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What the farmer actually keeps

It helps to start with how the retail dollar actually gets split up. A widely cited global study published in Nature Food, drawing on data from 61 countries, found that farmers typically keep only around 27 percent of what consumers spend on food eaten at home, and that share shrinks further in wealthier economies, sometimes down toward 16 percent. Australia, with one of the more concentrated grocery markets in the developed world, would reasonably sit toward the less generous end of that range.

It isn’t an abstraction once you look at the state level either. In South Australia, growers watched their farmgate prices fall by 21.6 percent in a single financial year, at the same time as their power, packaging, labour and freight bills all went up. Tomatoes, cucumbers and mushrooms all dropped in price at the farm gate in the very year that costs rose almost everywhere else along the chain. The same industry body estimated the average markup between what a grower is paid and what a shopper eventually pays at somewhere around 300 percent, a figure that comes from an advocacy group rather than an independent audit, though it lines up reasonably well with what the ACCC’s own inquiry has been finding.

Two buyers, one harvest, and not much room to move

Woolworths and Coles control something like 67 percent of the country’s supermarket sales between them, which the ACCC’s own inquiry described plainly as an oligopoly, one with little real incentive for either company to compete hard on price against the other.

What that looks like from the grower’s side of the ledger is fairly stark. There’s usually no long term contract and no locked in price, just a weekly order negotiated fresh each time, with every other grower in the district quietly competing for the same buyer’s business. Because the crop is perishable, it can’t sit around waiting for a better offer to come along, so the practical choice most weeks is to take the price on offer or watch the harvest spoil in the shed. Growers told the ACCC inquiry, on the record, that many of them haven’t seen their base price move in around fifteen years, the same fifteen years in which the major retailers have been posting record profits.

Even once a price is agreed, the risk doesn’t end there, because the produce still has to survive delivery. Industry data compiled in 2023 found that the single biggest reason a supermarket rejects a load isn’t spoilage or safety at all, but simple appearance, cited in 68 percent of rejections, ahead of size and ripeness. Growers lose an estimated 14 million kilograms of fruit and vegetables every year this way, after they’ve already paid to grow it, pick it and truck it to the door. Coles maintains its own rejection rate sits under 2 percent, and that may well be true, but the larger cost isn’t really what gets turned away at the loading dock. It’s everything a grower decides not to plant in the first place, because the risk of being told no has already been priced into the decision.

Put those pieces together and you get a fairly simple picture. Costs that are fixed and rising, sitting opposite a sale price that never moves, set week to week by two buyers who both know exactly how little choice the seller has left once harvest day arrives. That isn’t a rough patch in an otherwise fair system. It’s closer to the design of the thing.

The paddock nobody notices going quiet

Foreclosure is the dramatic version of losing the farm, and it stays rare enough in the official figures to make the occasional headline. The quieter version never makes the news at all. It looks like a family, after years of doing this arithmetic, deciding the only way left to get any value out of the land is to sell it. Australia has lost roughly a quarter of its farm businesses since the early 2010s, from around 135,000 down toward something closer to 110,000 today, and that’s a slow bleed with no single bad season anyone could point to as the cause.

Here’s the part that doesn’t get said out loud often enough. That land frequently doesn’t go back into growing food at all once it changes hands. Researchers looking at the fringes of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide have tracked the same pattern again and again, with working farms carved up into smaller lifestyle blocks and bought by people whose income comes from somewhere else entirely, people who want the view and the privacy and maybe somewhere to keep a couple of horses, not the harvest. Studies of the Illawarra region found these smaller lifestyle and conservation focused holdings contribute almost nothing to actual food production, even while they sit on land that used to feed people. None of this is bad luck so much as the next logical step in the same process. Once a block stops paying its way as a working farm, it naturally becomes more valuable to someone who was never going to ask it to pay its way in the first place. The paddock gets mowed instead of ploughed. It’s technically still in use, it’s just no longer feeding anyone.

Do that across enough properties, in enough regions, and the country’s actual capacity to grow its own food shrinks quietly, without ever attaching itself to a single dramatic headline. Fewer commercial growers left standing means fewer growers left to bid for the contracts that remain, which in turn means even less leverage for whoever’s still in the game, against the same two buyers who were never going anywhere to begin with. That’s really the loop closing on itself.

What other countries have decided to do about it:

None of this is unique to Australia, though what does seem fairly unique is how little Australia has chosen to do about it by comparison. The European Union builds direct financial support into its system specifically for the kind of farmer this cycle would otherwise crush. There’s a top up payment for young farmers taking over a property for the first time, paid for up to five years while they get established. There’s a simplified payment scheme so that small farms aren’t stuck competing against large agribusiness for the same pool of support. And there’s a redistributive payment that deliberately pays a higher rate per hectare on a farm’s first hectares than its later ones, weighting the support toward the small operation rather than the biggest landholder in the district.

France went further still, and went straight at the actual mechanism causing the problem. Its Egalim laws effectively flipped the negotiation on its head, so that the farmer proposes the price based on what it genuinely costs them to grow the thing, and the retailer is legally required to maintain a minimum margin above that cost rather than being free to grind the farmgate price down to whatever it can get away with. It isn’t a perfect fix. A 2025 government review found the law’s real economic impact still difficult to measure with any precision, and there are acknowledged gaps in enforcement. But it represents a government that decided farmer solvency was worth legislating for directly, rather than something to be sorted out entirely between two supermarkets and a fragmented, largely powerless group of suppliers.

