[Introduction Music 0:00:08.5]
Amanda:
Good evening everyone, and welcome to Farming Together’s second webinar episode of seven, collaborative solutions for farmers, fishers and foresters. My name’s Amanda Scott, I’m the Project Manager from the Farming Together program, and my colleague here Simone Blom is the amazing facilitator for the evening. Now if you missed our first webinar last week, that was a great one on sharing your data with Birchip Cropping Group, you can find that one on our website farmingtogether.com.au. Tonight we’re lucky enough to have two fabulous women doing amazing things in their community for our Out of the Box Solution episode tonight.
So Out of the Box Solutions is about community supporting agriculture, and agriculture supporting community. We know that food distribution has become increasingly popular in covid outbreak with food distribution boxes, and we’re going to hear from two of these amazing community minded women who help create food box solutions, that support local small scale producers and then give them greater access to clean and fair food. So our first presenter this evening is Deborah Bogenhuber from Out of the Box, a Mildura based food project which has small scale regenerative growers and connects them with local buyers.
And our second guest speaker for this evening coming direct and live from the markets I believe is Clarence Valley Food Inc Chairperson Debrah Novak. Now Deb’s acted fast during covid crisis to establish a delivery service, the Yamba Farmer Market, and produces market stall holders, which is maintaining sales post pandemic. So welcome tonight to our audience and to our guest speakers who we’ll hear from in a minute, welcome Deborah Bogenhuber.
Deborah:
Thank you Amanda and Simone. And I have after a little glitch managed to restart my computer and zoom in from the computer instead of my phone, so all is well. If I’m able to share my screen I will–
Simone:
Are you able to do that now Deborah?
Deborah:
Yep, okay. So I’m Deborah Bogenhuber from Food Next Door Co-op based in Mildura in north west Victoria, and I will take you through a bit of our journey and our story over the past four years or so. And one of the things that we were asked to talk to was some of the challenges and the problems that we’re addressing in the work that we do, so I’ll certainly be talking a lot about those. So just on the welcome slide here we have had a lot of great support, fantastic support from the Victorian Government for our work. And the two photos here are of the two farms that we currently have access to, our community demonstration farm on the left and the [0:04:03.2] farm on the right, and two of our farmers and also staff of the Co-op on that slide. So our weekly local produce box scheme is actually called Out of the Box, and it’s a weekly or fortnightly subscription model of local sourced produce that’s grown using regenerative practices.
We have three box sizes that customers can choose from, small, medium and large, for $25, $35 and $50. And the three pillars of the scheme are that everything is 100% local, that’s guaranteed, usually within about a 50 kilometre radius of Mildura. It’s grown to organic or regenerative farming practices and it supports the local community, and I’ll talk more about that as we go. So I guess really our work started with wanting to connect people in our community who wanted to eat local produce with local produce. I’ve been here for about 14 years, I’m not originally from Mildura, and the thing that really stood out for me when I first arrived 14 years ago was that there was no fruit and vegetable shop here, and this region is known as a food bowl, so this was quite a perplexing problem for me when I arrived.
And with the work that we started doing around four years ago it was something that we heard a lot in the conversations that we had, that people wanted better access to local produce. So we started with this local produce box scheme Out of the Box as a three month trial, we limited that to 30 boxes a week and gave it a go to see how it would go. And what became really apparent was that we didn’t actually have enough produce in our region to fill those boxes, and this was partly because we very much wanted produce that was grown to organic standards. So there was some other produce around that didn’t meet those standards, but overall we actually had a lack of small scale farmers, so I’ll talk more to that.
I just wanted to show you quickly this is the landing page of our Out of the Box website which is a Shopify online store, and I just wanted to draw your attention to the top there in case you can’t read it, it says ‘for each box $1 is donated to Food Next Door trainee farmers’, and there’s a button there that you can click on and that amount is updated each week. We’ve started recording this from the 1st of July this year, so since the 1st of July we’ve sold 1,426 boxes which is great. So Out of the Box is really just one part of our story as a Co-op, I mentioned that really through starting Out of the Box as a trial, identified this actually much bigger problem of not having enough small scale farmers in our region who were growing food for our community. So a lot of the farms here are medium to large scale, and almost all of the produce is exported from the region.
