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Local Food Revolution With Rob Pekin

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Seventeen years ago, Rob Pekin decided to radicalise the way we shop for and distribute fresh food. His concept for a new food system was based on community, connection and localisation – and the result is an Australian-wide food systems revolution called Food Connect

Born and bred on a dairy farm in western Victoria, Rob began to imagine a different kind of food system after he lost the family farm and fell into a depression.

“The food connect model started out as a multi-farmer community-supported agriculture project. It was really my attempt as a pretty busted-up dairy farmer, disgruntled with the world and how it worked, saying – well, if I’m going to do something on a solutions side of things, I have to address probably the biggest source of misuse of power, which is in the distribution side of things.”

In the latest episode of the Sense-making in a Changing World podcast, I chat with Rob about his journey and the Food Connect vision.  Hear more in this earlier interview with Rob’s partner and Food Connect co-creator, Emma Kate Rose. (interviewed on Episode 14)

What they’ve created is an is an inspiring  highly networked localised ethical and regenerative  food system –  one that nourishes growers, consumers, producers, the earth and foregrounds indigenous voices.

Click here to listen to the episode or watch it on the Sense-Making in a Changing World youtube.

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Full transcript below.

Morag:

Well, thanks Rob for joining me on the show today. I’m calling in to speak with you here from the banks of the Moocooboola River up here in Gubbi Gubbi country and it’s just an absolute delight to have you on the show. It’s been a long time since we’ve been talking about having these conversations. So, welcome!

Rob:

We have been very busy. Now thanks, Morag. Yeah, and we were in Gubbi Gubbi country last week actually doing a healthy soil workshop in upper Mumbai. So we just finished a series of four workshops with groups of farmers [inaudible] and the last workshop was up in Gubbi Gubbi but now we’re talking to you from Turrbal and Jagera country down here on on the Meanjin river, so called or so called Brisbane River in Brisbane. Now it’s wonderful and we’ve been so busy, but we have been having one of those monthly catch ups with a couple of people, which has been really sort of just beautiful little sessions. 

Morag:

Yeah, I think it’s a really great way to keep in touch with people who are out in the world doing really incredible thinking and action and collaborative work. But to bring all of those people together, well not all of them because you can never get all of them together, but to have time and when we make time to stop and have conversations and learn from one another. It’s been really, really, really helpful for me too. There’s a lot of reasons why I wanted to have a chat with you and invite you to the show, Rob. There’s a lot of things that you’ve catalyzed like we’re just as you were chatting before, you’re saying you’ve been doing Food Connect for 17 years, is that right?

Rob:

Yeah, it’s gone in a blink. 

Morag:

I know, I remember when you were first talking about before you even started and we’re just starting up a few prototypes of it. Gosh, I don’t even know where that time is gone either. But at the moment, right now, as we’re speaking, we have around us news stories all the time talking about cracks in the global food system, we’re hearing spiking food, we’re hearing stories of food shortages, global food shortages happening, and hunger, and I’m busy chatting with people in refugee settlements across East Africa saying their world food programs cut their access to food, by more than half the price of their foods tripled, and so this whole concept of relocalization of our food system is kind of become an absolute paramount conversation to have, and this is something that you’ve been working with for a long time now. And this idea too that I wonder if there have been a number of different crises that Food Connect has gone through, maybe you could tell. Some of the listeners may not have heard of Food Connect before, those who are more Meanjin based, Australian based, but if you could just describe it a bit and then say how resilient has been like in the floods or the droughts? And what is it about the food system that has really worked do you think, what about it that has made it successful and robust?

Rob:

Yeah, sure. I mean, you’re right. A lot of things are happening and it’s both a troubling time because of all the cracks in us that have really opened up and we’re seeing these escalations in whatever it is. Whether it’s the price of fertilizer, or the price of food, or labor, all of these things. So it’s a really critical time and Food Connect started out as a multi farmer community supported agriculture project. It was really my attempt as a pretty busted up dairy farmer disgruntled with the world and how it worked and then saying, “Well, if I’m going to do something at a solution side of things, I have to address probably the biggest source of misuse of power” Which is in the distribution side of things and getting there and mucking with these buddy, won’t mention their names, but these big monopolies here in Australia that are seen as pretty ubiquitous in time but actually, at the heart of it, they’re pretty young unconscionable organization. So it got me thinking, “Well I’ve got nothing to lose, let’s have a crack in that space”. But it comes out of a philosophy of Schumacher, it was small and beautiful and in Rudolf Steiner’s principles around associated economies, those two, or that was sort of like the main philosophical sort of underpinnings and there was obviously permaculture principles sprinkled through it in the early days of permaculture course back in the 90’s with David Holmgren and a whole bunch of other sort of thinking I did between the time I lost the dairy farm and started Food Connect, which was a gap about seven years where I was fairly destitute and just living in a tent and wandering the bush and trying to figure things out for myself because I was pretty traumatized by the experience of losing my farm. 