A young farmer taking on a struggling property in the Northern Rivers gets none of that. No income floor, no top up payment, just the same two buyers and the same fifteen years of flat prices, and a bank that doesn’t particularly care why the season turned out to be a hard one.

This didn’t happen by accident.

None of this is a natural feature of growing food. It’s the accumulated result of a series of choices made over time, decades of agricultural and trade policy that rewarded scale and export volume over the small diversified farm, a supermarket sector that was allowed to consolidate until two companies could effectively set the price for a nation’s fresh produce, a grocery code that until quite recently did almost nothing to restrain take it or leave it buying practices, and a lending environment where the cost of servicing debt can climb sharply while the price paid to the person who actually grew the food doesn’t move for a decade and a half. Every one of those was a choice, made by people who could reasonably have chosen differently. Calling the result a free market is generous to the point of being misleading. A market in which one side sets the price, sets the specification, and can reject the goods after the seller has already paid to grow, pick and freight them isn’t functioning as a free market for the party on the losing end of that transaction. It’s better understood as a captured one.

Why where you spend your money actually matters

This is roughly where buying local stops being a nice idea and starts looking more like a genuine intervention.

Every dollar spent through the supermarket and wholesale chain feeds a structure that already holds nearly all the leverage in that relationship, and quietly adds to the pressure pushing land out of food production altogether. Every dollar spent directly with a grower, whether that’s at a market stall, through a box scheme, or via a standing order with a local property, largely skips that structure entirely. It goes straight to the person carrying the debt and deciding, this particular season, whether staying on the land is still worth it.

Nobody’s suggesting a wholesale boycott of the supermarket, which isn’t realistic for most households in most weeks. But the portion of a household’s food spend that can reasonably go direct is worth treating as more significant than its dollar value might suggest. A region with a genuine, working network of direct buyer grower relationships gives that cycle somewhere to exit, a point where a difficult season doesn’t automatically end with the paddock going to someone who just wants the view.

Nobody who has actually watched this play out believes Australian farmers are bad at farming. What’s failing is the arrangement that decides how much of what they grow they actually get to keep, and what becomes of the land the moment that arrangement finally pushes them off it. Buying local won’t rewrite trade policy or fix the Grocery Code on its own. But it’s one of the few levers an ordinary person gets to pull, every single week, that pushes back on this cycle at more than one point at the same time. It’s worth pulling like it actually matters, because it does.

Sources: ACCC Supermarkets Inquiry 2024–25 (interim and final reports, and Coles’ submissions); National Farmers’ Federation Horticulture Council commentary on the ACCC inquiry; AUSVEG submission to the ACCC citing the Farm to Supermarket Food Waste Report 2023; Australian Bureau of Statistics Agricultural Census data and industry consolidation analysis; Canning, Barrett et al., “Post-farmgate food value chains make up most of consumer food expenditures globally,” Nature Food (2021); Horticulture Coalition of South Australia farmgate pricing data, as reported by Fruitnet (2024); peri-urban land-use research on lifestyle-block fragmentation in the Illawarra, Adelaide Hills, and greater Sydney/Melbourne regions; European Commission, CAP income support rules 2023–27 (young farmers, small farm scheme, redistributive payment); France’s Loi Egalim (2018–2023), as reported by The Local, Connexion France, and the French National Assembly’s 2025 Egalim 2 evaluation report.

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There is a story that gets told in this country about land, a story in which farmers and conservationists are on opposite sides of a fundamental conflict, in which every hectare that is farmed is a hectare lost to nature, and every regulation that protects habitat is a regulation that threatens the livelihoods of the people working the land. It is a story that gets told loudly and often, particularly by the industries that benefit most from the conflict it describes. It is also, in my experience of actually farming and actually caring about the ecological health of this country, almost entirely wrong.

The framing of conservation versus agriculture is not a neutral description of a genuine tension. It is a political construction, and it is one that serves a very specific set of interests, not the interests of farmers, and not the interests of the ecosystems that conservation policy is trying to protect, but the interests of the industries that sit between those two things and extract value from both: the large-scale land clearers, the native forest logging companies, the agribusiness operations that treat soil as a substrate rather than a living system and have no particular investment in the long-term ecological health of the land they use. These are the industries that benefit when farmers and conservationists are fighting each other. These are the industries that lose most when those two groups discover that their interests are, in most of what matters, actually aligned.

