as the broader food system has become dependent on an international workforce as we see now, these are issues that don’t allow transition of knowledge and evolution of someone’s skill set. So I would really like to see like a fully fledged business farm incubator program, where a person can come and have a real life farm experience within a supported environment and learn the intricacies of growing food, seasonality, crop rotation, meeting a market, pricing and marketing a project while also getting the business skills as well. So those two things need to be linked together.
Morag Gamble:
Where in the world are you seeing this working well already?
Joel Orchard:
Almost everywhere except from Australia .
Morag Gamble:
No, that’s straightforward
Joel Orchard:
Yeah, it’s a really, really successful platform for building new farmers in the US and in Canada. Those are the places I go looking for inspiration. The farm incubator is a model that’s well researched and documented, there’s journal articles, there’s manuals on how to run a farm incubator program. Only last year we published a document in Australia doing more of a kind of a landscape mapping and looking at how do we build that here in Australia through I guess, the economic context that we have in Australia.But yeah, I mean, it’s still at that point, it’s at an infancy.
Morag Gamble:
So what do you think needs to happen to unlock that potential here in Australia?
Joel Orchard:
I think it’s multi-pronged as a problem that it’s gonna require a multi-pronged solution. I suspect that a big part of the limitations to government recognition of the small scale farming sector is because it’s diverse and dynamic, and hasn’t really been mapped as an economic activity in itself. I mean, the simple example is no one couldn’t tell me what the economic impact of farmer’s markets are state by state. There’s simply no data, but if we were to look at that, it would be millions and millions of dollars, you know, contributing to the GDP and to local economies, but no one has mapped it and measured it. But most industries, when they meet a certain tier, are classified as a sector, and then they’re able to get levies and industry and government support. So because the small-scale farming sector covers off across vegetables and proteins and, cheeses and all of these different industries, it’s not being looked at as a single thing.
Morag Gamble:
So it’s kind of like an invisible sector you’re saying, like it’s just not seen as a thing. Like there’s something here, something there. Yeah.
Joel Orchard:
Along with the fact that small-scale is an undefined form of farming, like does small scale means low employment, does small scale means small amounts of land, does smaller scale means a small few thousand dollars of turnover annually. There’s different metrics that get used, which also makes it confusing. So I think it’s a space that needs a lot more. Yeah.
Morag Gamble:
Absolutely. Yeah. Gosh. So, then something else that you’re really involved in which I wonder how this fits in with the whole community-supported agriculture, the CSA. So you’ve got the CSA network of Australia and New Zealand. Are you seeing that this is a model that’s..
Joel Orchard:
Growing in Australia? I know that in many other parts of the world it’s also a really thriving, um, is this part of the answer is this
Morag Gamble:
I think It’s a part, it’s certainly a pathway to changing the dynamic of our food system. I’m really attracted to it as a model. I mean, they define it as a reciprocity economy. So there’s risk sharing, there’s an integration of engagement and involvement from both the consumer and the producer end. It’s not a food that’s wholly responsible on the shoulders of the farmers, it enables consumers and customers to be deeply involved in how their food is produced and how it comes to them. So I think in many ways it ticks all of the boxes in terms of how do we transition food systems and culture. I think it’s been really slow to be adopted here in Australia, for a number of reasons. But I mean, even when you think like, farmer’s markets are a fairly new phenomenon in Australia, I think the oldest farmers markets in Australia is only about 25 years old.
Joel Orchard:
So compared to countries throughout Europe, where farmer’s markets have been like the foundation of where you get your food for hundreds of years, it’s completely different. So yeah, it’s a big part of the culture shift that we need to see and because we’ve become so comfortable with the supermarket being the place that you access food, this new notion that you should have to access your food through a small number of hours on one day of the week, or if you’re lucky there’s a farmer’s market every week, or take it to the next step with a CSA where you commit upfront to perhaps six months in advance for your food. That’s just is a massive shift.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, that shift for convenience or the economics or just choosing things and all of that. We have quite a set, a mindset around that, I guess. So, yeah.