So one of the main crops grown here are grapes, table grapes, there are also wine grapes and dried fruit, sultanas and the like, apparently from the table grapes grown here about 99% of those are exported from the region which is quite staggering. So I’ll just take you through our model, and it starts here really with two things. So when we identified this problem of a lack of small scale farmers, we were pretty lucky to connect with a research project that had been looking into the skills and knowledge of new migrant farmers in Australia, Mildura was one of their main study sites, and how those skills and knowledge translated in the Australian context. And the main finding of this research was that quite simply it didn’t, because these farmers didn’t have the resources to access land, and so once they arrived here they were no longer farming.
So we suddenly connected with this community of farmers living here in Mildura and Sunraysia who weren’t farming, so we thought great okay we’ve got people who want local produce and are willing to pay for it and buy it, and now we’ve found some farmers, fantastic, who want to live here, they want to grow food, and they come from a background of farming without chemicals. So the other unique thing in our region is that we have a lot of unused land, so Mildura is a desert environment, our average rainfall is less than 300 mL’s a year, and you pretty much can’t grow anything, certainly not vegetables or fruit without irrigation. So we have a discreet irrigation district where there’s an irrigation network to be able to grow food here, and for various reasons I won’t go into it, it’s quite complex, but we have around 20 to 25% of land in the irrigation district that was once used for growing food no longer being utilised.
So it’s sitting vacant, some of it still has vines on it that have died quite a long time ago, so we have landless farmers as we refer to them and we have farmer-less land. And the Co-op managed to pilot a project that matched these landless farmers with farmer-less land to be able to grow food for our community. And that pilot project was successful in the sense that the farmers grew four years of a maize crop on there that they harvested, but since then we’ve learnt a lot along the way, and have been able to develop a model that’s now really producing food that’s coming into the broader community here in Mildura. So just when you thought we were solving all the problems, the next problem, as I mentioned we live in the desert and you can’t really grow anything without irrigation.
But the thing here is that you can have land but the land doesn’t necessarily have water attached to it, so we now had a problem of how do we get water, how do we buy water. When it’s a really dry year out here as it was last year and the year before, water prices go through the roof and it becomes completely unaffordable for small scale farmers to buy water to grow food. So we had to do some out of the box thinking, and were lucky enough to get some support from again the Victorian Government, through the Department of Land Water & Planning to establish a community water bank. And that water bank accepts donations of temporary water from water holders, which are then able to be utilised by small scale farmers who are members of Food Next Door at a price that’s reasonable in order to produce some food. So we’ve solved all our problems–not really, but we’re on our way to doing that.
We now have around 20 new migrant farmers all with their own plots growing food that they’re able to share with their families within their community; they’re starting to sell that produce to Out of the Box. The food hub in this diagram is another future vision, but at the moment it’s being sold through Out of the Box which guarantees a fair return back to the farmer, so minimum 50% of the box retail price is returned to the farmer. And then you can see on the left of that diagram that any other profits are fed back into the Co-op to continue to support farmers to access land, and other tools and support that they need to be able to farm. I’ll just mention as well that we launched our own training program last month, it’s not a registered training program, but we’re delivering that for new migrant farmers to learn the skills and have the experience over 12 months of farming at the community demonstration farm, to then be able to go off and have their own farming enterprise if that’s what they then want to go on and do. Thank you and I welcome questions.
Simone:
Beautiful, thank you Deborah that was fantastic. I do know your story but I always pick up more little bits, every time I learn a little bit more and it’s wonderful to hear it again, so thank you for sharing it. We do have a couple of questions, and if anyone has any more now’s your time to put them in the chat box. The first one is from Greg McGee, how did you establish the contents that would fill the boxes from week to week? Did it depend on the available produce from a small group of farmers?
Deborah:
Yeah, so the contents of the boxes change from week to week depending on what’s available, that’s exactly right. We do have around probably half a dozen regular suppliers, which includes a couple of larger scale certified organic properties who supply things like avocadoes and citrus that are longer growing things. And the rest comes from a couple of small scale growers who actually started farming with a sense of security that Out of the Box would buy all their produce. So they hadn’t actually been farming at any sort of scale when Out of the Box started, and we’ve been able to work together for these farmers to grow things that our customers want.
So we’re often surveying our customers, or just talking to them every week when they come to pick up their boxes, to get a sense of other types of vegetables they might want to see and then encouraging our suppliers to grow those things. So we’ve been going for three years, and certainly now our customers are saying the produce is so much better than it was last year or the year before. But it’s because we’ve got this really close working relationship, and because it’s a subscription model our growers have a really consistent order every week. So they know if we say ‘hey our customers would love sweet potato’, they know that we’re going to buy X kilos of sweet potato off them every week for as long as they have it, so that relationship has been really important to growing.