So we’re a distributor, mainly, and then over the years as we’ve evolved we’ve now got a community owned shed. You can see the Food Connect shed banner. So 520 people own this building that I’m in and there’s 41 food based entrepreneurs in here, or not all food based, there’s a couple of businesses upstairs that are social enterprises working with prisoners or working with art and food and really sort of interesting businesses in the space and that’s to provide this sort of infrastructure that’s missing for food based entrepreneurs who were pushing against the major system that extra externalizes all those costs. We wanted to provide a roof over their heads where they felt reasonably secure and together we could lower the overheads on their businesses. And then the second function of the shed was to provide a space where people could generally bump into each other and collaborate on bigger projects, and we’ll get into this later on around this sort of using the metaphor of nutrient cycling in the roots of a plant that whole symbiotic thing system when you regenerate a plant and the roots go down deeper and so the project as its initial phases was going. They’re leaving these capital cities, they only work five days a week, if at all this is my judgment coming from a dairy farm that my father fed to me in that, and that they were up to a bigger game. They were up for something that really, at a systems level, looked at food as though it wasn’t in a not for taking for granted role and saw it as a human right, rather than just a commodity. And lo and behold, it was a whole bunch of Britain mums who answered the call and there were about eight of them, and we hadn’t even launched Food Connect and I was really behind the scenes, helping a couple of farmers get their head around this idea of community supported agriculture because it is quite a philosophical and economically different model, because it’s based around true cost rather than the market and it’s around divorcing yourself from fossil fuels or divorcing yourself from all of those inputs and having a geographical approach to where your food comes from. So people have a direct connection with whatever it is and it’s utilizing all the skills that are in the city, whether it’s marketing skills or accounting skills. There’s a whole bunch of skills in the city that farmers don’t necessarily have and can we provide a business model where those skills can be utilized and then the farmer can just get on and grow the greatest produce and not have to worry about that inside a business model where trust was built into it. And so you might know in the early days I wrote out sort of a couple of conditions under which the business would run and one of them was that the business was to be community owned, it was never to be owned by me, as I was building it. As I said, with those Prisma moms and a whole bunch of farmers, there were a whole bunch of other people who were invested. It might have been my idea, but that doesn’t give me the right at some point in time to sell out or to benefit financially over and above everyone else. 

The second thing I put into it was a mission lock. So whereby it was the mission of the company was preserved and it was written into the articles in the constitution. So I sort of hybridized not for profit constitution, and a for profit constitution, because in associative economies or in Crystal Horton’s book [ inaudible] corporation, the Pty Ltd is the simplest structure to regenerate companies, how a company should behave. So you sort of know how companies that basically have rights like a human. And so he said, “Well, let’s not fight against that. Let’s use that as a way of bringing responsibility and accountability to that entity that is now human, like we would a parent over a teenager.”  But of course capitalism has let the teenager loose and now it’s out there ransacking the world and smoking, lots of drugs, and just going it’s just a bad teenager, a really, really bad teenager. But we’ve seen in the latest election here in Australia, with the independence coming to [inaudible] Emma and I sat down and watched four of the maiden speeches last night. These are really intelligent women and they are going to put a lid on that rampant neoliberal idea of how the world works, I mean it just isn’t working. 

Then the third thing, I’m trying to think of the third thing that I put into because it’s a long time ago, when I set the sort of the two to one ratio. So I belong to a big coop, it wasn’t really a coop, it was a big neutralized corporatized entity where the CEO was getting more than a million bucks and all us farmers were getting 17 or 18 cents a liter and the farmers were shooting themselves because of the effects both that corporatization and the deregulation of the dairy industry was having on us which allowed the supermarket’s to just do what they wanted to do. So that two to one wage ratio was so no one can any more than double the lowest paid worker in the business, and we’ve kept that and when you get people who want to get employed by Food Connected they say, I can offer whatever salary, 100 whatever it is 150 grand and I say, the highest we pay here is $36 an hour and the lowest is about $23 an hour and you’ve got to feed into that. But the benefits are you’re working with a company that’s aligned with your values and those sorts of benefits, whilst not financial, are huge in terms of aligning oneself around a better life and stimulating and activating all of the faculties that are inside all of us. We’re born with all of these innate ways of being, but capitalism and society at large sort of tells us no, you’re not.

Morag:

You have a really interesting point. Because they’re not the things necessarily that, well you can’t find him, they’re kind of sort of just there. But by describing them and mentioning them as part of that whole. If you’re working for a much higher thing but you felt dreadful about it, you would then have to go and find other things to kind of bring yourself back in and so there’s like the expense of that and so it’s different, it takes out a hole. Anyway, I think that’s a really interesting point. Another thing that you mentioned before, I don’t know if you just want to talk a bit more about that in terms of actually raising the money for the shed, for example it’s again different like you needed investment, but you did investment completely differently. And I think that was, for me, a groundbreaking idea. I don’t know where that idea came from. Have you seen it somewhere else? Or is this a new thing?

Rob:

I suppose I had seen it. Yeah. So I’d say that in other countries – Australia didn’t have the legislation to allow equity from retail from everyday mums and dads to buy into a building like this – there’s limits, you know. You can only have 20 and you can only raise 2 million out of that 20. Not 2 million, I think only 20 people can invest. So when we finally convinced the landlord to sell us the building, we had no money, obviously, being a social enterprise, and we’d already given him a million dollars in rent and we thought, well if we can adopt this idea of participation, economic participation, because we’re not going to change the food system until we change the economic system. And so, I mean, Emma was the main force behind we need to have this community owned . So 2018 the legislation passed, equity crowdfunding was now a legal tool, no one had done it yet. Fortunately in Queensland the Office of Innovation brought in a specialist from New Zealand and a Gupta who ran a company called PledgeMe and put her in what was called the hot seat for six months free of charge and we found a girl from New Zealand on the flight over and met her here and Emma did the course and no one had done it yet. What are we actually doing? How does it work and ASIC? We’re all over ASIC, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, who are the legislative responsibility, they were all over us like a rash in terms of the document and totally over the top. But they wanted to make sure that someone didn’t misuse this idea of basically attracting investment from everyday mums and dads into a large building like this. So yeah, it was an exciting campaign, we only had 90 days to do it and we did it in the nick of time

Morag:

So how much did you raise and how many shareholders did you have?