Joel Orchard:
Anyways, I find it problematic too, that it fosters a culture of elitism, which I think is unfortunate. The notion, I mean, a farmer’s market that’s available every week is a wonderful thing for a community, but it’s access to local food between, typically something, you know, it’s like eight till 11 in the morning. So you exclude all people from participating who work at that time of the day, who have children to get to school, who have mobility issues, who have health issues, who are elderly. So farmer’s markets are a wonderful thing, but they’re not as total [inaudible].
Morag Gamble:
It’s part of the answer, isn’t it? I mean, I think there’s this spectrum of different kinds of local food systems. So if you were to paint a local food system, that is a real and viable alternative to the industrial model that you’ve described, that’s kind of controlling everything at the moment. Yeah. I know there’s like a whole lot of transition that needs to happen, but what would it look like in Australia? If you, you know, 10 years down the track, if everything that you wanted to set in place was set in place, what would that.
Joel Orchard:
I think we’re going to really need to embrace some technologies, which I think is what makes the new young farmer and small-scale farming sector exciting for people. I think there’s going to be a high demand on technology, and we are going to need people with a high level of expertise to run really integrated small scale farms, which are in small spaces in amongst the suburban world. I think that’ll be really important in the future. And I think in order to compete with the convenience culture of these massive corporate conglomerates, which dominate the food system, we need to work together. We need to do it really, really well. We need farms working interconnected through a virtual distribution system that can enable farmers to measure and to have the information that they need to make decisions really in advance, in order to create sustainability and to reduce waste and to make sure that they’re growing to exactly the demand that’s required. And that needs to be somewhere that farmers own that data, because at the moment, farmers don’t own the data around the demand and the requirements of the food systems, the Coles, and the Woolies own all of that data. So food hubs as a model where it’s a central point for produce to be collected and collated and boxed up, and then redistributed would be a really great part of the solution. And those should be community-owned assets that are owned through cooperative platforms that consumers are a primary stakeholder in the way that those food hubs operate, rather than outsourcing that responsibility to someone that’s going to try and profiteer. I think the cost of food needs to go up because farmers aren’t getting paid where they need to be viable. But most of the price of food is ending up in the profiteering hands of the companies that own the distribution systems. So..
Morag Gamble:
What’s the current figure? Do you know of the, I know it varies from industry, but roughly like how much in a dollar would a farmer get?
Joel Orchard:
Oh I’d love to know that figure in the top of my head, but yeah, I wouldn’t even guess.
Morag Gamble:
No, I know it varies depending on what kind of industry you have, whether you’re in dairy or carrots, you know, well, I mean..
Joel Orchard:
That’s often talked as one of the values of farmer’s markets in that, you know, the dollar that you spend goes straight into farmer’s pockets, which is where it belongs. I guess why I look at these food hub models as the next best solution, because if we can run them through as community platforms, the profits get redistributed to the community and they can go back to farmers if that’s where they’re needed or to offset the cost of accessibility, to food, to the people who have socioeconomic barriers, like that’s the kind of model that we can run. It can be viable. It doesn’t have to be a not-for-profit or purely run by volunteers. Like we can create meaningful employment for people throughout that system. We just have to extract ourselves from this profiteering model where, it’s not people that are benefiting, it’s companies that are benefiting and they’re benefiting because shareholders demand that they benefit. So yeah, it’s people who don’t care what happens on the ground, or if people go hungry that are causing the problem, but we can take ownership of that.
Morag Gamble:
So what do you think is a way to disrupt this paradigm? I know there’s a lot of things that you’re doing already, but what do you see as the most positively disruptive thing or things that we could be doing?
Joel Orchard:
I think that there’s an increasing demand for these kinds of food hub models. I think it’s a space that’s evolving. I think there’s various iterations of how that will look to communities happening already. People are experimenting with the reco model, which is a type of farmer’s market that came out of Finland. And it’s done through a pre-ordering system through a Facebook group, uh, we’re seeing that being experimented with, we’ve got some great examples of food hubs evolving in say Brisbane with Food Connect and in Melbourne through the Melbourne Food Hub. I think some communities are taking more responsibility for their food, there’s a great group in North East Victoria that their whole community was devastated by the bush fires, but as a part of their recovery and resilience program, they’re now building small scale farms to work, to feed into, a food hub that can make sure that their community’s food needs are met.