Let me be specific about what I mean. The NSW land clearing data released in 2025 showed a forty percent jump in native vegetation clearing, with agriculture identified as the driver of seventy-seven percent of all clearing in 2023 — more than 51,000 hectares in a single year. These numbers are real and they are serious, and they represent a genuine ecological catastrophe in slow motion. Australia already holds the worst record for mammal extinctions of any country on earth. The national threatened species list comprises more than 1,700 species, with more added every year. In NSW, scientists have projected the loss of nearly 500 wildlife species to extinction within the next century if current clearing rates continue. When land clearing at this scale is described as agriculture, it is easy to understand why conservationists treat farming as the enemy. But I want to ask a more precise question: what kind of agriculture is doing this clearing, and who does it serve? Because the farms I know, the farmers I respect, the kind of land management that I have dedicated my working life to understanding and practising. None of it requires the bulldozing of tens of thousands of hectares of native woodland. The clearing described in these statistics is overwhelmingly large-scale, corporate, industrial agriculture. Operations that are farming at a scale and in a manner that most small and regenerative farmers would not recognise as continuous with their own work. To treat this as the natural consequence of farming, rather than as the specific consequence of a particular industrial model of farming operating within a regulatory environment that has been deliberately weakened, is to misdiagnose the problem in a way that ultimately protects the people causing the most damage.

The enemy of the koala is not the market gardener. It is the industrial land clearing operation that calls itself farming in order to access the exemptions that agriculture has historically enjoyed from environmental regulation.

The timber industry makes this dynamic even clearer. Native forest logging in Australia is, by any honest economic analysis, a structurally inviable industry that has been kept alive for decades by taxpayer subsidy and political will, at enormous ecological cost. The accumulated losses to taxpayers have exceeded $1.3 billion in Tasmania alone, with comparable handouts in Victoria and New South Wales. The industry employs fewer than 800 people in native forestry operations nationally — a number dwarfed by the 11,600 employed in the plantation sector, which already supplies approximately ninety percent of Australia’s sawn timber and grows wood faster, at higher quality, with a fraction of the ecological impact. And yet native forest logging has continued, in large part because it has successfully positioned itself as a rural industry, a regional employer, a part of the Australian agricultural identity. When it is, in practice, the subsidised extraction of old-growth carbon stores and irreplaceable wildlife habitat for wood chips, paper pulp, and low-grade box liners. Victoria ended native forest logging in 2024. Western Australia followed. In September 2025, NSW set the boundary for the proposed Great Koala National Park, 476,000 hectares and halted native forest logging within it, with formal gazettal expected in 2026. These are significant and overdue decisions. But at the federal level, even as reforms to the EPBC Act in December 2025 finally removed the longstanding exemption that had kept native forest logging entirely outside the scope of national environmental law, the federal environment minister told the industry that operations would continue as usual, with stronger oversight in principle but no fundamental change in practice. The exemption is gone but the logging continues, which is perhaps the clearest possible illustration of the gap between the language of conservation and the reality of what the political system is actually willing to protect.

The timber industry’s response to every attempt at reform has been consistent: to position the choice as one between jobs and the environment, between rural communities and inner-city greens, between people who understand the land and people who want to lock it away. This is the conservation-versus-agriculture framing at its most naked and most cynical. Deployed not by farmers but by an extractive industry that loses everything the moment the public stops believing that cutting down old-growth forests is a form of land management.

I want to talk about what farming actually looks like when it is done well, because I think most people who have not spent time on a working farm have very little concrete sense of what genuine land care involves and the gap between the industrial image of agriculture that dominates public debate and the lived reality of regenerative practice is so wide that the two things barely seem to belong to the same category of activity.Regenerative agriculture begins with the understanding that soil is not dirt. It is a living system of extraordinary complexity, a single teaspoon of healthy agricultural soil contains more individual organisms than there are people on earth, a web of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, and arthropods whose interactions regulate nutrient cycling, water infiltration, carbon storage, disease suppression, and the structural integrity of the ground itself. Industrial agriculture, with its dependence on tillage, synthetic inputs, and monoculture, systematically destroys this biological community. Regenerative agriculture rebuilds it through reduced or no tillage, through diverse crop rotations and polycultures, through the integration of animals managed in ways that mimic the grazing patterns of native herbivores, through the maintenance of living root systems in the soil for as much of the year as possible. These are not romantic gestures. They are practical interventions grounded in soil science, and the farms that practise them consistently demonstrate outcomes in soil carbon, in water retention, in yield stability under drought conditions that industrial systems cannot match over the long term.

The ecological consequences of this kind of farming extend well beyond the soil. A farm managed regeneratively develops a structural and biological complexity that industrial monocultures cannot support diverse vegetation layers that provide habitat for insects and birds, hedgerows and remnant tree lines that function as wildlife corridors, waterways managed with the care that keeps them clean and productive rather than the carelessness that turns them into drainage channels carrying topsoil and agricultural chemicals into the sea. I have watched, on farms I have worked on and visited, the return of species of insects and birds and small mammals to land that was managed with attention and intention rather than extraction. This is not incidental to good farming. It is the measure of it.

A farm that is genuinely cared for is not a compromise between food production and ecological health. It is both, simultaneously, because the conditions that produce good food — living soil, clean water, biological diversity, ecological complexity — are the same conditions that define a healthy landscape.