Rob:

So 520 people own the building, we’ve now raised nearly 2.7 million. So initially, we raised 2.116 million, which was enough for us to buy the building, it was 1.8 million. So a little bit left over to get some of the renovations fit for purpose for all these new tenants that had come on board during the campaign. But straightaway, after we raised the money, we had one investor come and say, “Do you want some more?” And we said, “Yeah, 150”. So we built some cold rooms, and freezers and packing rooms and a whole bunch of other things and that was just the interest only and a debt equity swap in 10 years time. So you know, all these sort of new financial ways they can do it and then another group of retail investors, 18 of them came and saw us and said, “What about we put a whole bunch of batteries and solar on your roof?” We’ve already had a bit. So they raised 80,000, in sort of a special purpose vehicle, around the same principle of separating the asset from the investment and that’ll be gifted to Food Connect in 10 years and we set up a power purchase agreement for all these people are really knowledgeable in these instruments and also how to construct an arrangement where we’re just paying out the debt of the solar and the batteries through our power bill, which is still 15 cents a kilowatt. Hasn’t changed, even though Australia has gone through this energy crisis. So it’s made us really robust and obviously, having so many tenants and this model, this idea of having, not just tenants who are food base, but tenants who can sort of provide that diversity and ecosystem sort of culture that allows.

Morag:

you know, is like is the waste from one going into the like, how ecology enterprises..

Rob:

Because when I started Food Connect, even though I was an organic dairy farmer and then a biodynamic market gardener, I wanted to just have good farmers, I didn’t want to have a certification scheme that pitted farmer against farmer. So that flew against going to one of the trials we did have was convincing people that I just wanted good farmers and that comes out of a farmer autonomously being given the opportunity to decide for themselves how they’re going to run the farm and going beyond organics. As a result, a lot of our farmers drop certification and become beyond organic and then the same here in the shed, we didn’t put any rules. We’ve had some hedonistic hot chili sauce makers who have come in here, totally just driving an Audi, just all of the things that a bloke would do is introducing the Chilean meat and we’ve watched this person evolve into this beautiful human being who’s now become the protector of all the women in the shed -I should add to the 520 investors are 84% women, and something like 86% of the money is from women- So it’s not like, yeah, it’s a really different model and as a result of the 41 tenants, I think 32 women, so it’s become this really safe space that that quite a few of us have curated where they feel like they’re supported at a values level.

Like I’ll tell you an interesting story, we just had our oldest entrepreneurs just started in the shed about three weeks ago. Cassie and Bri they’re sisters, they’re in their 70’s and they’ve started a healthy dog food treat business called Bow Wow treats, I think it is. And they are absolutely an inspiration, like they spent two years researching this product, trialing all the different flavors, using just plain old produce and I bumped into them two weeks ago and when I gave them the initial tour, and they’ve never heard about thickening, literally doing the tour and I’m telling it’s owned by all the stuff that I just told you. And they got so excited, they felt like we’re at home. Like, this is the place we’re going to start this business from and more to this business from and for me this is the symbiotic relationship and for Jeff and for all the other people having these 270 year olds who have had a hell of a life in the shed, launching a business up against your rat bag, LD treats, and all the other crap treats out there is part of the magic that inspires if it unfolds more faculties in you, because then you start to think about we could actually do more for the Australia system, we’ve got women, not a lot of superannuation living in their cars, it’s real. The housing crisis, the cost of living crisis and what else can we do around women. Because by the time I’m 70, I’ve got so much left to give. I don’t want to be sort of left behind by society, so it’s a space that does that to everyone and obviously it’s placed by this sort of culture around all the renovations. We’re doing the shed, so we have to knock the building down and build a new one, we’ve used everything in the building. So it’s a demonstration of how to regenerate an old building, repurpose an old building into something that’s really funky. We’re seeing that a lot in the world today. We only use trades people and businesses from within one kilometer of this building which has engaged all the other businesses who have always seen us as a bit of a hippie, a bit of a lefty hippie organization, and then they suddenly get a call and say, “Hey, listen, can you come and build this toilet?” Or, “Can you come in and help us renovate this wall?” or whatever it is and they come in and then they suddenly get to know us at a relationship level and go, “These guys are funny” it’s just common sense. 

Morag:

But did you also have, in the past, street parties and things to open up in the middle of any industrial era and that kind of thing probably just never happened before. So you’ve kind of vibrant culture into that space.

Rob:

We have lots of those parties and now our events coordinator, she has fortnightly lunches and invites all the other businesses to come around. I got that from my mom. My mom used to always say, “It doesn’t matter who’s driving up the driveway. Offer him a cup of tea, give him a chance to come in”. I mean, they might be thinking of robbing the place, but also have a cup of tea with you, they’ll be thinking, “Well, I’m not gonna rob this place. They’re really nice, they gave me a cup of tea.”So that’s sort of like the powerful stuff. When you think about society and getting back to this sort of the city, the thing I observed was, I had no idea, but the city is a really lonely place where no one is accountable to anything, really. I mean, certainly they are. And so the business model was using community drop off spots, rather than home delivery. I mean, home delivery is just like giving soluble fertilizer to a plant. It’s just saying, you stay there, we’ll look after you, and they never participate in the broader game of how do we address biodiversity loss, climate change?

Morag:

I think actually, this is a really central part of your model. Its the way that you have invited people and created spaces where people can participate. Like, I think that’s the thing, often it’s hard to participate in the food system, we’re in the current model, it’s like, you can only be a consumer or a producer, but there’s not much in between. So you’ve kind of opened this space and invited people to come and play in that space and to learn and to find ways to be an actor in that. And I read, I remember something that you said a long time ago, talking about how we all need to be farmers of the future. Like we can’t just expect the 1% to do it, that we all need to be participants.