Morag Gamble:
Where is that?
Joel Orchard:
It’s just out of Aubrey. I can’t remember, it’s called Acres and Acres Cooperative. It’s a fantastic project.I think there’s experiments, but there’s not this kind of broad adaptation or you know, people I think if I took a step back, I think probably one of the biggest barriers to us embracing these new ideas is that food is so abundant and still so easy to get in Australia. We haven’t really suffered a great catastrophic event that has really challenged our ideas around food security and meant that we’re all awakened to the fact, we need to do something about it, even through the fires and COVID and floods. And now the mouse plague, there’s still so much food readily available and far too cheap in Australia that it’s not giving an impetus for change.
Morag Gamble:
No, and even the information like you were saying before about we’ve only got so much topsoil left or climate change is affecting the way in which food can be grown in Australia and the patterns of weather, you know, the unpredictability, like all this stuff goes in as the information, but I think you’re right. I don’t think it’s landed as a reality that in our lifetimes we’ll see a massive shift in what’s going on in the food system here in Australia.
Joel Orchard:
And I guess the part of that story that Young Farmers Connect has been trying to speak to is the social sustainability of farming. And this idea that now more than 50% of our farmers are over the age of 60. I mean, that is in every way, a workforce crisis, which has huge implications to our ability to get food. And if we don’t do something radical to ensure that young people can be supported into the industry, we’re going to lose most of the people who grow our food and their knowledge, and we need a transition of that wisdom around land management, but we need it to be coupled with an embracing of new ways of doing things which do include integrated and collaborative food models that do include regenerative and ecological land management practices. And we probably need to radically review the way that farmland is viewed as a commodity that can be bought and sold through real estate markets and stock exchanges. We are seeing land grabbing of a huge scale in Australia through a corporatization rather than, you know, even worse scenarios at gunpoint where we see in, you know, Southeast Asia land grabbing and in South America is a really different issue, but it’s the same problem.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, so I wonder, you know, this idea I’ve been tossing around this idea and I don’t know how to make it happen. I would love to hear your perspective on this, and you’ve talked about it in the right at the start about land trust. I know around Brisbane, I mean I wrote this report for Brisbane City Council about their urban food systems thinking, you know, for 2025, 20 years ago or something now. And I think they’ve only done community gardening type of things as a result of this, but one of them was this idea of the land trust because they have bushland trusts. Now they have the capacity to buy up land and put in levies in place that people pay environmental levies then goes out and buys land in and around the city that has ecological quality so that it’s protected in perpetuity. And so I always saw that as a possible model that they could use, but just change it from bushland to being farmland, identifying where all the best agricultural land is in and around the city. I mean, if that was done 20 years ago would have been amazing because, you know, since then the spread of Brisbane has just taken over so much of the best agricultural land, but what are some of the successful or possible that you can see now in 2021 at supporting local governments and cities, to be able to think along these lines, and a farmland trust, you can see how that might work outside, but in terms of getting an urban farmland trusts everywhere, you know.
Joel Orchard:
It’s interesting because I’ve been quite involved in the community gardens movement, and they’re a wonderful asset to neighborhoods as a green space and as a biodiversity buffer for urban environments. But I still do look around and as wonderful as they are as a place to engage communities, they’re not a food system solution in terms of production. We need to see large scale farms at this, you know, within the feasibility of what can happen in an urban environment locked up and we need to protect every last square centimeter of soil that can potentially be farms in and among cities. I mean, only today, and I’m sure they wouldn’t mind me mentioning it, I had a chat with the lads at the neighborhood farm. And so they’re just on the peri-urban fringe in Brisbane, and the neighbouring block of land that they’ve been using is now for sale. So there’s a security of tenure issue for them in terms of their ability to continue to grow and meet a growing demand of an urbanized community in their region. There’s a housing estate going up across the road. So they need to grow more food, not less, and we talked about this land trust as a potential solution for them.