Simone:
Fantastic. And Karen’s asked did you buy the land or is it leased? And what is the process to do this?
Deborah:
Yeah so the land is accessed through a land share agreement with the land holder. So the two properties that we currently have access to we’re not making any financial contribution to the landholder, in both cases they had a part of their property that they didn’t want to use themselves but they wanted to see being used, and through personal relationships they offered that access to us. So we go through process of developing the agreement over time with the land holder that ensures that we’re really clear on what the expectations are, what the roles and responsibilities are of the Co-op and of the land holder, and those agreements are five year agreements initially.
Simone:
I’ve actually got a question that I might sneak in here; no one else has got one at the moment. It sounds like it just has kept expanding, it just seems like there’s new initiative after new initiative. Have you got a long term plan about the things that you are wanting to do? Or is it as a challenge presents itself that you then go okay I see that challenge as an opportunity, how about we try doing this next.
Deborah:
Probably a bit of both. Our long term plan is to see the landscape here full of small scale farms growing organic produce for our region. We have a population of about 60,000 within probably a 50 kilometre radius of Mildura, we have 14 supermarkets, I think two of those are locally owned, and we have one fruit and vegetable shop that supports local farmers. So there is a huge potential here for a strong local food system, and we’re only just scratching the surface with what we’re doing. And in terms of expansion, so that’s a vision for the landscape, we’d love to have a food hub. But actually since covid–I think this has been consistent certainly in Australia, but I think around the world, that local food has been really sought out by people, so our subscriber numbers for Out of the Box have almost doubled since the start of restrictions for covid.
Simone:
Thanks Deborah. Tamara has asked are the farmers limited to migrants, or can young farmers and those wanting to enter the industry otherwise get involved?
Deborah:
Yeah. So our two principle suppliers are young farmers who are not new migrants, the community demonstration farm at the moment has just new migrant farmers accessing that and so does the other property, the river farm. So our primary purpose, the primary purpose of the Co-op is the relief of suffering and distress of new migrants and refugees through supporting them to reconnect with farming but we’re not exclusive. So if there are young farmers who don’t have their own land and don’t have resources to access their own land who come to us asking for support, we would talk to them about how we could support them.
Simone:
Yeah it definitely seems like a model that could be transferred into–if other people are inspired to do it in their region it could be done with young farmers as well. Karen just had a secondary question around the agreements between the landholders and the farmers. Were the agreements drawn up by lawyers or is it an informal arrangement?
Deborah:
So the agreements were not drawn up by lawyers, but we do have a legal team who do pro bono legal work for us, who have reviewed them and we’ve made a few adjustments to them. We’re a registered charity so there were a few things we had to change for that, and the agreements are between the landholder and the Co-op, not with individual farmers. And then the Co-op manages the relationship and the agreements then with the farmers so that there’s sort of two processes there.
Simone:
Fantastic, thank you. And Greg’s asked as well, have you used community banks to assist in marketing the concept to potential customers?
Deborah:
Community banks, I’m not sure what you mean by that Greg.
Simone:
Did you want to add something else to the chat there Greg to explain that a little bit more?
Amanda:
We can go to the next one.
Simone:
Yeah we might just ask Douglas’s question while Greg’s just completing that one. What do you think was the secret to success in securing initial government funding support?
Deborah:
Having all their right ingredients at the right time. The process of securing support was very lengthy, so we’ve sort of had a few different–when we started Out of the Box we had some seed funding from the Federal Government through the Farming Together program, which helped get Out of the Box up and established in that first year which was great. And then the bigger stuff around developing and establishing a community farm and supporting farmers that was really the hard sell, it didn’t fall neatly into any box and government doesn’t do well with that. So it took us about 15 months from when the Victorian Government said we’ll give you this money to when we actually got the money. And during that time we developed a business case, I think the secret–it’s not a secret but it’s about relationships.
So we had really good relationships with researchers that I mentioned before who were working on that project, with other forms of support to help us write a business case to really identify what the problems were that we were trying to solve. We had friends or supporters in multicultural affairs in the Victorian Government as well as in agriculture; we had a local community that was extremely galvanised around wanting to see this happen. So the Co-op itself with its members, the new migrant farmers who are from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, they just wanted to grow food, so we had all of these ingredients together that kept it going. That 15 months was a really hard slog, and without all of those people saying ‘yeah you’ve got to keep going, you’ve got to help us access land, you’ve got to help us farm’, you know I probably would’ve given up, so it was very much from the grassroots, that was why we succeeded in getting that funding.