Rob:

Yes, that’s right. That was back when I was doing the research on what percentage of the population would need to be farmers in the world. We’re now starting to confront each other and it was 15% at the time. But I sort of broaden that term out and I’m not a terribly intelligent person. But the one thing I did encapsulate was that word participation, that was my one principle that if I can get people to participate with their skills in something they don’t necessarily have anything to do with, you know what magic could come from that and so a bit like allowing people to self organize around something they don’t really know exists and allowing those relationships in symbiosis. This has to happen, where I would just step back and I would coach them a bit. I remember in our first farm that was a writer, she didn’t know she was going to be our first farm that was a writer, but I was looking for a letter of the farm letter and I’d always look at the bottom of the email and go, “Oh, English teacher” Ring Ring. “Hi, I see you’ve just bought a box of Food Connect. Hey, listen, I’m just wondering whether you would like to write our farm letter” and she went, “Oh, my God! I’ve never spoken to a farmer in my life.” I said, “I know, right? You know, I’ll give you a couple of dot points and you just get on the phone with him” and she said, “Okay, I’ll do that.” and she was really scared about this idea of ringing farmers and having conversation with them. But then I think it took them about 10 years and then they bought a farm. Like, they eventually moved out to Kingaroy and became farmers. So you never know where things are going to go. So you sort of have to provide a bit of a boot up the bomb, I call it back in the day, everyone needs a bit of a boot up the bomb never hurts to sort of get into something here.

Morag:

That concept of being afraid to speak to a farmer, like, isn’t that if it just speaks to the split that we have?

Rob:

Yep, that’s right. I mean, you reminded me of the original. The other reason why I came into the city was that I knew the city because the country divide was a real thing. I exhibited all these prejudices and all these judgments about city folk and so it was a challenge to me as much as to the city. What can I step over, in terms of my judgment, to build a better world for everyone and get over some of my prejudices? And people see me now, we’re all friends now and I’m nothing like the person I was back in the aircraft engineering days or the farming days.

Morag:

So do you think then in terms of building the relationships that you have, I mean, that the strength of the network of farmers and producers that you had, because you’re speaking from that position of like, I’m just thinking about how does this ripple out? How does the next one happen? You’re speaking to people from that deep experience and the pain and knowing that of being a farmer and having seeing a different possibility and to be able to speak, I guess, a language that resonates? How important is that for the success of what you’re doing?

Rob:

Yeah, I think it’s been incredibly successful that idea that I’ve been, I never knew at all, so I never pretended to. So that gives people an opportunity to step into a space and that certainly has caused pain because we’ve had people who’ve come in and said, “I know more than you and I’ll show you. I’ll tell you what to do” and we’ve listened to that advice and a lot of the time it hasn’t worked. So you gotta really be aware of where someone exploits you, where you’re giving them space to unfold their highest and best use. But for the most part that I don’t know what you call it, it’s sort of like, you’re just giving. It’s not being too tight around, this is what we want to do and because we didn’t know what we were doing. This multi pharmacy is a project where a whole bunch of moms come and they said, “Well, how are we going to do this?” and it wasn’t until the third week that the mums came to me and said, “We can’t go to their farm anymore. It’s a whole day, we’ve got kids, we’re getting laid. But if you get all those boxes to our house, we’ll provide that as a pickup spot for all the people who live around us.” So that was the CD cousin model that was born then and then we named and then a couple of weeks later again, we’re gonna give you a name and then in the middle of the night I came up with this idea, Country Cousin you know, and so that was born. 

It’s always been an iterative process of always having conversations and being very open and transparent when things go pear shaped. Because, together, we’ve got lots of solutions. We can get together but if you sort of hold it to yourself and you control it to yourself, there’s no place where people can come in and participate and be a part of it and importantly grow the network. Because it isn’t about Food Connect, this was a project about something much, much bigger. Food Connect just became the business or the social enterprise. So throughout Southeast Queensland in lots of places, there’s lots of sort of networks because it comes out of us all having relationships and all doing our bit. But seeing where we’re overlapping, “Oh, maybe we could do that together.” You know, we just did that. These four Healthy Soils workshops and that was with healthy land and water, soil science, Australia and Food Connect Foundation was the one that got the money, and a whole bunch of volunteers came on board, and soil, food, David Hardwick’s organization down in Aubrey. I must give a plug for David, he would be an – I’ve done a few healthy soil courses – he would be the most engaging and inspiring and informed presenter or workshop convener to a group of farmers I’ve ever seen. Real humble guy. He just knows how to engage and poke and prod farmers into thinking you get some water roleplay being a fun guy, or being a plant or being a bacteria, or being a protozoa. So I had farmers come up to me during the course saying, “Wow! I’ve done a couple of courses on this but I’ve learned 10 times more in the first half of the day than I have anywhere else.” So that got me excited because a lot of science is now demonstrating what we’ve always known about under the soil. That amazing, diverse biological system, that cycles, nutrients, and now we’re seeing the new root tip, where a cell membrane or cell comes in, and about two inches long, it gets stripped of his membrane, and then within two minutes, it’s gone up to a corn plant or amazing plant come back out and at that point there, its membrane gets put back on and it goes back out with a signal from the plant that says I need more of this or I need more of that. Actually, the whole world of soil science is now saying that that symbiotic relationship and all of those organisms are in symbiosis with the plant and then obviously the transpiration, and then even the bacteria now that’s going up to the cloud, which is this small water cycles, that’s preventing the reentry of heat from greenhouse gasses. 

This is really, really formidable stuff and it gets farmers excited, because I haven’t said to farmers that you’ve got to drop the whinging bitten, you got to drop the hole, it’s too hard and it is absolutely too hard. But when the crisis hits, they’re going to be in the best position. Because they faced all of those things, they had to deal with nature, they’ve had to deal with not good prices, they’re in the end. I’ve had to engage all their faculties at a systems level, even though they might not know it and now we’re at that space, where now it’s their time to rock and roll and their time. I think our mother, we had a conversation where the world has gone on this carbon tunnel vision for about two or three years thinking that energy, if we move all our energy to renewables, everything will be solved. But of course, it’s just one little part of the picture and farmers are in this place now, where they’ve been seen as all the whole soil in the whole food and land use sector has been completely forgotten about yet it’s the most scalable solution to pretty much all of those grand challenges that we’re looking at now. So it’s a pretty exciting time to be in the space and to be getting back to your question before about how do we do more of this, where people come out of a sense of agency in their region, to put together models that are specific to their region using the assets, identifying what the weaknesses are, what the strengths are, and out of their own volition working with other communities collaborating to do similar things and that’s we’re sort of seeing. We’ve been starting to tease apart the success of Food Connect, which it hasn’t been all that evidence and then I’m working with a sustainable table and Tanya, Emma, Kate, my partner, on how do we produce little small booklets that might elevate that sort of those ideas, these principles, these little tweaks, where people go, “Oh,you don’t have to be some mythical higher being.”