Morag Gamble:
How does it work exactly? Like what have you seen as being a model that really works well in the United States, for example, like if you’ve got a piece of land that’s going up for sale in a city that’s expanding, it’s going to be really expensive and it’s not going to be something that someone can afford to buy just to grow vegetables on. So just walk us through how this land trust model works and how you’ve seen it viable?
Joel Orchard:
Well, this is a good time to talk about it, cause I’m currently doing a research paper on it. So yeah, I’m deepening my understanding of how it works elsewhere and looking at how do we recontextualize it to the Australian legal and economic landscape. So essentially a farmland trust as it would look in Australia brings together the notion of a community land trust, which we already know works in Australia. That’s most commonly seen through like a housing estate or community housing estate kind of platform. And then there’s a conservation land trust, which we also have some examples of in Australia working, which can either work through a land acquisition and then locking up indefinitely like a public national park or can work through a piece of land being put, held under a covenant of conservation. So it becomes indefinitely protected, even though the land can be purchased and sold through the regular kind of real estate. The community land model works in that the houses or the dwellings are disconnected from the land title. The land title, which is generally the most expensive part, is held as the, in a community trust that could be through a cooperative or through like a private or a corporate trust fund, which is then managed by the community. And essentially by removing the land purchase from the real estate market means that it doesn’t increasingly become flighted. As the region’s land prices get inflated and the occupants are then only financially responsible for the dwelling itself, which means then that people who have economic challenges can afford to have access to the housing or even through rental agreements at a really reduced price. And so bringing those two concepts together where we conserve land for a purpose, and we also hold land in perpetuity and extract it from the real estate market to be put back into the commons, matching those two things together with the purpose of preserving land for food production is what a farmland trust would look like. And that is working well in the US. I’m also looking at some really great models in France, in Spain, in Scotland, in England. And they all work slightly differently, in the US there’s a big culture of land benefactors and philanthropy. So it’s farmland, it’s put into these community trust models by people who own land that can afford to gift it. In the UK and in Europe, it’s typically done through land purchase by community cooperatives. So community groups can go together through like an equity crowdsourcing platform and purchase shares in a parcel of land and then have a stake in ownership. Sometimes that’s done through a really sensible but low return on investment model. And other times it’s your investment is the food that you’ll eat for the rest of your life. So yeah, there’s different ways that those economic models can be created. And I think that’s the point that which, right here in Australia, is looking at what’s going to work for us, and what’s going to work within the boundaries and restrictions of our tenancy act and the illegal prescriptions around land ownership.
Morag Gamble:
And as you were speaking, I was thinking it’s really exciting to then explore this in the concept of thinking about access to land for housing. You know, we have a housing crisis too, for young people who can’t afford to get into the housing market. So if there’s a way that these two things could somehow be combined to create real and affordable housing and land for growing food, and it’s kind of almost like a new form of it, I dunno, almost like an eco village model in a way that just makes it super affordable.
Joel Orchard:
Well I think we know, and we’ve become disillusioned by the government and their willingness to put our interests first and foremost as communities. And I think in many ways, these are models that have evolved with almost an anarchist framework. These are people working together collectivizing and creating solutions for themselves. And whether that is community cooperatives buying land and putting community housing on it, whether that’s cooperatives coming together to own and run food hubs, this is more or less the same style of solution. This is collective impact through community engagement and community ownership, for the purpose of having some sense of control and regaining control over these things and embedding the layers of values and ethics that we want to see, but aren’t seeing in our government.
Morag Gamble:
So what I see is a really exciting possibility then, and this is probably what you’re doing, is gathering these and making them visible, gathering these systems and offering them, you know, like creating conditions, creating groups, creating networks, where people are sharing this information, talking to one another to explore what are these alternative stories of food and farming and the different systems that work. So you’ve got maybe just describe a little bit about how people can connect in with this, like, whether it be events or networks or things like that, where people can touch base with you and find out more about how all of this works and stay in touch with your latest research and, and investigations.
