Dja Dja Wurrung Country

June 2025

Over three days in June 2025, over 150 rural and urban farmers and farm workers, food producers, food coop members, chefs, educators and committed allies gathered on the unceded lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung at Jonai Farms & Meatsmiths, where the Deep Winter Agrarian Gathering first began in 2015. Many came from lands still draining of disastrous floods to those parched by drought, extreme climate events caused by decades of corporate greed. As well as community support and outreach to those suffering the worst of the physical, mental, and emotional toll of the climate, economic, political and social crises of these times, we acknowledged the key role of the colonial capitalist system run by the patriarchy in the creation of the polycrisis. 

Our efforts were supported by the national committee of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), who will also help us collectively take forward many of the weekend’s proposed actions, because a crowd is not a movement, and we value our connections with each other and the other organisations who are with us in the struggle for food sovereignty, such as Open Food Network, Sustainable Table, the Degrowth Network, Young Farmers Connect, and more. 

Back in 2015, we worried about regulations & corporations that made it difficult for livestock farmers to build or access slaughter and butchery. 11 years on, there are many on-farm butcher’s shops and a growing number of micro-abattoirs across the country, and with AFSA’s leadership, farmers have won the support of most state and territory governments. Market gardeners had it easy on the regulation front in 2015, but worried about the risks and realities of burn out in what can be back-breaking toil. At the start of 2025, FSANZ made the veg farmers fellow victims of scale-inappropriate regs with the ‘licence to sell lettuce’. But because we are collectivised, we won exemptions for those under two hectares in NSW and under 1 hectare in Victoria.

Jonai Farms provided an instructive backdrop for our deliberations around gaining secure land tenure, building the intrinsic infrastructure of agroecology, and creating resilient solidarity economies such as community-supported agriculture (CSA). The Jonai share their land rent free with the First and Second Nations farmers of Tumpinyeri Growers, they have an 11-year-old butcher’s shop on the farm which allows them to serve their long-standing CSA members, and are nearing completion of a micro-abattoir on the farm after years of red tape and creative fundraising. The highly productive 69 acres of Djaara Country supports seven livelihoods, nine residents, and three generations, who collectively and independently feed around 500 people in the local region and in Naarm/Melbourne. 

In a plenary session on decolonising the food system, we considered the importance of Second Nations listening to and learning from First Nations and from Country, and working with the ‘ethics of incommensurability’ of farming on unceded lands, committing ourselves to reparations and acting in mutual obligation with Land and each other. We shared ways to pay the rent – whether to the organisation by that name, or to other local Indigenous organisations – noting that this transaction is just a step on the path to more relational ways of being we are learning and practising on our farms and in our communities. The AFSA national committee has had a regular decolonial circle for several years, and we committed to now opening it up to all members who would like to join. 

We heard from urban allies of the strengthening of work in Naarm/Melbourne through the establishment of a food sovereignty network, with events to help produce more politically-formed subjects better connected to the global struggle led by La Vía Campesina, and to degrowth, anti-racist, climate change and many other movements. 

While the unconference commenced with an exploration of the global history of food sovereignty and agroecology – the largest transnational social movement in the world with over 300 million signed up members of food sovereignty and allied organisations – it finished with local and regional discussions of what everyone can do back home, hands in soil, around a knife, or on the keyboard. We heard inspiring examples of local collaborations that already exist amongst market gardeners on WhatsApp, quarterly in-person meetings in the Yarra Valley, and the Women Who Farm network on the mid-north coast of NSW. As a movement of radicals (literally, ‘forming the root’) to reformists, we also discussed the importance of policy submissions and every individual person’s ability to contribute through a letter to your local MP, such as during the current AFSA campaign for reforms to support the development of more micro-abattoirs.

As we wrapped up our gathering, we agreed that we should continue convening nationally every two years, encouraging local groups to gather regionally in the intervening years. We have long understood the importance of acting locally, and Deep Winter, along with its more political cousin the annual Food Sovereignty Convergence, has helped us appreciate for over a decade how much is gained by coming together nationally. It is not either/or, it is both/and, so alternating the local with the national can strengthen our movement at all levels of action and nourishment. Thank you to the Land, the plants, the animals, the farmers and food workers, the cooks and cleaner-uppers, and the many enthusiastic allies and supporters who kept our bellies full as our hearts and minds expanded, and to all for bringing the much-needed rain to the drought stricken lands of the southeast. Our cups runneth over. 

Viva la vía campesina! Viva la revolución!