Morag:

Fantastic. You know, like, it’s because you’ve done all this thinking around it and experimenting in there, all the iterations you’ve talked about, I think there’s some real essence that you can draw out of that to be able to say, “Look, here’s some starting points.” So not like the recipe sheet to copy, [inaudible] but here’s the principles, the underlying principles or here’s like the links to these kinds of resources or why not think about these things? Well, here’s the question. Do we explore to find how it’s going to evolve in your area. So I think that would be amazing. I wanted to ask you too, Rob, about something that you do quite differently than most other enterprises organizations overseeing is how you foreground indigenous leadership and wisdom? And I wonder if you could just speak to that a bit, please.

Rob:

Well, that’s been another fumbling sort of adventure and journey. I was curious, because when I lost the farm and then there’s this wonderful part of my life where I was lamenting the farm in a big, big, big way and my uncle told me to go to Tasmania and just get away from all of the memory and everything that was going on back on the mainland where the farm was and all that self flagellation. I was setting up camp on the northern part of Devonport, over the best rate to my farm and I was going to say goodbye to my farm. Suddenly, this indigenous fella came out of the gloomy Twilight and said, “You can’t camp here. This is a reserve”. I mean, “Oh God, no, sorry.” Anyway, to cut a long story short, he sat down and we had this amazing conversation and he sort of picked up that maybe I was in a bit of trouble mentally and he listened to me and he gave me all sorts of tricks and things to ask the spirits when I walked through Tasmania and at the end of it he said, “Listen, you can go down there. It’s near the water, it’s off the reserve. And just off the reserve and you’ll be looked after, you’ll be fine. It’s fine. Pick your team there.” And then the next morning, I woke up with this amazing sort of epiphany or insight that, “Oh, my God. He’s an Aboriginal person, where we’ve sort of pillaged 2000 generations of deep love for the land and here I am having a big suck over my four generations and losing the farm.” And I was always really well connected to my farm. It had two volcanoes, one that was only 40,000 years old and the other one was 1.2. and they overlap and I was right into the whole farm. But that other conversation, then that epiphany, the next morning, I realized, “Well, why did he give me his time? What possesses him to be patient? Listen to me dribble about my woes and not once did he say, “Piss off” He never did and I thought, Oh, no. So that got me really curious and over the years, I swore that when Food Connect, as for connecting, we’ve been offered bush food from various farmers and various sort of groups and I said, “I’ll never do any 90 foods through food and we’ll never sell them until I get permission.” So I went on this quest of going to every indigenous group, every indigenous conversation, giving my pitch on how do I get permission and be ignored for probably 10 years or so and then suddenly, a group of elders turned up with a shed here and I poked him and I elbowed him and I said, “Oh, here’s my chance. I’m gonna do it again.” And they just laughed at me, they said, “Your [inaudible] and you’re never gonna pay the rent. I was promising all these big things. I was really selling myself.

Anyway, they said, you can sell our food. We know about you, we’ve known about you for years and they bought into the shade. So this group of indigenous people, so this is the Watson family, who taught Mary Graham and I didn’t know at the time anyway. We got invited around for a cup of tea with our Mary and Uncle Charlie, her brother, Taylor and all these people and we had probably four hours of tea listening to them and they gave us some profound knowledge that really was not sort of, it’s not easily accessible, and that was where I started to go, “Aha! Now I know that their knowledge is going to get us through this” and we need to because as a white person you sort of you bring him to the table, but it’s sort of tokenistic and then you put them at the center of the table because you want to make a big part of the conversation, but that’s also tokenistic. But we need to put them at the head of the table. Tell us what to do with that philosophy and that amazing wisdom, and knowledge ,and experience that they have. It’s extraordinary. So now we’re at that point, and that has been profound in so many ways, and overlaps with some of the Schumacher stuff and some of the sort of distribution is theory from Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton and some of the stuff from Rudolf Steiner. But the big difference is that indigenous law comes out of the land. They’re given the laws through the land. That’s a big concept for us and it’s taken me years to understand that and I’ll never say I understand it fully. But I now get it much better than I did back years ago and I was listening to David do his soil workshops, where he got everyone to role play and I saw where all of those symbiotic relationships and when you step back and give the plant the opportunity. Don’t give it soluble fertilizers, don’t limit its growth, don’t get a carry in there and chop it down. Every time a green leaf appears, allow it to grow, you’ll get all this root growth, you’ll get all these bacteria, and all of these symbioses,and things will balance. The Nematodes will balance out against all this. And I was thinking, “Oh, my God. That’s what we’re doing in the city.” We’re just stepping back and giving city people who have been given too much soluble fertilizer and capitalism has stunted their growth in terms of their highest and best use and now we can. Because of that, we’re seeing all these relationships becoming robust, not resilient, robust, against all of the things that are happening in the world. I mean, obviously, we’ve got a long way to go. But that’s how they would have been taught law was through observing nature over millennia.

Morag:

And so how has that changed what you do as a business, as an enterprise?

Rob:

So we know Mary and Lulu taught us he was like, there’s like about 10 things. So one of them, they never talk about equity, they always talk about balance. No, never use the word equity. We’ve talked about balance, which is subtle, but quite profound when you think about it deeply enough. So obviously, Mary told me, I had a session with her two weeks ago and she said, “We need to have seven, in governance and on boards, we need to have seven women to take two out of 10.“ That’s how we are rebalancing. So it’s not about merit or equity, it’s about bringing balance back to the world. We need more women on all of these boards and all of these organizations, because they’ve got that special ability. The other one is, they always talk about the difference between power and authority and autonomy, so the one about autonomy. So there’s never the stick or the carrot, which is Western society runs by the stick. It’s like I’m running away from something or I’m running towards something rather than whereas they always talk about autonomy and you will, out of your own volition, come to a realization about how you should conduct yourself because conduct is really important and respecting elders and respecting children and in seeing the children as the future inheritors and all these things that we know, these tropes that we know about. 