The farmers I know do not want to clear native vegetation. They want to farm in ways that keep the land alive that build soil rather than deplete it, that maintain the ecological relationships that make their farms productive over the long term, that preserve the remnant vegetation on their properties because they understand, from direct observation and accumulated experience, that a farm stripped of its ecological complexity is a farm that is becoming less productive and more fragile with every passing year. The cover crop they plant in autumn is not just a nitrogen-fixing strategy it is a commitment to feeding the soil biology that will carry the next season’s production. The windbreak they maintain along the northern boundary is not just erosion control. It is the corridor that the gang-gangs use to move between the remnant forest patches on either side of the farm. These things are connected, and the farmer who has been paying attention long enough understands that connection not as an abstract ecological principle but as a practical truth that shows up in their yields and their soil tests and the biological abundance or poverty of the landscape they are managing.This is what good farming looks like. It is slow, attentive, place-specific, and oriented toward a timescale that extends well beyond the next harvest, toward the health of the land in ten years and fifty years, toward the capacity of the next generation of farmers to grow food from the same ground. It is the opposite of extraction in every sense that matters, and it is being practised, with varying degrees of resource and support, on farms across this country by people who have chosen land care as a vocation and who are doing conservation work every time they walk their paddocks with genuine attention to what they find there.

A farm with living soil is a conservation outcome. A farm with intact remnant vegetation and functional wildlife corridors is a conservation outcome. A farm managed by people who have spent decades building their knowledge of a particular place — who understand its hydrology and its seasonal rhythms and its ecological vulnerabilities, who notice when something is wrong before it becomes irreversible is one of the most effective and most scalable forms of landscape stewardship this country has. The choice is not between farming and conservation. The choice is between farming that is ecologically intelligent and farming that is not, and the regulatory and political frameworks we have built have, in too many cases, been better at protecting the latter than enabling the former.

Good farming is conservation. It always has been. The idea that they are opposites is not an ecological truth — it is a political strategy, and the people it has served most reliably are not farmers and not the environment, but the industries that profit from treating both as expendable.

What would it look like to govern from this understanding rather than against it? It would mean environmental regulations designed to target the industrial clearing and extractive logging operations that cause the overwhelming majority of ecological damage, rather than creating compliance burdens for small and regenerative farmers whose practices are genuinely consistent with landscape health. It would mean investment in the transition from native forest logging to plantation timber at a scale and quality that actually works, rather than the rushed and underfunded programs that have repeatedly failed to deliver a viable alternative resource. It would mean recognising that the people most likely to manage this country’s agricultural landscapes with genuine ecological intelligence are the ones who have chosen farming as a vocation rather than as a vehicle for capital accumulation — and that the conditions for those people to stay on the land, to pass their knowledge to the next generation, and to keep practising the kind of farming that serves everyone’s long-term interests, are being undermined by the same market forces that are driving the clearing and the logging and the degradation that conservation policy is trying to address. It would mean, above all else, ending the fiction that has served extractive industries so well for so long the fiction that caring for the land and producing food from it are fundamentally incompatible activities. They are not incompatible. They are, when done with intelligence and intention and a genuine long-term commitment to the health of a particular place, the same activity. The conservation movement and the farming community in this country need each other, and most of the people in both know it, even when the politics makes it difficult to say so out loud.

The industries that profit from the conflict between them the large-scale clearing operations, the native logging companies collecting their taxpayer subsidies while the koalas lose their habitat are not farming. They are extracting. And they have been extraordinarily successful at convincing everyone else that their interests and the interests of real farmers are the same thing.They are not. And the sooner we stop letting that story go unchallenged, the sooner we can start building the policy frameworks and the farms that this land, and the people who genuinely care for it, actually need.

— G

There is a particular kind of poverty that doesn’t show up in any economic measure, and I have been trying to find the right words for it for a long time. It is not the poverty of not having enough — it is the poverty of not being able to pay attention to what you do have. Of moving through your days so fractured and so hurried that the world around you becomes a blur of stimuli rather than a place you actually inhabit. Of being, technically, surrounded by beauty or meaning or life, and being completely unable to receive any of it because your attention has already been sold to something else.

I think this is one of the defining crises of the moment we are living through, and I think it is deeply connected to the ecological and food systems crises that I spend most of my time thinking and writing about. Because you cannot care about what you cannot see, and you cannot see what you have never learned to look at, and learning to look requires something that our current system is very deliberately and very profitably taking from us: the sustained, unhurried gift of our own attention.

The attention economy — and it is worth using that phrase deliberately, because it names something true about what is being traded — is built on the insight that human attention is a finite and extraordinarily valuable resource, and that whoever captures it can convert it into profit. Every notification, every algorithmically optimised feed, every piece of content engineered to be just outrageous or just sentimental enough to make you stop scrolling — all of it is a bid for the same limited resource that you also need in order to know where you live, to tend a garden, to be present with the people around you, to notice the way the light is changing over the paddock at the end of the day.

There is no neutral ground here. Attention that goes to the feed is attention that does not go to the land, to the community, to the slow and unrewarded work of learning to be somewhere. This is not a moral failing on the part of individuals — it is the predictable result of an extraordinarily well-resourced industry whose entire business model depends on winning the competition for your awareness. But understanding that it is a competition, and that something real and irreplaceable is at stake in it, seems to me like an important place to start.

The most radical thing you can do, in a world that is trying to monetise your every waking moment, is to give your attention to something that will never appear in anyone’s revenue report — a piece of ground, a growing thing, the particular quality of this season in this place.

