By Sally Ruljancich

I am honoured to be stepping into the role of President of the National Committee of AFSA, a position which I feel ready to assume and which I will grow into quickly and thrive in. I’ve been participating in the politics, ethics and advocacy of food sovereignty, through my studies and my farm business for many years; this positon just makes it a little more official. With AFSA’s wonderful committee, I am confident that we can continue, and build on, the momentum of 2016.

Firstly, a resounding and applauding thank you to Tammi Jonas for her leadership in the role of President over the past two years and a congratulations on her new role as Chair of the FFFU. There is no doubt that Tammi will do amazing things in this role, her years of activism and passionate public speaking ensures the voices of farmers will be heeded. Her legacy of leadership and absolute commitment to food sovereignty is tangible, and the creation of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is testament of this.

I joined the committee of AFSA in May 2016, slap bang in the middle of the LDF campaign, diving straight into strategizing the #youcantbuywhatieat potluck events and attended a number of them – they really were amazingly delicious gatherings – and the online community rallied around the cause in the public space. It was exhilarating. I, with fellow committee members, also met with parliamentary members throughout the second half of the year as AFSA continues to have its voice heard. We will be seeking meetings with legislators and policy makers in 2017.

Like most people, I wear a number of figurative hats. I’m a researcher at The University of Melbourne, working in fundraising, a position I took on after fleeing my PhD thesis and moving to a farm in South Gippsland with my husband. We established Colin and Sally’s Organic Lamb and Beef in 2013, selling our meat direct to the eater and along the way, created and grew, a community of conscientious eaters. Our beautiful children aside, it is the achievement I am most proud of. From this position, I have always championed other small producers and am often the first point of contact for advice on selling direct and connecting farmers to a wider audience. If we want the CSA and direct sales movement to grow (hint: we do), then we must publicly support each other and collaborate more often, and better.

I didn’t start life as a farmer. I wasn’t always writing from a farmhouse, gazing at sheep grazing on the hills. For many years an inner-city vegetarian, I abhorred the treatment of animals prior and during slaughter and simply did not want to participate at all in a food system that condoned it. University days were a blur of too many long shifts in a fish and chip shop, lectures and bad food from the supermarket. I wrote about food regulation in my thesis, but I didn’t yet know how to engage with the food system of my dreams. I now know what I’m fighting for. Systematic change.

The concerns raised at the Fair Food Convergence in late-October 2016 were many, but the ones which stood out as most pressing were the lack of processing infrastructure accessible to many meat farmers (particularly for poultry), the disconnect that many eaters have to the seasons and a lack of confidence and knowledge of cooking with a variety of meats cuts and produce; and how we can continue to create a ‘space’ for farmers and eaters to connect, one which works for both.

AFSA’s mandate for 2017 will be to support, fundraise for, and run the LDF and to continue to cultivate the nexus between farmers, producers, and eaters, by way of advocating food hubs, CSAs and direct models of sale, eating seasonally and using all the cuts, from cheek to eye fillet. Nationwide seasonal feasts anyone? Also, more championing in the public realm is needed of those chefs and eateries that DO walk the “paddock to plate” talk and AFSA will be vocal in our appreciation of the ones that do. AFSA will also explore models of small and community-run meat processing facilities in regional Australia and sharing the successes of the models around the country that are operational or near to being. Unlocking the access to processing and distribution infrastructure are key to more small scale producers feeding their communities. Imagine that.

Thank you to Michele Lally, Paul West, Alana Mann and Sophie Lamond who are stepping away from their positions on the AFSA committee, and to Wendy Lehman, who left the committee in June; all to continue their respective and wonderful projects within the fair food space. We all look forward to hearing about your successes; AFSA is richer for your input.

To the committee going forward, Chris Balazs (Vice-President), Jo Hall (Secretary), Ben Mac, Phil Stringer, Serenity Hill, Samantha Hawker, I genuinely look forward to the coming months of lobbying, seasonal feasting, strategizing and collegiality. A special thank you goes out to intern Courtney Young, making the lives of committee members easier, one mail chimp at a time.

It was a fateful day that morning I rolled up Jonai Farm driveway to learn how to make sausages with Tammi. I left with bacon, knowledge and a collectivist spirit reawakened. A community of knowledge-sharing and peer-to-peer support, the likes of which I hadn’t previously encountered drove home my sense of purpose to create a food system that is determined by the farmer and the eater rather than corporations, is respectful of the animal, and works on and with the health of the soil. And delicious. I joined up immediately.