But power and authority was the one that – I really got this three or four years ago – how power is exerted in so many ways in Western society and we just bought the shed and here I was writing up all these leases. Not too many, because we sort of had a lot of space to build and it wasn’t filling up as quickly as I wanted  and I went to do this training called Backyard training in town here with a whole bunch of Food Connect board and friends. I went back and I’m thinking, “Oh, my God. Here we are writing up leases and leases a foreign powers.” It says, if you don’t pay your rent you’re out in the shed. It is meant to be this place where businesses, where we were removing the barriers for small businesses to come in and unfold whatever they want to do and I’m writing a lease so I scrapped all leases and we went from about seven tenants to about 20 tenants in about three months like it was nothing at all. I remember sitting with that to a tailor who’s been taught by Bartonella. Mainly, she’s sort of like the new L and she’s only in her 30’s. Until I said to myself, she might have only been 29 at the time. I said to her, I don’t know what’s happened, but all this stuff happened and told her that we weren’t writing leases and there was a couple of other things that I picked up from the backyard course, that I was deploying or putting on the ground here at Food Connect and she said, “Do you know what you’ve done?” And I said, “I’ve no idea what I’ve done.” And she said,”You’ve given people the opportunity to fall in love with themselves again.” And she said, “What you’ve done by allowing them to self organize, having known lists, allowing them to come into the place, and have two months where they could explore and get used to the space. Just a bit, what hours they’ve done autonomously, to me, so I don’t, I’m not checking on them on their hours. They’re self organizing around when they are leasing the kitchens. You’ve allowed their highest and best faculties. You’ve stimulated that in such a way where they’re now becoming in love with themselves. Because you’ve given them the opportunity to be more than who they’ve ever been allowed to be before because you’ve taken away accountability and responsibility. You said, “No, no. You just operate out of your own volition.” and because they call that obligation.” So that their terminology is there’s no accountability, there’s no responsibility, there’s just obligation. All there is this obligation and that’s up to you to decide who you’re going to be obligated too. I thought, Oh, my God, and she said, that’s what you’ve basically done and because you’ve done that to the first couple people that are attracted to that, they tell their friends, they say, “Oh, I’m in this bright space at the moment. I don’t have to sign a six month lease. If I run late, I just bring them up and say there’s a lot of flexibility and it’s given me the opportunity to find my niching there.” I even say this might not be the space for you. You might at the end of this go, “No, this isn’t for me” and that’s fine with us. So it’s sort of saying to them this is the [inaudible] we might not like you either. It’s sort of hinting that you can be a much better person than you are and because you’re going to be in community, there’s no escape. So your interpersonal skills have to sort of lift a couple of notches and that allows people to fall in love with themselves because they go, “Oh, my God, I’ve got this insight about myself. I didn’t know this about myself.”

Morag:

That’s amazing. It’s fantastic. This idea of obligation, I think some people are afraid of obligation, whereas it is actually a liberating thing. 

Rob:

That’s a really great way of saying it. I hadn’t seen it in that way before. But I suppose while this bothers me doing this motion of unfolding your highest and best use is a form of emancipation. For me, it’s emancipation I should say. 

Morag:

What was that? 

Rob:

For me it’s emancipation.

Morag:

Oh, I thought you were talking about ferments there for a minute. Emancipation, leveling up.

Rob:

It’s liberating because that is transformative in itself being given the opportunity and non-judgement. So this and other First Nations things we never judge. Ao that was another thing we had here. I swear to God, how many times do you judge someone? You just drop all of that and just allow them to be who they could be.

Morag:

So Rob,  what you’ve created, all of you together in all of your conversations and relationships is quite extraordinary. I wonder what is your big picture of what you hoped for? Or where would you like this to go? Like you said before, there are these enterprises that have come out of this. But is there something else that is fermenting through this process?

Rob:

It’s obviously still based on that model of giving the plant the opportunity, the human the opportunity, to put his roots down deeper and grow and see what that stimulates inside the food system, but the principles of smallest beauty, we don’t want to get big. Some of the businesses here will get big, but they’ll be much bigger if they collaborate and then go for procurement contracts at a hospital or Aged Care Center or childcare center. Because that’s the final frontier for humanity is to get along and to not be polarized and to see diversity as something that adds value to your life. Rather than seeing yourself as an employee that does whatever it is. Then I’m going to sell sauerkraut all over Australia, that’s not the model. So we’ve still got a lot of work to do on that governance and those things I spoke about before, how do we reinforce them and how do we curate them more and more so they always and they become deeply embedded and more and more people exhibit those sort of that culture of non judgment and working with others and deeply growing as a human and then obviously as Australia. Because as we’re saying, there’s so many cracks in the Australian food system that are starting to be really evident. So having networks or food sheds, food hubs, whatever they are, whether they’re virtual or physical, right up and down the east coast of Australia, in the South Australia, that are all networked together. So we have this highly network distributed food system that has reinstated the logistics and the infrastructure, the value adding in the region. So 70% or 60% of all groups, all food grown in a region is value added and sold in that region and eaten in that region. So that’s an enormous readjustment because that goes away from the big economic model. It’s an economic model where you just put mango farmers in one town and banana farmers in another town. It’s an efficiency thing for a global food system, but it doesn’t work for the food system we need in the future. So that will give farmers the opportunity to go Oh, okay. So if I get rid of a bit of my Banana Farm and plant whatever it is within the law crop or and start to diversify their operation that can be used by these valuators in the town and then sold in the town, then they can see that as a pathway. Because until people buy this stuff or evaluate this stuff, the farmers haven’t got an incentive to grow it. So we’ve got to set up that side of things and then farmers go, oh, you beauty, I’ll grow that, and then they’ll grow more, and then they’ll grow more, and then eventually, probably, in the case of some of the sort of some of the more intensive products, they’ll just drop by the wayside because farmers have been utilizing the land so much and there’s so many things inside of that around understanding where their financial return is that keeps them at a needs basis, not a once basis. So there’s so much work to be done in that economic realm of needs. 