I want to be honest about the fact that I am not immune to any of this. I farm and I also have a phone, and the phone often wins in ways I am not proud of. I am not writing from a position of having solved the problem of distraction, or having achieved some enlightened state of pure presence. I am writing from the position of someone who has felt, very concretely and repeatedly, the difference between a day spent genuinely attending to the land and a day spent half-present — going through the motions of the work while some portion of my attention is elsewhere, reviewing a conversation, composing a future one, processing the background radiation of the news.

The difference is not subtle. It shows up in the quality of the work, in what you notice and what you miss, in whether you come back inside at the end of the day feeling replenished or hollowed out. And it has convinced me, more than any theoretical argument could, that attention is not just a nice thing to have more of — it is the actual substance of a life, the medium through which everything meaningful is experienced and everything important is learned.

On the days when I am genuinely present, the farm keeps showing me things. The way certain plants are flowering earlier than they did three years ago. The return of a bird to a patch of regenerating scrub that had been quiet for a long time. The particular smell of the soil after the first real autumn rain, which is a smell I am fairly sure I could not have described two years ago because I had not yet paid enough attention to earn it. These are small things. But they are the texture of actually being here, and they are only available to those who show up with their attention intact.

There is a deeper argument here about the food system specifically, and I think it is worth making plainly. Industrial agriculture is, at its core, a system built on the withdrawal of attention from land. It replaces observation with standardisation, relationship with transaction, local knowledge with imported protocol. The farmer who knows every corner of their soil — who can read a paddock the way you read a face, who has developed over years the capacity to notice what is subtly wrong before it becomes catastrophically wrong — is exactly the kind of intelligence that industrial food production has no use for, and no mechanism to reward.

What replaces that attention is scale, speed, and the illusion of control. And the land, which cannot be fooled indefinitely, eventually shows us what that bargain actually costs. The degradation of agricultural land — the compaction, the erosion, the loss of biological complexity — is in part a story about what happens when we stop paying attention to where we are and start managing it from a distance instead.

To farm well is to pay attention well. And to pay attention well is, increasingly, an act of resistance against a system that profits from our distraction.

I keep returning to the idea that the crises we face — ecological, political, social — are in some fundamental way crises of attention. That we have built systems which are very good at exploiting the world and very bad at actually seeing it, and that the gap between those two things is where most of the damage happens. That the corrective is not only policy or technology or the right economic incentives, but also the much quieter and harder and more personal work of learning to pay attention: to this place, to this season, to the people and communities and living systems that surround us and that we are, whether we acknowledge it or not, entirely dependent upon.

This is not a counsel of passivity. It is, I think, a prerequisite for anything else. You cannot protect what you have not first truly seen. You cannot advocate for a food system you have never actually been present in. You cannot build community with people you are too distracted to fully inhabit a room with. Attention is where everything begins — and in a world designed to capture and commodify it, choosing where to place it is one of the most consequential decisions we make, quietly, dozens of times a day.

Our attention is the most valuable thing we have. It is worth being very careful about where we put it.

— G

Radical Localism Is Not a Retreat — It’s a Refusal. There comes a point in history where the stories we’ve been told stop making sense.

Where the language of “defence” begins to sound like destruction.
Where “security” looks like endless war. Where “progress” feels like disconnection — from land, from each other, from ourselves. And quietly, beneath the noise of headlines and hot takes, something in us says: no more. Not out of ideology. Not out of rebellion for its own sake. But from a deeper knowing — that the way we are living is feeding something we do not believe in.The Machine Only Runs If We Feed It. We are told that power lives in parliaments, in boardrooms, in markets. But the truth is far less abstract. Power lives in what we buy. In how we eat. In where we put our time, our labour, our attention. Every dollar spent on industrial food systems, on extractive energy, on pharmaceutical dependence without question — it flows somewhere. And often, it flows upward, concentrating in systems that profit from instability, from crisis, from war. This is not conspiracy. It is structure. And structures do not need belief to function — only participation.Refusal Is a Form of Power. What if resistance didn’t look like shouting louder? What if it looked like stepping sideways? Not violent overthrow. Not utopian fantasy.But quiet, coordinated withdrawal.Growing food, even a little. Buying from people you know. Repairing instead of replacing. Sharing skills instead of outsourcing them. Reducing dependence on systems that don’t serve life. This is not about purity. It’s about direction. Each act says: I will not feed what harms us.

Relearning the Old Ways Is a Future Practice. For most of human history, people lived within the limits and intelligence of place.Food came from nearby.Energy came from effort and ecosystem. Knowledge was embodied, shared, and lived — not outsourced.This wasn’t perfect. But it was connected. What we call “radical localism” is not new. It is a remembering. A remembering of:how to meet needs without overreach, how to live with enough, how to belong somewhere, rather than consume everywhere. There is a kind of wealth here that cannot be taxed, scaled, or extracted.Compassion Beyond Borders. We are living through an era of deep fragmentation — political, cultural, ecological. And yet, beneath it all, there is a simple truth:Suffering anywhere is not separate from us.To stand against war is not just to oppose it in words, but to examine how our lives may unintentionally sustain the systems that make it possible. This is not about guilt.It’s about coherence. Can we live in a way that reflects the world we want to see? Downscaling as Liberation. We have been sold a dream of more — more convenience, more speed, more consumption.But “more” has come with a cost:ecological breakdown, social isolation, dependence on distant, fragile systems.What if less is not deprivation — but freedom? Less debt.Less reliance. Less entanglement in systems that trade life for profit. Downscaling is not stepping back. It is stepping out.Community Is the Real Infrastructure. The future will not be built by institutions alone.It will be built in:shared meals, seed swaps, skill shares, local trade, mutual aid. In relationships that hold real weight. Because when systems falter — and they will —it is not markets that catch us. It is each other.A Different Kind of Refusal. This is not a call to disengage from the world. It is a call to engage more deeply — but differently. To shift from: consumption → participation. dependence → sufficiency. abstraction → place