Joel Orchard:
I guess that is the point, it’s not the notion that we can inspire people to think about different ways of doing things by putting it out there into our communities and talking about it. And I think also, trying to create a culture of collaboration and an interesting one within the farming community, like years ago, it would, if your neighbors were growing better as zucchinis than you, you would look over the fence because there was no way that farmer would tell you what the secret was. Now we see through these Young Farmers Connect groups, people sharing knowledge so that everybody benefits. And that is a culture that I think is number one facilitated by these new digital places that we have, Facebook and the rest, but also it’s a part of the culture shift. And especially it’s a part of the new culture within the farming movement, which I think is reflective of the new type of person that’s engaging in the sector. And so they bring this ethos of collaboration with them, which I think as you say, is inspiring to see what will come out of that. But yeah, Young Farmers Connect, I would call a Mea network. It’s a network of networks. There’s value in localizing your network, because you’ve got shared knowledge from your local community around who supplies the best fertilizer, where to get tractor equipment, who’s to service your fencing, who’s doing home butchering, what seeds to grow at what time of the year, what events are happening, but then there’s also value of those networks interconnecting, because as we know, as a movement, everybody’s going through the same challenges and we can learn and benefit from connecting together. So yeah, most places now have a Young Farmers Connect chapter. Sometimes they’re just a Facebook group, other chapters are more involved and have coordinators that run events and do different activities. So yeah, you can find all of those. If you search Young Farmers Connect on Facebook or through our website.
Morag Gamble:
And we’ll put all the links down below, so anyone who’s listening, have a look in the show notes because Joel is going to share with us all of those different links that you can just click on them there and go directly to them. Are there any other links that you wanted to share as well as the Young Farmers Connect, any other organizations or platforms that you wanted to let us know about? Was that kind of, as you said, the Meta network that you can find everything else through.
Joel Orchard:
I try to make it that place. I think, you know, for us to, we recognize that we’re not experts in anything and that there’s plenty of other organizations that have expertise and are delivering wonderful services. We just want to make sure that it’s easy to find. We still find everything is so distributed and everything is still happening in isolation and in bubbles. And we need places where it’s a one-stop shop and everything is there and we can share as a community. So yeah, hopefully if things and activities are happening or there’s a place to learn, we can aggregate that content and make sure that everybody hears about it. But I think we’re also recognizing that people are tired of Facebook and people are tired of social media, and we need to build better ways of communicating, mailing lists and all of the rest, but, you know, platforms like this. And we try to make our industry events or our field days social events, so that there’s that natural and organic communication. And we see people going into business together, having, finding relationships, I mean these social events are really important just to bring people together with a shared value and a shared vision.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Joel, it’s been a wonderful exploration of the challenges, the visions, the possibilities, and, you know, I think as you, as you’re saying, it’s really, there’s so much work to be done in this space and encourage anyone who feels motivated to step into this,to really, to do this is kind of one of the biggest jobs that we face in society is how we can find regenerative ways of being and starting with our food system is kind of the core of it. So I encourage everyone to hook into Young Farmers Connect and I know Joel is just such a huge resource. So yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. It’s been just wonderful.
Joel Orchard:
And thank you. I’m always inspired by connecting with others around me that are all, share the need to do something and be actively involved in creating change. So I really valued the opportunity to talk with you and all the people that share our vision for more resilient and regenerative future. So, yeah. Cheers.
Morag Gamble:
Thanks. So that’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining me. If you like a copy of my top 10 books to read, click the link below, pop in your email and I’ll send it straight to you. You can also watch this interview over on my YouTube channel. I’ll put the link below as well, and don’t forget to subscribe, leave a comment, and if you’ve enjoyed it, please consider giving me a star rating. Believe it or not, the more people do this. The more podcasts bots will discover this little podcast. So thanks again. And I’ll see you again next week.