Actually, I’ve just ordered a whole bunch of Crystal Horton Bud’s books. He’s written a couple of months more books to get my head into, because it’s fascinating. The financial system is still exhibiting a lot of business as usual investment, even impact investment. Apart from a couple of groups like sustainable table and Haley and a couple of really aware financial sort of intermediaries around the world, it’s hard for them. I had a good chat with Woody, just about two weeks ago. He’s just written another sort of essay that really talks to this idea of how do we really seriously double down on our economic system, so it exhibits these traits if you look at the enemy system it’s just been fed soluble fertilizer. Really good returns, they don’t have to work too hard for their money and now we have a financial system that’s out there doing all these unreal things that don’t really serve society at all. So there’s a lot of work to be done in that space. The eater side of things, the value adding side of things and the financial side of things have to sort of really lift their game to be on a parallel with all these regenerative farmers and all these permaculture backyard farming, community gardens and all. So the food side of things is really happening. We can see that that’s underway and going really strong. But the work to be done in money eating and value adding in an unprocessed or not hardly processed at all. There’s a lot of work to be done in that space.

Morag:

Coming back to that idea of growing. I mean, I remember a long time ago, we were having conversations around how to protect and utilize more of the Peri-urban land and so after 17 years, developments are still eating up lots of Peri-urban land every year. Where’s your thinking around that? And what examples we’ve seen in terms of where are the future farms? And who are the future farmers? And is there a place to protect this land? What are the tools that we can use to help do that and the urban farming part of the picture isn’t the Peri-urban?

Rob:

It’s a great question. Because of our 10 year anniversary, Emma and I, after the 10 year anniversary, which was that street party, 3000 people came out and we thought we’d get about 500 and we’d had this simple sourcing policy of a three hour radius average. So we went five hours, which was the maximum and we thought after that 3000 people turned up, we thought our society’s probably up for a more sophisticated conversation about where we source food from and so we designed this new sourcing policy called the Brisbane food plan and instead of the five hour radius, we said “Well, let’s embrace the whole glow and divide that into zones.” So this is very much a permaculture thing and then we divided all food groups into 13 categories and we looked at them all through four lenses, human health lenses, because the eater public comes out with food from all different angles. So we thought, what are the key reasons why people would buy something from Food Connect, and we come up with social justice, economic, ecological, or human health. So those were the four lenses. We looked at all those 13 food groups and then we said, “Well, where should that food come from to meet those four lenses?” And it was really interesting how it all panned out and now our food miles are down even though we source products from now on, from as far not not as many to satisfy that diet, because we’re trying to rebuild the diversity. Because as you know, even though we might have potatoes and five or six varieties like our plant, the diversity that we grow is so limited in terms of the mainstream media. So we need to encourage that. So now it’s down to about 8090 kilometers average during the wintertime and then in summer, because we go to steam top, it gets up to around 130 kilometers on average for all of our projects. So by opening up a more sophisticated conversation about where we should source fruit from, we identified herbs, openhearted lettuces, they all should be grown in your backyard or a community garden down the road or a street verge garden or whatever it is and then you’ve got your urban farms. So a neighborhood is a great example, you know, market gardens in the sort of underutilized urban spaces and then you get your period and where your meat should come from, where your milk should come from, all of those things through those four lenses. That’s one of the other things we’re sort of now saying. Well, this can be applied to any town or any city, this idea through these four lenses using those principles and that, because we can’t determine whether it’s going to be urban or whatever it is for any town, the town will decide that they’ll self organize around all this opportunity down there. It might get flooded every year or we might get flooded every now and then. So it’s giving communities the agency to map so not their area. Look at the infrastructure that might be lying lighted and we’ve seen plenty of it. You go into a rural town in these amazing buildings that would just retrofit with not a lot of money into an amazing space. But no one’s really valued it that way. Through them doing their own food mapping and given some tools. Like Michael Shuman, you do that analysis of, or your client town or not, you know, simple things like that stimulate people to think, Oh, my God, who owns all these buildings? Does the person running the business inside that shop own the building? Or is it owned by LendLease? So it gets them to think about what money is not staying in town because it’s going into someone’s pocket overseas or into the Cayman Islands or whatever else. So it really educates people through that process. I hadn’t thought about these sorts of things, I hadn’t thought about that as an economic multiplier, I hadn’t thought about that business down the road and of course, asking those questions also brings a bit of obligation to someone who’s sitting there and a couple of community members come in with a notebook saying, “Oh, we’re just doing this town analysis. We’re just doing some food mapping. You own this pub? Where did all your rum salted peanuts come from?” And then they start to think, Oh, I haven’t thought about that, before I just had an agent walking. Fill the fridge with coke and fill this and so those sort of conversations by community people is of itself halfway there in terms of them starting to think about and then think about it in a training. This is going to take a period of time, we’re not extremist here. It might be a radical idea, but it’s not going to be actioned in a radical way. It’s going to be action in a participatory way. So that’s probably some of the cues or the keys and like highlighting, in other parts of the world, what communities are doing. That’s always very inspiring when you see  towns who have gone from before to after.

Morag:

I think it’s just really kind of opening up. Like you don’t want to copy that. But you know, to be able to sort of go, “Oh, that’d be like that.” That’s really inspiring. Well, a bit of that and weaving them together somehow and then finding your own thread, I think that’s so important.