To say: We will not fund what destroys life. We will build what sustains it.The Quiet RevolutionThis path will not trend.
It will not be endorsed by those in power. It may even be dismissed as naive.But it is already happening — in small farms, in local economies, in communities choosing to live differently. Not loudly. But steadily. And perhaps that is how real change happens. Not through domination — but through thousands of small, grounded acts of refusal and creation. The future is not something we wait for. It is something we practice. And it might begin simply — with where you are, what you choose, and who you choose to stand with.

At the farmers market this morning, the exotics table looked like a small rebellion.

Soursops like prehistoric hearts. bristling, defiant. A pile of black sapote collapsing into velvet softness — the kind of fruit that refuses to be photogenic and demands to be tasted instead.Dragon fruit split open like a ceremonial offering. Rambutans wearing their pun…

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When money enters a local business like at the Byron Farmers Market, the neighbourhood bakery, or the family-run hardware store in Mullumbimby, it does not vanish into distant shareholders’ reports. Instead, it remains embodied in the region, circulating like groundwater through layers of community life. This is the essence of a closed-loop or circular economy: value does not evaporate but accumulates, nourishing the very soil from which it arose. Each transaction becomes a form of reciprocity, acknowledging that prosperity is not a commodity but a shared field of interdependence.

Take the Mullumbimby Farmers Market, purchasing directly from growers is not simply an ethical decision; it is a recognition of the relational fabric that sustains regional life. A single exchange supports a grower, who supports local jobs, who support local households, who support local culture. Cafés and restaurants, increasingly sourcing from known producers, become extensions of the farm rather than competitors to it. The farmer who sells you vegetables may later repair their tools at the local hardware shop, buy lunch from a neighbouring stallholder, or employ a local bookkeeper. The loop tightens. What looks like commerce is, in truth, a choreography of mutual reinforcement.

Santos Organics exemplifies this philosophy in practice. As a not-for-profit retailer in Byron Bay and Mullumbimby, it treats profit not as an endpoint but as a means of regenerating the landscape and the communities that care for it. Funds flow directly into regenerative agriculture, Indigenous land care, and the nurturing of small producers. This is commerce with a conscience — or more precisely, commerce that understands itself as embedded in place, soil, and story.

Energy is joining this circle as well. Zero Emissions Byron (ZEB), in collaborating with councils and local businesses, is advancing the notion that energy generation, like food, can be decentralised, democratised, and rooted in community. What once seemed idealistic now demonstrates a profound truth: resilience emerges when essential systems are held close to home. These projects are not fringe; they are foundations for a future in which regional autonomy is not rhetorical, but real.

The alternative is equally clear. Every time convenience short-circuits intention — through online retail, multinational chains, or imports — the region experiences a quiet exodus of wealth. What leaves does not return, and what remains becomes more fragile: fewer local jobs, diminished business diversity, and a thinning of the cultural uniqueness that gives these towns their identity. Extraction economies hollow out what circular economies protect.

To prioritise the local — in food, trades, services, energy, even superannuation — is to affirm a simple but profound principle: that economic vitality is strongest when value is created, circulated, and retained within the community itself. Northern NSW already possesses the talent, imagination, natural abundance, and entrepreneurial spirit required for self-sustaining prosperity. The question is whether we, as residents, choose to activate the systems that make that possible.

So yes: buy the eggs at the farmers’ market. Hire the local accountant. Repair your tools instead of discarding them for a cheaper online substitute. These choices are not nostalgic gestures in a modern world; they are acts of economic sovereignty. They say, quietly but unmistakably, that an economy should serve the people who live within it — not distant shareholders who never set foot on this land.

The farm sat nestled at the foot of a mountain and a view of the expansive ocean — a patchwork of garden beds, coconut skies, bananas, and wooden bungalows. We woke with the crowing rooster, and the day began before language. Rainbows in the sunrise. Soft greetings as we all climbed out of our bungalows and waited at the toilet line; 1 toilet 9 people. Dew on grass. The smell of the salty air. Running down into the communal kitchen where you play tag to get the hot water so you can gulp down some coffee/tea before we put our hands in the earth. Some mornings no words were spoken, some only about dreams. We all meandered up to the shed at 7:30am to convene, laugh, do a little morning shake up and discuss what needs to be completed on the farm for the morning.