Simone:
Yeah beautifully said, we couldn’t agree more, it’s all about relationships here at Farming Together too. I’ll just complete Greg’s question Deborah, so the question was in regards to if you’d used community banks to assist in marketing the concept to potential customers, because in some rural areas there are community banks to support businesses.
Deborah:
So Greg I’m not sure if you mean things like the Bendigo Community Bank, we do have one here who we bank with, we haven’t received any support from them to date, but we have a good relationship with them and we’ve actually just applied for a small grant from them.
Simone:
And we’ll just take this last one from Tabitha, how involved are the members of the Co-op?
Deborah:
So our farmer members are extremely involved, they are at the farm well all the time to grow food. We have a farmer meeting every week on Zoom now with the leaders, the farm leaders who are able to communicate things back to the other farmers. We have quite a few volunteer members, so our Co-op’s a multi stakeholder Co-op, so we have farmer members, consumer members, volunteer members and also landholder members, so I’d say most of them are pretty engaged and involved in what we do.
Simone:
Yeah beautiful. Okay well thank you Deborah, if you want to stay on there might be some other questions that come up through the webinar. And I will now invite Debrah Novak to speak live from the Grafton markets, am I correct Debrah, Grafton today? Yep fantastic, and I’ll just take you off mute there too Debrah, wonderful.
Debrah:
Hi everybody, and welcome live from the Grafton Twilight Farmers Market. We are actually on Bundjalung Country, and we are in the region of the Clarence Valley where we have three First Nation peoples, the Gumbaynggir, Bundjalung and Yaegl. And I make a point of saying this today because we’re celebrating and acknowledging it’s NAIDOC week, and we have a number of First Nation people here as stallholders for the first time, so we’re really excited, so hello. And please forgive me for the lighting and the interruptions because it’s actually pack down time now [Chuckles].
Amanda:
I think it looks fantastic Deb.
Debrah:
Thank you, thank you. And the lights came on, even better [Laughs], oh maybe not so but anyway. Hey look I’ll just start off with just a brief outline of who I am and what I’m doing, and just jump in and ask any questions at any time, I’m more than happy to pass on the knowledge. So yes my name is Debrah Novak, I’m Chair of an organisation called Clarence Valley Food Inc. Our life began as an organisation on the back of a public meeting for National Ag Day in 2017, so Australia’s first day of celebrating our primary producers in 2017. So I had been elected to Council in Clarence Valley Council as an elected Councillor in 2016, and saw that there didn’t really appear to be a support network for farmers in our community, so felt the need to convene this public meeting, and we had over 40 people attend and from there we formed our skills base board.
So our skills base board has a lawyer, an accountant, a media professional, a political strategist, a surveyor, a strategic planner, and a farmer who has a retail and wholesale butcher, and a fifth generation. Everybody, all of us are involved in farming in some way or another whether it’s running a farm, I was probably the weak link I might add, I’ve only just become a farmer again. But I do farm sit so I actually think that does count, and some sizeable properties like 10,000 acres which I guess to some people is pretty small, but I can saddle a horse and ride a horse so hopefully I tick that box [Laughs]. Anyway, look the public meeting was really great, we got some great feedback, and the reason we actually began, we saw this really extraordinary opportunity with the new Grafton jail, Australia’s largest jail being built here in the Clarence Valley.
So we saw that as an opportunity to do some sustainable long term farming practices to support our producers for 20 years, so we met with the organisers who were doing the jail and we noticed that they didn’t have a local procurement policy. So we worked with the Minister, we worked with the federal member, the state member and the local mayor to have included in the jail a 30% local procurement policy which they all agreed to and now support, which is a part of their procurement policy which is wonderful. So from there in my role as I guess entrepreneur, the Yamba Farmers Market came up for tender and nobody was putting in to go for it. So I approached the local Rotary and Lion’s Club to see if they would be interested and no one said that they wanted to take it on. So I thought it’d been going for eight years, and I just saw that it was too much of an opportunity to let it go by the by.