By Tammi Jonas

In my second and final year as President, the AFSA National Committee has worked and fought hard to especially support small-scale dairy and ethical meat producers who are at the pointy end of unfair regulations and outdated planning schemes. We’ve done so because the food sovereignty movement must actively support ethical and regenerative farming models so that eaters have somewhere to turn as we ask them to turn their backs on Big Ag and the duopoly.

A major focus for the year has been the crowdfunding campaign to establish a Legal Defence Fund to support farmers, makers, and eaters in their attempts to grow and access ethical and ecologically-sound produce in the face of unfair and inconsistent regulations and planning designed for large industrial agriculture and processing. We’ve currently raised nearly $30,000 and recently distributed the first funds to three farms in need: Elgaar Organic Dairy in Tasmania, Moo View Dairy in South Australia, and Happy Valley Free Range in Victoria. The campaign has been great for building AFSA’s membership, which has nearly tripled over the past year.

The #youcantbuywhatieat potlucks have been a huge success across the country at raising awareness of the problems of our current food safety regulations and the threat they pose to food sovereignty, and they have been some of the best meals I have personally ever eaten! We’ve feasted on wild-shot rabbit ragu, roadkill roo stew, home-killed and cured salamis, raw milk cheeses and an endless variety of pickles and ferments to support the millions of good bacteria in our guts and contest the orthodoxy of sterility that is a different but genuine risk to public health. Communities everywhere are coming together to talk about what kind of food and agriculture systems they want – it’s food sovereignty enacted!

The Legal Defence Fund is now a formal sub-committee of AFSA with its own Terms of Reference and we’ll be seeking expressions of interest soon for members of the Steering Committee – those with training or experience in food safety and planning are particularly urged to join us in our efforts to reform the system back to accommodating a more human scale.

In addition to running the campaign to build a Legal Defence Fund, we’ve also been very active in lobbying policymakers and legislators directly. AFSA made submissions to the Productivity Commission’s Inquiry into the Impact of Regulation on Agriculture, and the Animal Industries Advisory Committee’s inquiry in Victoria, and attended hearings of both inquiries to further express our views on what food sovereignty could look like with some careful reform. We’ve met with the Ministers for Agriculture and Planning in Victoria as well as backbenchers and leaders from the Opposition to build awareness of the food sovereignty movement across the political spectrum.

The small-scale farmer movement continues to grow and gather, and this year’s Deep Winter saw over 200 farmers and our allies come together for two rejuvenating days of strategizing and nourishing our community in Gerringong, NSW thanks to the wonderful people of Buena Vista Farm and Milkwood.

Also in AFSA’s efforts to support more small-scale producers I’ve met with dozens of livestock farmers across the country, and a movement to (re)build small regional abattoirs is well underway – watch this space in the coming year as we continue to reclaim the means of production back from the hands of corporate greed.

At the international level, in August 2016 Fair Food Farmers United (FFFU), the farmers’ branch of AFSA, was officially accepted as a member of La Via Campesina (LVC), the leading voice of the global food sovereignty movement. LVC brings together millions of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world. It defends small-scale sustainable agriculture as a way to promote social justice and dignity. It strongly opposes corporate-driven agriculture and transnational companies that are destroying people and nature.

AFSA is also a proud member of both the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) and Urgenci: the International Network of Community Supported Agriculture.

In March 2016 I attended the Asia Pacific Regional Conference of the FAO in Malaysia, where we continued to forge alliances with civil society organisations working for food sovereignty across our region, and had the opportunity to put forward positions on over-regulation in Australia to the Director General of the FAO. I also learned more about opportunities to work in solidarity with our comrades across the Global South as they fight the ill effects of cheap Australian exports that are destroying their own smallholders’ capacity to survive.

I have done a dozen interviews for radio and print media as well as numerous podcasts in addition to nearly 20 public speaking engagements at events as varied as the Victorian Agritourism Summit, the Horsham Landcare AGM, and Slow Food’s Terra Madre in Italy. Our outgoing Communications Officer and Sydney University academic Alana Mann has detailed the rest of our media impact in her report.

I step down from the role of President knowing I am leaving it in the very able hands of organic beef and lamb producer Sally Ruljancich, a force of nature and know-how in her own right and a bright new leader for the food sovereignty movement in Australia.