The work was steady and grounding — planting, weeding, turning compost, feeding chickens. We spoke less and listened more. I started to hear the subtler sounds: the breath of soil, the whisper of wind through the corn, the pulse of rain before it arrived every night. Some afternoons, we’d wander off — hikes through forest, swims beneath waterfalls, barefoot walks along long, empty beaches and surf until our shoulders couldn’t take anymore or the sun decided to go to bed. Time stretched differently there. The days felt whole, not parcelled into hours. We learned to hitchhike — not out of necessity, but out of trust. Each ride was a story, a reminder of how open the world can be when you meet it without hurry.

I stayed humbled by my learnings; the richness of the Hawaiian culture and their love dictated learnings of the earth. How to hand pollinate the dragon fruits at night and gawk at their flowering beauty by the moon, how to propagate and pollinate vanilla, the story of Kalo (taro), pruning ulu and lychee trees, how to process coconuts to gain every inch of their 16 moons existence they go through from seed to shell, how to harvest salt, and most importantly introducing my tastebuds to an array of new fruits of the tropics!

Living in community reshaped everything. We shared meals, stories, moods, the ache in our hands. I was convinced that we were starting to share consciousness and have the same thoughts in the space we shared. We rotated chores and cooked in pairs. Evenings were candlelit — guitars, tea, soft conversation. It wasn’t always easy; there were moments of friction, of too many personalities under one small roof. But there was an honesty in it — the kind that grows from working side by side in the same patch of land.

Every Saturday, a group of us got down the valley to volunteer at the local food forest — a living classroom of fruit trees, perennials, and mulch paths spiralling into one another. Elders from the town would come to teach pruning, compost tea, seed saving. Kids climbed trees, someone brewed herbal tea from lemon balm and mint. Those mornings felt like church, only wilder and more forgiving. We gathered the fruits of the forest; Rollinias, custard apples, jaboticabas, cocoa, mamma sapotes, acerola cherries, bananas, coconuts. Some people would spend the morning cooking on fire and preparing a rainbow lunch from the forest to share in circle and speak from the heart. We would walk back to the farm with full hearts and literal handfuls of fruits and herbs from the forest, ready to experiment and tantalise our tastebuds.

The longer I stayed, the more I felt the rhythm of the place working its way beneath my skin. My senses sharpened. My body learned to read the sky for weather, the soil for moisture, the plants for what they needed. I stopped counting days. Life became a kind of conversation between me and the earth.

When I finally left, the land stayed with me — in my hands, in my sleep, in the quiet hum of remembering. The world beyond the farm felt louder, faster, thinner somehow. But beneath it all, there was still that steady rhythm, still that pulse that whispered:

You are part of this, still.

WWOOFing wasn’t an escape.
It was a return — to community, to slowness, to the original promise of being human: to care for what feeds you, and to be fed in return.

When we talk about “food,” we often think about the immediate: what’s for dinner, what’s in the fridge, what we pick up at the supermarket. But if we took a moment to step back and ask the broader question—what is a food system?. Suddenly, it’s not just about eating. It’s about land, people, culture, power, and the future. At its simplest, a food system is the set of relationships and processes that bring food from where it’s grown or caught, through all the stages of production, processing, distribution, consumption, and eventually, waste. It sounds straightforward. But the reality is far from simple. Food systems are as vast as global trade routes and as intimate as a home garden.

One of the most important things to remember is that a food system isn’t just about farming. Once food leaves the paddock, a whole chain kicks into motion: transport trucks, cold storage, abattoirs, processors, distributors, retailers. In Australia, where distances are huge, logistics are a massive part of the system. A bag of lettuce might travel thousands of kilometres before landing in your trolley. Food systems also include what happens after eating: the packaging in our bins, the scraps in our compost (or landfill), the greenhouse gases released when waste breaks down. In Australia, food waste is a major issue—around 7.6 million tonnes each year. National efforts like Food Waste for Healthy Soils Fund, and organisations like OzHarvest and Foodbank, are tackling this problem by rescuing food and diverting it from landfill.

“The web of actors, processes and interactions involved in growing, processing, distributing, consuming and disposing of foods, from the provision of inputs and farmer training, to product packaging and manufacturing, to waste recycling. A holistic food systems lens is concerned with how these processes interact with one another, and with the environmental, social, political and economic context. The food systems lens also brings to light reinforcing and balancing feedback loops, tensions between the different components and flows of food systems, and interactions that are cyclical, multilayered and multi-scale. It is a way of thinking about the world that seeks to identify the linear and non-linear relationships between the different components of the system.” International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems 2015 (IPES), p3, ‘The new science of sustainable food systems’

Culture and Power

Food systems aren’t just physical—they’re cultural. What we grow and eat reflects who we are. In Australia, this means a layered identity: native foods like kangaroo, finger lime, and warrigal greens alongside European staples like bread and beef, and more recent influences from migrant communities bringing rice, noodles, spices, dumplings, and more. Our food system is a map of migration as much as it is of agriculture. But food systems are also about power. Who owns the land? Who sets the prices? Who profits? In Australia, supermarket duopolies—Coles and Woolworths—hold extraordinary sway over what farmers get paid and what consumers see on shelves. In 2024, this concentration of power even sparked a Senate inquiry into supermarket pricing, highlighting how structural imbalance affects both growers and households. For small producers, this imbalance can be crippling. For consumers, it narrows choice and drives homogeneity.

