NEWS
A kaleidoscope of people, knowledge and capabilities, GROUNDED Festival at the spectacular Yan Yan Gurt West Farm was an uplifting event full of inspiring and skilled humans, all working towards a healthy, connected and regenerative food future.
Boasting 750+ people on site, 58 tent sessions, 23 demos and walkshops, 5 farm tours, 73 speakers, 27 exhibitors, 50 volunteers, and 4,644 dishes washed by B-Alternative, GROUNDED wasn’t just a 2-day festival – it was a meaningful, immense gathering. Now in its third year, the one-of-a-kind event continues to be a testament to its organisers – the incredible Matthew Evans, Georgie Johnson, and Ollie Benson, alongside their steadfast teammates Laura, Nadia, Fran, Niall and Sam.
Host farmers, the Stewarts, warmly welcomed the mass of visitors from across the country and the food landscape onto their property at the eastern foothills of the Victorian Otway Ranges, inland from Lorne. The 573-acre property produces prime lambs and wool with integrated agroforestry, whilst running an educational farm tour business and a native flower enterprise.
Coming all the way from Western Australia, I was bursting at the seams to immerse myself in the stories, research, and lived experiences of those driving regeneration across the entirety of our food system.
People and Soil
A personal highlight was seeing and meeting Nicole Masters, author of For the Love of Soil – the book that catalysed my interest in regenerative agriculture and opened my eyes to the world beneath our feet. Drawing on her experience as an agroecologist and coach (Integrity Soils and CREATE program), Nicole aptly centred one of GROUNDED’s key values – community – in her presentation by imploring deep listening, remembering to have fun, and reconnecting to nature and people.
Having already witnessed the incredibly captivating Suz Orgill in action at our Regenerative Food Systems Conference last year in Perth, it was equally entertaining watching her bring the same energy to GROUNDED Festival in Vic. Suz kept her crowd captivated by masterfully comparing soil to cooking and involving the crowd in her carbon presentation, even when there were loud cheers from a nearby tent causing competition for attention!
Throughout the festival, I heard from other knowledge holders including Jake Robinson, Carolyn Hall, Michael Taylor, Clara Coleman, Jake & Gemma Chandler, Courtney & Ian Young, Matt Haggerty, Maggie Jarrett, and many more, each bringing unique perspectives and fascinating insights.
Local farmers and landcare groups shared their brilliant approaches to coupling best practice management techniques to understand overall farm health with capacity training for emerging advisors in the regions. I loved hearing these first-hand experiences from those at the coalface, and learning how the ultimate goal of this work – to build long-term support and sustainability in rural communities – was being implemented.
Human Health
There was a unanimous agreement amongst the GROUNDED crowd that human health starts with the soil – and healthy, living soil at that. Therefore, conversations around the link between the soil microbiome, our gut microbiome and the quality of our food were highly anticipated; and who better to lead these than Dr Steven Chen (Chief Medical Officer of Recipe4Health in the US), and Prof Felice Jacka (Deakin Distinguished Professor, OAM, and Director of the Food & Mood Centre at Deakin University).
Steven’s Food is Medicine program is seeing vast improvements in client health outcomes. By integrating regenerative food and centering equity in healthcare, Steven and his team of clinicians are using produce prescriptions to improve human health while supporting local farming and ecological outcomes. Steven shared Wendell Berry’s quote, “people are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food,” to highlight the need for such a program. With an annual health care cost of $4.9 trillion in the US, programs like Steven’s are now more important than ever.
Felice’s work in the field of nutritional psychiatry unravels the complex relationships between diet and brain health, recognising diet and nutrition as risk factors for mental disorders. Felice’s labelling of ultra processed food as “frankenfood,” and her calls for a Minister for Food, tighter food marketing regulations, a sugar tax, and local planning laws that prioritise health were met with unanimous head nods.
Natural Capital
Moving out to the landscape and ecosystem services that farmland provides, Carmel Onions (CommBank Executive Manager of Agribusiness Sustainability) and Rayne van den Berg (natural capital specialist from Value Australia), discussed how banking is changing the way it views land and how landholders can be paid to look after their landscapes through true cost accounting.
Carmel recommended farmers find low-cost ways to collect data that communicates their sustainable management and resilience to enable external stakeholders like banks to assess risk profiles and equity. With competing land-uses and limited land remaining, there is a need to advocate for valuing natural capital on property evaluations.
Connecting the realities of managing land to legislation and policymakers is crucial for this next phase of environmental markets. Knowing how to build, quantify and manage natural capital is core to business strategy and agricultural viability. We still need a fundamental, regulated market mechanism to enable financing of nature-based solutions, but landholder and Indigenous voices need to be at the forefront of those discussions.
In a separate dialogue, Rayne explained how engaging corporate partners requires a different approach to those with government and philanthropic funders. While the latter focuses on nature itself, corporates are driven by financial resilience and social costs. Considering the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures, Rayne referenced a study that estimated for every tonne of carbon lost, society loses $283 US in social capital, highlighting the urgency corporates are facing to strategically plan and prioritise actions that reduce carbon emissions (and support those that sequester carbon).
Back to People
Farmers like NSW sheep grazier Vince Heffernan provided living proof that productive farming and environmental restoration are not mutually exclusive. Vince demonstrates exceptional leadership in the regenerative space, and is just one example of the brave individuals that came together for this event. Both Vince and Nicole Masters echoed the notion that social pressure is central to both stalling and triggering change.
While it’s undeniable that older, white men remain the dominant demographic in the agricultural industry, GROUNDED demonstrated that a generational shift is occurring – a large portion of the crowd and speakers were women, and many were younger adults. Perhaps this is just another reflection of the positive influence diversity has on a system – not just above and below ground, but in our communities and who’s caring for the land. While this is a step in the right direction, a truly resilient food system also requires genuine First Nations leadership and bridging that gap remains vital work.
Spending my last morning on an insightful farm tour with the Stewart family reinforced my drive to continue working in this space; listening, sharing, collaborating and regenerating. Continued support of on-farm demonstrations and peer-to-peer activities, less judgement of others, and more diversity and trust building to achieve the impact we want (and need) at scale.
The climate has changed and it’s not going to be a quick turnaround, but we need to start asking questions of ourselves, our leaders, and looking to what nature needs. We need functioning ecosystems within our farming landscapes, and we cannot afford to keep taking resources without giving back if we want to sustain as a species.
“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
– Wendell Berry
Tibby Tuckett (RegenWA Program Manager)