I will continue on the AFSA National Committee in the role of Chair of Fair Food Farmers United, where I look forward to continuing our strong engagement with farmers, and to building on nearly two years of work to establish the Legal Defence Fund. I also look forward to furthering AFSA’s international advocacy work with IPC, LVC, and Urgenci over the coming year.

As I hand over the helm, I’d like to offer a sincere and resounding thank you to the hard-working National Committee members of 2015-16: Chris Balazs, Alana Mann, Sally Ruljancich, Jo Hall, Phil Stringer, Ben McMenamin, Paul West, Michele Lally, Sophie Lamond, Wendy Lehman, Sam Hawker, and Gavin Williams, as well as our two fantastic interns over this past year Katarina Munksgaard and Courtney Young. And a very special note of gratitude to our dynamo volunteers who help with AFSA’s websites and comms Kate Raymond, Sharon Lee, and Larna Pittolgio, as well as the talented Greer Freshwater Burton, who designed our brilliant new logo this year. If it’s true that the future belongs to those who turn up, I’m really glad it was you guys. ;-)

 

Viva la revolución!

Cheap milk and corporate greed are killing dairy farmers, and in a commodity-driven food system there isn’t a damned thing farmers can do about it.

Regulation is stifling small-scale, ethical farming, and when the government shuts you down, there isn’t a damned thing farmers can do about it.

Loss of abattoirs across Australia is driving small-scale livestock farmers out of business, and there isn’t a damned thing farmers can do about it.

And yet there is something we can do about these problems, but farmers need everybody’s help. Farmers can’t mend the broken food system alone, but together we can all take back control of the means and ways of production!

Our campaigns

On dairy, there are some relatively simple things everyone can do right now:

1. boycott Coles, Woolies, and Aldi, who keep prices on milk artificially low, hurting farmers every day;
2. if you can’t boycott the big supermarkets because you genuinely have nowhere else to shop, at least boycott their private labels (Coles, Woolies, Aldi brands) and buy branded products;
3. buy your milk directly from a farmer!

Check out Richard Cornish’s piece On Australian Milk for more insight into why dairy farmers are being driven out of business by a system that treats food as a commodity in the volatile global market.

For tips on how to avoid the duopoly (+Aldi), see these excellent tips from Sharon Lee and Jennifer Richards. Also check out FlavourCrusader’s list of farms from which you can buy your dairy (and other produce) directly!

On regulation, AFSA is running a crowdfunding campaign to establish a Legal Defence Fund to support small-scale farms suffering from overly burdensome, out-of-date, and inappropriate-to-scale regulation and planning frameworks.

Donate today so that farms like Elgaar, Mooview, and Happy Valley Free Range can get back to making a living doing what they do best – growing ethical and ecologically-sound, nutritious, and delicious food!

Our events

AFSA recently co-hosted events at the wonderful polyculture that is Caroola Farm, and in Canberra with Southern Harvest and the Australian Conservation Council. We also screened the excellent new documentary Polyfaces with the generous support of Regrarians and filmmakers Lisa Heenan, Isaebella Doherty, and Darren Doherty, followed by a delicious fair food dinner at A Baker. These events blended local strategising about the infrastructure needed to support the small-scale farming movement with the launch the exciting draft of the ACT Peoples’ Food Plan. Both occasions also served as successful fundraisers for the AFSA Legal Defence Fund.

Our lobbying

Following on from our submission to the Animal Industries Advisory Committee inquiry in February, AFSA is in discussions with the Victorian Ministers for Planning and Agriculture on the necessary changes to planning and regulation to keep up with innovation and best practice in the small-scale farming movement. We have been assured that our concerns have been heard, and a response from the ministers to the report is due in the next couple of months. We are also supportive of Minister Pulford’s work in Parliament to implement the recommendations from last year’s review of PrimeSafe (the Victorian meat industry regulator).

On abattoirs, AFSA has been meeting with farmers all over the country to learn more of their challenges, and what we hear repeatedly is:

• huge multi-national corporations like JBS Swift are buying up Australian abattoirs and shutting small-scale producers out;
• big, export-focused abattoirs are increasingly telling small-scale farmers to go somewhere else;
• small, regional abattoirs are closing due to decreasing viability, often as a result of the need to upgrade facilities in order to meet changing regulations and the increasing cost of compliance;
• the very limited number of poultry abattoirs in Australia are threatening to or have already shut small-scale farmers out as they don’t want to process small batches, and in some cases because they claim that the producers are competition as they raise the same breeds as the owners of the abattoirs.