So I applied for the tender, got the tender, and that was two years ago, so when I took over the tender I had 15 stalls and now two years later I’ve got it to 44 stalls, and I’ve put the farming back into the Farmers Market. So it’s very exciting, we have some very very strict rules, I have a number of my stallholders say I’m the strictest Farmers Market on the North Coast, I actually don’t have a problem with that, because my stallholders know that I can back them but it’s very hard to pull the wool over my eyes. For me to build this relationship with our consumers and our stallholders and our farmers it’s all about trust, and trust means you have to have a set of rules that you stand by and that your customer comes to respect. And that is our point of difference from any commercial supermarkets, that we have a locavore footprint, an enforced locavore footprint.
I do farm inspections, most people don’t know I actually have 10 years [experience] as an organic grower, I don’t tell too many people that, I think it’s really important that element of surprise is good. And then just recently I’ve taken over the Grafton Farmers Market, I was invited to take over the Grafton Farmers Market that had only seven stalls and around 250 customers moving through in the morning, and then I was invited to take it over or manage it, coordinate it. And I said only if I could relocate it to the obvious centre of town called Market Square, which was a designated place for farmers in 1848 to sell their produce, and this is the first time [Chuckles], unbelievable but anyway. So from taking it on six weeks ago we’ve gone from seven stalls to 25 stalls, and gone from serving 250 people to serving 1,500 people, so that is really exciting.
So the pandemic hit in March, and I have a background in media, so I’ve done 25 years as a media professional specialising in digital content producing. So it was really wonderful to be able to sit there and work out and go–and obviously I love a challenge, and go oh how do we survive this [Chuckles]. So nobody was doing food boxes in our town of Yamba, I mean it’s an absolute no brainer to do it, because you’ve got 44 stalls there to pick and choose from, so the hardest part was picking the pictures to put on the website. So for those who are there now, you’ve more than likely got your phone there in front of you, you can have a look at the Yamba Farmers Delivery website, that tells you exactly what we’re doing. Also if you want to have a look at the Grafton Twilight Farmers Market and the Yamba Farmers and Producers Market Facebook pages and Insta pages, you’ll get to see I’m very proactive on those sites.
If you’re going to have a look at the Yamba Farmers and Producers Market website, that features all our stallholders and that will give you a really good idea of who we’re working with, the extraordinary stallholders that we are working with, and just the amazing members of our community who just love us to death. And in particular those people who love to just shop with us fortnightly, spent $300, put that on the table and go ‘yep just give us the best of what you’ve got’. So I mean it’s about building that trust and for me and our community–when the pandemic hit, and for those who don’t know Yamba, Yamba was voted the best town in Australia 11 years ago because it didn’t have a MacDonald’s, one of the reasons. And we went into complete lockdown where we’ve gone from having 1,200 to 1,500 people shop with us through that four hour period to only 250 people shopping with us.
But boy didn’t they show their love and their loyalty to us, because they moved from spending a small amount of money to four times as much money with us. And it was extraordinary because they were–and how I can tell how good my stallholders are doing is they broke all their sales records during the pandemic, so that says everything. And for the locals to come out and support us and then support the boxes as well has just been extraordinary. So the boxes, I tried a few different boxes, but I just thought we’ve got so much amazing produce there that just putting it in packages like a farm box, or a meat box, or a gourmet box just made it easier because there’s just too much to choose from [Chuckles], I mean tough problem I know, but it made it difficult for me.
So anyway I thought it’s got to get easier surely, and that’s what we did, so what you see on the Yamba Farmers Delivery website now is what people can purchase any time. And I have to say, I always swore I would never ever do online food orders, because to me that completely defeated the purpose of having a farmers market. Because the farmers market is so extraordinary for the farmers in themselves, for their mental health and wellbeing, for them to connect with their customers, some of the extraordinary tales some of my stallholders have told me to get to our farmers market through the fires last year, driving through flames, I mean extraordinary. And then to be able to share those stories with their customers is just like captive audience, it’s been really extraordinary.
So through the pandemic we had no food security problems within the farmers market, clearly some of the supermarkets did, but we had no supply chain interruptions at all which was fantastic, which goes to show the strength of our community here in the Clarence Valley. We’ve got 60 commodities produced here, we’ve got over 2,500 registered farms, our population of Clarence Valley is 53,000 people over 10,000 square kilometres. Lots of sugar cane, macadamia, beef, huge horticultural area, blueberries, raspberries, everything, and you can do your entire shop at the farmers market because we have milk; we have organic sourdough bread, really a full range of produce. And I have to say I’ve got the most amazing feedback from a young guy last night who shops with us every week, he’s only lived in Yamba for nine months, and he said ‘what I love about your farmers market is the greatest things in the world can all be found at your farmers market’ and I go aww [Chuckles].