Rob:

Each bioregion has its own biota, and bacteria and fungi and it’s only up to them. They’re the ones that are gonna love ..

Morgan:

That’s how you brought this kind of the mycelial metaphor into everything and it is incredibly powerful to reconceptualize who we are, where we are, how we function, through that lens. The more we start to discover how it works, I’m in constant war and I think every time I learned something, I learned something from what you just said before, and then you go and you share that because it’s so new and it’s so different from what we were taught at school. You go to school biology, it’s not. But it’s still not what’s being taught as well, which is kind of frustrating, because the curriculum is nowhere near where the reality is and that’s kind of disappointing. What I was just going to ask you, though, is do you see support coming from governments or regulators or anything? Are you still seeing that as a scoring? Because I know this is part of that conversation for small farmers, small food enterprises that sort of like this squeezing that happens? Or do you feel like there’s a shift that’s going on?

Rob:

No, and Gabrielle Chan’s book, Why You Should Give a F About Farming, it really highlights some of those sorts of that squeeze that you just mentioned then, I think it’s probably one of my blind spots or I just haven’t engaged with the government myself enough to really understand. I think it’s probably because I attempted two years ago and just laughed out and kicked out the door, what a silly idea. So I think there’s probably more of an appetite to listen now and I think now with these independents, with the new parliament now, like I was saying to him this morning, let’s give a few of these politicians because three greens are in here in Brisbane and we’re pretty connected to them. Let’s use that as a door to open up conversations with all these other independents. I mean, Cathy McGowan, she would be absolutely up for this conversation, if she isn’t already. I mean, surely, and she’s in contact with all those independents on a Tony James, who does the regeneration podcast, he’s good friends with Kay Cheney. So I think it’s a real opportunity for us because whilst they might be blunt or they might be the word I mean, obviously, I don’t know how Canberra works, but I can imagine the Labor Party going to go do their thing and engage with them and collaborate, sometimes that more at a tokenistic level, what else are they going to be doing while they’re in Canberra. They’re going to be meeting with Buddy departments and policy heads and DJs. They’re really intelligent women, they are going to be prodding and poking and lifting the lid on so many things. So I think that’s an opportunity for us as a movement is to is to go to Canberra and probably and go when they’re not in Canberra and engage with them more around how policy and the other side of it is we haven’t probably yet established a comprehensive how this looks as an opportunity for Australia to both the agricultural sector, which is pretty powerful, very powerful lobbying group wedded to the neoliberal idea. But I think there’s probably an appetite within those organizations to sort of see this as something that gives them more of a social license. I often say, all these farmers that you don’t like all these little small scales, free range, egg things and all that sort of stuff. They’re giving you social license, if it wasn’t for them, they give you the social. So you’ve got to reciprocate back and involve them in more discussions, because it’s only going one way we know which way it’s going. So I think, for me, that’s probably something I want to now step into a little bit more, after so many years at Food Connect and demonstrating something or other and probably now I think I’ve got a bit of credibility to be able to move into those conversations.

Morag:

Maybe to host those conversations and gather those people into a room together to …

Rob:

To take out the polarization. The G and the anti G tech bring him into the one room actually, we were talking for a while about having what we call TED talks, which is one person standing up with no chance for a q & a. We were thinking that shed talks are where we have a panel of opposite sides, but there’s rules around this. This isn’t a debate, this is a conversation where we’re talking and listening and we’re going to have a lot of q&a. But there’s gonna be rules around the conduct by which we had this conversation. So we don’t go into the sort of one side and the other side, we start to see the opportunities in embracing both. I think that’s where society needs to go and I think these independents are going to do that a lot. Well, they’re going to be, let’s have a conversation. We want to pick up the behavior.

Morag:

Yeah. And also to use the space of the shed too for various sorts of  teachings of different kinds. Like, you’ve got so many members and so many supporters who have so much knowledge just to keep bringing them into lifting up the hole. I think it’s interesting, the way that you’ve woven all those pieces together. 

Rob:

Well, we’ve got a great team here and it’s certainly not just Emma and I. There’s Jesse, and Nat and Jeff, and the board 

Morag:

It has been so fantastic to catch up, Robert. There’s always so much to talk about when I get together with you and there’s all the different dimensions of it and I think from the very practical actually making it happen and creating real and viable and tangible solutions in that sort of iterative process you’re doing and really pushing the boundaries of what we normally ask of communities, or armers, or eaters, or businesses, and it’s pushing those edges and I think that’s what so inspiring. But then also this possibility for, because you’re so grounded in that, that you become like this sort of attractor, where conversations can happen, because it’s a real place to begin.

Rob:

That’s right, you get out of the head realm and it’s how this can be applied on the ground sort of takes away the theoretical sort of opposition. It’s sort of like, Oh well, actually, let’s see how it works on the ground. That’s the ultimate test. So, for me, it’s always been important that there has been an on the ground solution of ideas rather than just ideas in and of themselves. 

Thanks, Morag. It’s been wonderful to chat. 

Morag:

Thanks, Rob. 

Rob:

We don’t do it often enough.

Morag:

No, no, but please make sure that you send through a list of the different books that you’ve mentioned so I can share them with the listeners and also I’ll make sure for those of you listening or have that there, I’ll send you all the links to Food Connect, Food Connect Shared, Rob’s work, and any of those. And also whether you have it accessible? The Brisbane food plan? That would be amazing.

Rob:

I think it’s on the Food Connect Brisbane website. But if not, there’s three websites: the Food Connect Shared. Even if you just search Brisbane Food Plan, it’ll probably come up.

Morag:

I’ll try and make sure I can link to all the different great things you’ve been talking about so people can access. Alright, thanks so much, Rob.

Rob:

No trouble. Enjoy the rest of your day and thanks for the opportunity. It’s been wonderful to speak. I hope it’s been useful.

Morag:

Yeah, it’s been fantastic.

Rob:

So yeah, bye

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