The result of narrowing access to local abattoirs is that farmers are transporting animals longer distances for slaughter, a situation that has negative impacts on animal welfare and also the welfare of the farmers who in some cases might be doing more than an 8-hour round trip drive just to have their animals processed. This is not sustainable in terms of farmers’ time nor finances.

AFSA is talking with government and small-scale producers to find solutions to these barriers to ethical and ecologically-sound livestock farming. We simply must build more abattoirs (mobile or fixed) to protect the viability and integrity of the growing number of small-scale, ethical livestock farms in Australia.

Our voice

I recently had the pleasure to address the Tourism North East’s Agritourism Conference a few weeks ago, where I posited that the only reason we need agritourism is because we’ve made people tourists on the land, and failed to support farmers by paying appropriately for the cost of food.

We need to make agritourism a supplementary activity to agriculture that reconnects people to food production and helps make farming viable again – not by replacing agricultural income with tourism income, but by using the tourism to help people learn to pay what it costs to produce the food and let farmers get back to farming. Agritourism can be a wonderful form of community engagement and connecting people to food production, and there is an urgent need to re-skill the population around farming and the domestic skills of cooking, preserving, and reducing waste.

A few weeks ago I attended the Pan Pacific Pork Expo in Queensland along with my husband Stuart, where we gained a great deal of insight into the motivations and challenges of the intensive pork industry in Australia. I’ve written an account of the problems of Big Pharma, Big Food & the intensive pig industry here.

AFSA has grave concerns about the control held by large pharmaceutical companies and their quick fixes to keep animals in unhealthy environments alive, which hides the need for serious reform of those production methods. By working more closely with intensive animal industries, AFSA hopes to start making small inroads to help shift the industry towards more ethical, ecologically- and socially-just forms of production.

Here’s hoping for a brighter future for all farm animals, farm and food workers, farmers and eaters everywhere.

 

It’s been a huge start to 2016 with a lot going on in the food sovereignty movement, keeping all us farmers and eaters very busy indeed!

A common thread in our activities is governance – good governance, bad governance, and the perverse outcomes of ignorant governance. Let me explain with a few examples…

Definition of ‘intensive agriculture’ in planning schemes

In Victoria, a farm is deemed ‘intensive’ if it imports more than 50% of the nutritional requirements for its animals. So technically all pig and poultry farms, most dairies, and many farms suffering from this awful drought should have permits to run ‘intensive’ production models. (Interestingly, horses are exempt as they aren’t considered farm animals, but I digress.)

The scheme was obviously designed to capture feedlots and actual intensive pig and poultry sheds, and even perhaps so-called industrial ‘free-range’ farms where stocking densities may be as high as 10,000 birds per hectare. Great, that seems like a pretty good thing.

But wait, the scheme says that my farm, with around 110 pigs on 23 acres at any given time is also ‘intensive’ because we collect spent brewers’ grain from the local brewery and supplement it with a GMO-free grain pellet and seconds from agriculture in our region. And it says that Jo Stritch’s Happy Valley Free Range farm in the Yarra Ranges, with similar stocking densities and excellent use of green ‘waste’ from her region is intensive too. In Jo’s case, intensive agriculture is banned as she is in a Green Wedge Zone.

And so Jo is selling her farm and moving her family and all her animals to a shire that will let her raise her pigs on the open paddocks.

Jo was Livestock Farmer of the Year in 2015.

AFSA put in a submission  to the Animal Industries Advisory Committee’s Discussion Paper, and attended a hearing in Bendigo to further canvass our concerns about the deeply problematic definition of ‘intensive’, and were delighted that our evidence and arguments were well received by the Committee. We’re now awaiting the Committee’s recommendations, which we hope include a more appropriate means of assessing whether a farm is in fact ‘intensive’, as well as support for communities who are fighting everywhere to stop inappropriate development of actual intensive pig and poultry sheds with all of their attendant environmental, animal welfare, and social costs.

Impact of Regulation on Small Farms

AFSA also put in a submission to the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into the impact of regulatory burden in Australian agriculture.