And he wasn’t there this Wednesday and I said to him ‘where were you?’ and he’s gone ‘I was down working in Coffs’, I said ‘you know you can do online ordering’ [Chuckles] he’s gone ‘no!’, so another convert there I think. Anyway, any questions? That’s enough of me talking. I hope there’s somebody out there, is that crickets I can hear? [Chuckles]
Simone:
Thank you so much Debrah. Always love hearing you talk about your stories, particularly the extra add-ons from last night. It’s just so inspiring what you’re doing and great to hear that it’s being recognised in different regions in the area as well. We’ve got a question from Em Willis, how did you organise the deliveries?
Debrah:
Okay so I’ll tell you what that was really quite interesting, so it showed what was lacking in our region for a start, it was very difficult to find refrigerated transport. And because we had meat we were offering beef, pork, chicken, we wanted to have that full range. Living in a regional area we couldn’t find a refrigerated truck, and so as luck would have it one of my stallholders had a refrigerated truck sitting in the back of their shop that was their spare truck, and as luck would also have it he had an idle sister [Chuckles], so I hired the sister and the truck. But that was the great thing in doing the food boxes, we didn’t do it to generate income, I mean we do it as not a wholesale price, retail price, we pay the going rate, but what it did was it made enough money to employ somebody and to pay for a refrigerated truck that went all around the Clarence Valley. And when you’re delivering that sort of service you actually have–as a part of the New South Wales Food Authority Standard you have to deliver in a truck like that when you’ve got meat and milk.
Simone:
Thank you. Tanthia’s said she hasn’t heard about the weekday market, how is that?
Debrah:
Sorry, a weekday?
Simone:
Yeah.
Debrah:
Okay so the Yamba Farmers Market is Wednesday mornings between 7:00am and 11:00am, and it’s changed a lot since I’ve taken it over. I did a major risk assessment of the market and started using a lot of social media, made it very user friendly for young mums and elderly people, where now it’s just a really easy shop for those people. And basically that Wednesday morning market you have to be consistent, so I don’t use casual stallholders at all, they have to be permanent or seasonal, and of my 44 stallholders now 43 are permanent and only one seasonal. And a lot of them were seasonal, I just said to them ‘you know if you want to make a good living we need to lift all our games, and we need to have our stalls as we are running a business’, so there were some hard conversations to have there. I wouldn’t insure any of the businesses because I said ‘why should I love your business more than you do’, so you need to get your own insurance and put your grown up business pants on.
I also felt too that I didn’t want the stallholders thinking–because it’s very competitive when you’re competing against the major supermarkets, your presentation is really important too, you can’t look like–look good, look like a farmer, look sexy or whatever, but don’t look like you’ve just got out of bed because that’s a real put off, and it’s about that level of customer service. And my stallholders have really lifted, we’ve put on workshops through the New South Wales small business commissioner funded workshops for merchandising, so making their stalls look amazing. In the rules you have to have registered kitchens, you have to have proper labelling, so it’s not a backyard job, it actually is a small start-up, and if you want to grow your business you can. We’ve even sold stalls now which is fantastic, so we’re in that market of selling businesses which is wonderful.
And here in the Grafton twilight like I said it went from 7:00am till 11:00am in the morning, but we moved it to a twilight market because there wasn’t the support there and I wanted to grow the market. So with no marketing we’ve gone from 250 shoppers to between 1,200 and 1,500 shoppers now which it’s word of mouth. And like I said I have that media background, word of mouth is 70% of your sales, and like tonight we actually had the Clarence Valley Chamber Orchestra play, it was so beautiful, and they just did a pop-up and did a big jam session here. And it was just so beautiful and just engaging as the sun was going down and so many young families sitting around just listening, it was really beautiful.
Simone:
It sounds amazing, and it’s been lovely to watch it get darker behind you as well.
Debrah:
Yeah, oh a bit scary [Chuckles].
Simone:
I just wanted to check if anyone else had any questions? I actually had one for both you and Deb, Deborah I don’t know if you’re still there? I was really interested, I see the projects that both of you are doing as being almost central to your communities now, and I’m really curious, I know it’s not something that can be really measured, but has there been any way of seeing the flow on effect outwards to your communities more generally?
