with Woodstock Flour, Roly Poly Farm, Bellasato Farm & Penny Kothe

Farming Democracy tells the story of eight Australian family farms doing things differently, working for a ‘new normal’ in agriculture that is good for 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.

Since the book was published, Australia has seen drought, unprecedented fires, and a pandemic revealing and exacerbating the critical flaws in our food systems. We join four Farming Democracy authors to talk about their journeys into farming, on the farm, and what food sovereignty has meant for them through the events of 2019–2020.

with Tyson Yunkaporta

Chat with Tyson Yunkaporta — author, academic, maker, and Indigenous thinker of the Apalech clan in North Queensland. We talk about the need for Indigenous thinking in our food systems, decolonising agriculture, and how non-Indigenous growers and eaters can work in solidarity with First Peoples.

Tyson’s work examines global systems from an Indigenous perspective. It explores how we we learn, look at, and talk about patterns of creation, and how we can learn to live within those patterns again.

We talk to Tyson about what this means for the food sovereignty movement — which itself was born out of Indigenous and peasant struggles, and in which advocating for the rights and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples is a core principle. We explore how we can build solidarity-based communities that respect and work with Indigenous knowledges, and build food systems based around those principles.

with New Economies Network Australia (NENA)

The alternatives to our current growth-focussed economy are being built all over Australia, tackling a range of connected issues that influence our food systems: ecological health, industrialised supply chains, democratic governance, Indigenous sovereignty, and more.

The New Economy Network Australia works to connect and promote such projects, build peer-to-peer learning and use collective strategies to create and advocate for change, to build a movement of people working in solidarity to create a ‘new’ economy. Join Dr Michelle Maloney to talk about how and why NENA is making solidarity the new normal as it works to transform our economies.

with Southern Harvest

Southern Harvest Association takes solidarity from the field to the fork — running a multifarm CSA style producer hub, a farmers’ market, education workshops, and a harvest festival. It’s a food system by the community for the community. The Southern Harvest mission is to build local and regional food and farming communities based in solidarity all along the supply chain, by supporting healthy relationships between growers, producers, consumers and community.

We talk about how they bring their regional food community together, and how that community has supported each other over the last year, through fires, hail storms, floods and pandemic, and how they’re moving forward.