In our submission, we gave evidence of many examples of overly burdensome regulation stifling innovation and the very viability of small-scale farms. One such example is the terrible impact of lack of due process for Elgaar Dairy in Tasmania, who were shut down after 20 years of traditional production of organic milk when the food safety authority decided they needed a new pasteurizer and various upgrades to what they determine are more ‘modern’ standards. Elgaar has no history of food safety issues, and have now been without a license for over a year and a half, during which they crowdfunded over $250,000 to buy a new pasteurizer and meet the new requirements. The Tasmanian authority has yet to grant them another license in spite of the upgrades and enormous amount of work done in good faith. AFSA condemns such draconian measures and unwillingness by government to support small businesses towards compliance.

Our submission also cites egregious examples from Victoria’s meat regulator PrimeSafe, the huge impact of knee-jerk changes to regulation of raw milk on small-scale dairy farms (many of whom have now gone out of business), and the complicated business of ensuring appropriate labeling of GMO and imported ingredients while not creating an extra burden for small-scale producers who sell directly to the public.

Asia Pacific Regional Conference (APRC) of the Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations (UN)

In the second week of March I had the honour of attending the 33^rd APRC of the FAO in Puttrajaya, Malaysia, along with 54 other members of civil society organization (CSOs) from across the region. We started with two days of sharing issues – everything from loss of mangroves and destruction of ecosystems and viability of small-scale fishing in Indonesia and Malaysia due to large-scale aquaculture and trawling, to loss of access to the necessary infrastructure to process livestock and mill rice in Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Viet Nam, and Australia.

The FAO has major themes currently running on the importance of agroecology to a sustainable future for soils and the people who grow our food, and another on the importance of control of value chains by small-scale farmers to maintain or increase viability. There is also strong work being done to acknowledge the importance of situating work on nutrition within the broader scope of food systems. While the Asia Pacific region has halved hunger in the past 20 years, there are still 490 million hungry here, the highest proportion in the world, while there is conversely a significant rise of overweight and obesity as countries industrialise.

The Australian government’s contributions to this forum were, quite frankly, embarrassing and totally at odds with the good work being done by the FAO. The Australian delegate from the Department of Agriculture Matt Worrell told those assembled that we should ‘focus on large holdings that are better capitalised and better educated’, ‘aggregate smaller farms to achieve efficiencies’, and that ‘smallholders’ positions can be improved by free trade – by connecting them to international markets’, concluding that free trade can solve food security issues in the region. Ours was the only country in the region that I heard to be openly dismissive of smallholders – every other speaker stressed the importance of small-scale production for food security and rural prosperity.

I will write a longer report on the APRC and share it on the AFSA website soon.

Loss of abattoirs in Australia

We are facing a crisis as one after another small, regional abattoir shuts its doors in the face of increased compliance costs and inability to compete with large-scale multinational abattoirs who are buying up our infrastructure and increasingly shutting out small-scale producers as we’re perceived to be a nuisance in their large, industrial, export-focused models.

AFSA is working to gather information about the increasingly centralized control of abattoirs, and we are heartened by the work being done up in the Mary Valley in Queensland by a group of small-scale livestock farmers to investigate their options for re-establishing an abattoir after the loss of their closest in Eumundi last year. See Phil Stringer’s excellent report for more detail elsewhere in this newsletter.

In my own region in the central highlands of Victoria, a group of us are also working together to investigate the option of an on-farm mobile slaughter unit, and in Bega, NSW, smallholders already took control of their abattoir when it threatened to close in 2013, and formed a cooperative to keep it open.

Community Supported Agriculture on the rise!

There is plenty of good news amongst all of these tales of bad governance negatively impacting on food sovereignty across Australia and indeed the world… and it lays with you, the people, who are continuing to find ways to support farmers directly, whether by frequenting farmers’ markets, buying online directly from farmers, or joining the increasing number of farms who run CSAs.

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is one of the pillars of food sovereignty – a solidarity economy that ensures the viability and accountability of farmers, while providing delicious, nutritious food produced in ecologically-sound and ethical ways. Have a chat with some of your farmers about whether it might work for them, and what you can do to help. Also have a look at Transition Farm’s excellent model, and read more about CSA and other great food sovereignty initiatives in the latest special Fair Food issue of Pip Magazine!

Those who control the means of production control the world. Ask yourself who you want that to be – faceless multinationals who frankly don’t care whether your family gets sick from the rubbish they sell you, or the farmer whose kids might go to school with yours? Wendell Berry famously said that ‘eating is an agricultural act’, and Michael Pollan extended the claim to point out that it is also a political act. Let’s show the politicians what we want with every bite we take – it’s up to all of us to build a fair food future!