Debrah:
Definitely. So because I’m a Councillor and I have that media background everything is evidence based for me, so I don’t want to hear fluff, I don’t want to hear fairy-tales, I want to see hard core evidence, because people ask me that, how did you come up with that. So I employ people to do the counters coming into the market to count people, so I can tell you exactly how many people have signed in, QR coded in, and then I’ve had counters on. And then we’ve done surveys already, so I do surveys in my market in Yamba, so for instance in Yamba they used to always have music and then I stopped having music, because it was just too head banging for me at that hour in the morning, it just was too loud, and nobody missed the music.
And when I did a survey I thought oh I better do a survey here, I asked them are you here for the food, are you here for social, are you here for the music, and only three people said they were there for the music, so my research told me no one cared about the music, but it’s different for the twilight because it’s a different atmosphere altogether. And I asked the people, I always ask them, I walk around, ask the stallholders and I ask the customers how is it, what is it you like, so I get that feedback and then we do the written down surveys as well. And everybody’s talking about it I’m told by the hairdresser in the hairdressing salon, that’s the proper test [Laughs].
Deborah:
I’ll talk to that, but Deb I just want to say what you’re doing sounds so amazing, and I am a little bit jealous because it does sound like you’ve got a much stronger base of support for a local food system as well as more diversity in your produce.
Debrah:
I think it’s actually finding it, because when I tell people what we grow here they’re shocked. And I think because I move in that circle now I can do the connection, I actually go finding out who’s doing what and where.
Deborah:
Yeah, we don’t have any dairy here, we’ve actually just started stocking from our nearest dairy which is two and a half hours away, that’s about as local as we can get. But also our nearest abattoir for large animals is in Adelaide, which is about five hours away so we have no local meat, we have no local poultry.
Debrah:
Wow, it sounds like a lot of opportunity [Chuckles].
Deborah:
A lot of opportunity, yeah. In terms of flow on effects into our community, I think we’re still at the stage of trying to–I guess we’re a bit inward looking still in trying to establish ourselves, so for us we see it in our growing membership. So we have allocated all of the land on both of the properties that we access to about 20 farmers, and almost every week we’re getting another farmer come to us saying can I have a plot, so we’re actually just scoping out another piece of land at the moment. So in that sense we’re seeing a lot of positive impact in the new migrant community in being able to do something that they’re good at and that is meaningful for them and helps them contribute back. We got farmers to fill out application forms last season and answer questions like why do they want to grow food, what will they do with that food once they’ve grown it.
And almost everyone said it gave them a way of contributing back to the community, they wanted to feel like they belonged to this place and this community. And then I guess the other thing which I mentioned was the growing numbers of subscribers for the box, but actually our Farmers Market closed because of covid, and I think we gained some subscribers because of that, and they’ve just reopened so it’ll be interesting to see if some of our subscribers drop off. I also just wanted to Deb ask you a bit more if there aren’t any other questions. You mentioned social procurement, and I do note that one of our new Councillors has joined us on this webinar tonight; we’ve got a fantastic new Council that just got elected. So it’s something that’s on our agenda as how do you get bigger organisations and local government and local authorities to support local social enterprises through social procurement, are you able to talk a bit more to that?
Debrah:
Yep. So I guess it’s been quite interesting for me from a local government perspective to read over documents. So what really actually got me going was I read a document that was a desktop study of the Ag in the Clarence Valley, and I read through it and we have this year put 48,000 head of cattle through the sale yards, and whoever put that desktop study together actually didn’t include cattle and I thought oh my god [Chuckles]. That’s why we started Clarence Valley Food Inc, so that we could advocate, network, lobby and educate on behalf of our farming community, because there was actually nobody doing that. And even in the four years that I’ve been a Councillor not once have I heard from the National Farming Together crew, nobody, if you don’t have a united voice for your farming community in your local government area you are a fractured voice I can tell you. So what we’ve done when we started pulling together our data, was the first thing we noticed you can’t access real-time data it’s third party privacy laws, you just can’t access, so I needed to go finding that data myself. Your region will have a–sorry where do you live?
Deborah:
Mildura.
Debrah:
Is that in Victoria?
Deborah:
It’s in Victoria.
Debrah:
Okay. So in New South Wales they have regional strategies that have been developed by the New South Wales Government, so I’m only assuming Victoria will have that as well. And all these plans exist that you can–so for instance recently we applied for a grant, and we were able to identify 20 plans that linked in to what we wanted to do. That’s how you can convince your local government to be a part of the story, because at the end of the day State and Federal Government is actually looking to work in a more holistic fashion, where you’ve got your three tiers of government working together, and local government is the closest voice to the people. And through your community strategic plans when you elect a new Council, this is when you need to get your farming community out in force to drive the conversation through the economic policy, because if you don’t you fall off the cliff.
