6. Good Organic Gardening - November-December 2016 AvxHome.in

GARDENING COMMUNITY | Future Feeders
pick up a weekly box of freshly picked,
seasonal organic produce.
The abundance and risks are shared, Joel
explains, which is particularly apt as we tour
the farm after an east coast low has brought
flooding rains and drowned some of his
crops. He’ll source missing vegetables from
other young farmers who fared better, for his
weekly boxes.
According to Joel, the new breed of farmer
is tackling much smaller pieces of land, using
higher-production biological systems and
growing a diverse range of locally suited crops.
“My ideology around farming is based
on ecology, as we know successful thriving
ecologies depend on diversity,” he explains.
“So when I look at my farm production
system, I would call it an ecological system
and that’s how I model it. When I look at the
farm as a business enterprise, it has to carry
through those ideas of ecology thriving on
diversity and communities as well.”
Working together, instead of the isolated
and competitive way that farming has
become, is what inspired Joel to establish
a network of young farmers so they can
benefit from the efficiencies of scale and the
effectiveness of being a larger-scale operation
on paper, but geographically separated, much
like bringing together pieces of a jigsaw.
“If young farmers can work together in a
network, we can inspire each other into the
social space we need,” explains Joel. “Working
in isolation is a really unattractive offer to any
young person thinking about starting a career
in farming and committing themselves to
seven days a week. That’s unreasonable, but
if we can work together with models of labour
sharing and time sharing it can work.”
Communitysupported
agriculture
As with other peer-to-peer business models,
Joel believes associative economies and new
societies are thriving on the idea of coming
back together again. “It’s actually us who’s
doing it for ourselves. It’s communities owning
their food production systems,” he says.
Associative economies, first described by
Rudolph Steiner in lectures about economics
in the 1920s, are based on the conscious
co-ordination between producers, distributors
and consumers. The goal is an economic
sector managed by associations of industry
and consumers, rather than the “invisible
hand” of the blind market in capitalist
economies or government-owned enterprise
in socialist economies.
“That’s why I really look to the communitysupported
agriculture model as something
that’s great for our community, because it
gives everybody a sense of ownership and
responsibility for their food,” Joel explains.
“While farmers’ markets have been a great
step in the right direction, they still suffer
from a pay-and-walk-away mentality where
your responsibility ends at the financial
transaction. That responsibility also needs
to extend to the health and wellbeing of the
farm and farmers because without them we
all go hungry.”
On trying to make a living as a farmer,
Joel also points to the problem that farming
models have created where they depend
on free labour, leading to an enormous skills
deficit because that labour is transient and
no one is keeping young people or enticing
them to stay in the community and become
food growers.
“We haven’t centred our industries on
farming being a viable future and I think
there’s so much opportunity for it,” says Joel.
“We really need to value food security. It’s
crazy not to.”
“We need a complete change in the dynamic of how
young people are going to access land and develop
their own farming enterprises. We’ve lost what was
once a family farming model where the farm got
passed on generationally.”
Snow peas
Weekly boxes
Vegetable harvest
Greens
64 | Good Organic Gardening