And whoever’s in your local government area on your Council they just drive their own agenda, and I’m not talking about Councillors, I’m talking about staff. So that’s why when your local Council says ‘hey we’ve just been elected, we want to start doing our community strategies’, they are there for four years and that’s what they refer to all the time. So if you can coordinate all the farmers in your community to make sure they turn up to those meetings, and it’s only once every four years, that’s where you can get farming put on to the agenda and just agriculture in general. And then you can look at the policies and frameworks that exist within your local Council as well that will support what you want to do, so that the competing interests like mining or urban development, that Ag’s got a seat at the table and has a really strong voice, whereas at the moment even in our region we’re just working on that now in our strategic plans where Ag actually really has a strong voice. How’s that sound?
Deborah:
It sounds like a lot of work Deb [Chuckles].
Debrah:
No it’s not actually. You only need to connect with one Councillor, that’s what you elect the Councillor for [Chuckles].
Deborah:
We don’t represent all of the farmers here, most farmers grow food here for export, and that’s not the food system that we’re part of.
Debrah:
Yeah. Well in our area here in the Clarence Valley, like I said we’re the biggest employer and have the largest–one in four businesses is a primary producer. And we’re forever reminding people of that because at the end of the day I actually think farmers are sometimes their own worst enemy, because they don’t talk themselves up. They’re the salt of the earth, they’re just too busy farming to get out there and get in amongst the crap, because they’re real people, and politicking is just sometimes I’m sorry crap, and I see it all the time. So there’s got to be people like me out there who just loves and idolises our farms, and I’m more than happy to sing their praises and through research, through what they do and talk them up, because if they don’t do that, if I don’t do that, you’ve got all these other competing interests that come over the top of them all the time.
Simone:
Thanks Debrah. We’ve got one more question for Deborah Bogenhuber here, how do you go about gaining community trust being online?
Deborah:
I presume that’s talking about the box scheme. So the box scheme is all the ordering and the payments are done online, but the boxes are picked up in person. So we don’t do deliveries, so pick up is done in a four hour timeslot on a Thursday afternoon, and that’s when we see all the customers. And it’s great, we’ve had customers become friends because they keep bumping into each other at customer pick up, and most of the pickup is done by younger mums, so often with bubs, and we’ve seen whole mothers groups and things start from that regular connection on a Thursday afternoon.
Amanda:
I think that’s a pretty lovely place to finish on. Thanks so much Deb and Deb, and thanks to our audience, I hope you enjoyed being inspired by as much as I have by two obviously very passionate and committed members of their community, who are driving to bring the community together through agriculture. Some amazing stories, thank you so much, I’ve loved the dialogue between you two as well, I think we could leave you two talking for a while tonight. So for anyone who is interested we’re going to make a copy of this recording available on our website in the next couple of days, and also if anybody is interested in the webinar coming up next week it is titled Galvanising Hidden Strengths. And we have champions from three different farmer driven networks to share their experiences behind building and strengthening farmer capacity, and the things that have surprised them the most with their experiences.
So we have Diana Fear who’s the CEO of Central West Farming Systems, they’ve been doing some great work with women in agriculture, Ken Drummond who’s a member of Stirlings to Coast and also the newly formed WA Producers Co-operative, and Niki Curtis who’s the acting CEO for the Growers Group Alliance in Western Australia. So if you’ve enjoyed tonight make sure you tune in next week as well. Thanks again to our amazing guests, like Simone, every time we’ve had lots of combinations, now Deb and Deb, but every time we hear you speak we’re just reinspired and we learn something new. So thanks very much to you both for your time, and Debrah Novak I think you need to get home it’s looking pretty dark out there now.
Debrah:
No they’re still packing down; I’m waiting for my coffee [Laughs].
Amanda:
Alright, alright.
Debrah:
Thank you everybody, and happy to chat anytime and make contact, more than happy.
Amanda:
Thanks very much Debrah.
Simone:
Thank you.
Debrah:
My pleasure, bye.
Deborah:
Thanks everyone.
Simone:
Thanks Deborah.
Amanda:
Goodnight everyone.
Simone:
Goodnight.
[End of Webinar]