This can be across many layers including the access and inequality of food - in wealthy suburbs, organic produce and speciality grocers flourish like the Northern Rivers. Yet, in remote places especially indigenous communities, fresh food is scarce as a result of food miles and it normally comes with a hefty price tag. These are food desert: places where geography, infrastructure, and economics make healthy food hard to access.

One striking feature of Australia’s food landscape is the lack of a coherent, up-to-date National Food Plan. The last serious attempt at a federal food strategy was in 2013, and it has since lapsed. Since then, food has been addressed in fragmented ways—through agricultural policy, health guidelines, environmental regulation, and trade deals. Unlike countries such as Canada, Australia lacks a holistic national food policy that links health, sustainability, equity, and resilience.This policy vacuum means much of the innovation is happening locally—through councils developing food resilience strategies, networks like Right to Food Coalition NSW, and community-based organisations filling the gaps. While these efforts are inspiring, they highlight the need for national leadership to knit them into a cohesive framework.

What does a healthy & sustainable food system look like?

A food system is not just a supply chain. It’s an ecosystem of relationships: soil, water, farmers, workers, corporations, governments, communities, eaters. It’s history and culture woven into every bite. It’s the greenhouse gases released by our livestock, the costs at the checkout, the memories tied to recipes passed down through families. It’s abundance and scarcity, justice and inequality, resilience and vulnerability.In Australia, our food system is unique: ancient and enduring, yet also fragile and in flux. To understand it is to see beyond the plate, to recognise that every meal connects us to land, labour, history, and future.The more we ask, what is a food system?, the more we see that it’s not just about food—it’s about how we live together on this continent, and how we’ll sustain ourselves in the years to come.

Impermanence is something most of us encounter in small, personal ways: the fleeting sweetness of summer berries, the short season of wild mushrooms, the loaf of bread that goes stale too soon. But zoom out, and impermanence defines the global food system itself. Crops rise and fall, prices swing wildly, and the very climate that sustains farming is becoming less predictable.

For decades, we built food systems to resist this reality. Industrial agriculture promised consistency: Global trade promised stability. Supermarkets gave us strawberries in December, avocados year-round, and chicken breasts in neat, uniform packages. It felt permanent, dependable. But the last few years have shown how fragile that illusion really is.

When Global Trade Hits a Wall

Weather disruptions are no longer rare events—they’re the new baseline. Heatwaves, floods, and droughts have sent prices skyrocketing. Since 2022 alone, climate shocks pushed U.S. vegetable prices up by 80%, global coffee prices by 55%, and West African cocoa prices by nearly 300%. Farmers in the U.K. reported hay yields cut in half. In southern Europe, winemakers warn that as much as 64% of traditional vineyards could vanish by 2050 if conditions continue.

None of this is abstract. It’s what makes your morning coffee more expensive, your grocery basket lighter, and your choices narrower. Impermanence isn’t just in the field; it’s in your fridge.Trade has long cushioned us from these shocks. If drought hit one region, imports from another filled the gap. But lately, those safety nets have been fraying. Wars, pandemics, and export bans have all shown how quickly supply chains can unravel.

When Ukraine’s wheat exports stopped in 2022, countries in Africa and Asia were left scrambling for staples. Earlier this summer, beef prices in the U.S. jumped over 11% in a single month—not just because of drought-shrunken herds, but also because tariffs blocked imports from Brazil. Sweden modelled a scenario of losing key food imports and found their ability to meet basic dietary needs could drop by more than 60%. Trade makes us feel secure—until it doesn’t.Perhaps the most sobering form of impermanence is what we’re losing without even noticing.

In the last century, we’ve wiped out about 70% of crop genetic diversity and nearly a third of livestock diversity. Fewer than 200 plant species now make up most of the world’s diet. This narrowing is dangerous. Diversity is nature’s insurance policy. It’s what allows some varieties of grain to withstand drought while others survive pests. Without it, impermanence turns catastrophic—when one crop fails, entire systems wobble.

Resilience Means Reinvention, Not Repetition

It is tempting to cling to stability. We want strawberries in December, avocados on toast year-round, chicken breasts packaged neatly in uniform portions. Yet this illusion of permanence is made possible only through extraction—of water, of soil nutrients, of fossil energy—and comes at a cost to both ecosystems and the communities who grow our food. Impermanence, reframed, could be a teacher. Instead of resisting it, what if our food systems worked with it? Localised, diverse farming practices are inherently resilient because they expect variability. Indigenous and traditional knowledge systems, long dismissed by industrial models, embody a deep acceptance of seasonal flux and uncertainty. Even our daily eating habits can become rituals of honouring change: eating seasonally, embracing what is abundant, and letting go when it passes. Global food systems will not—cannot—remain as they are. The question is whether we experience impermanence as collapse or as renewal. If we accept that foods will come and go, that prices will rise and fall, that what feeds us today may not feed us tomorrow, we may learn to build not permanence, but resilience.To eat, really, is to engage in impermanence. And perhaps that is less a loss than an invitation: to savour what is here, to adapt to what is next, and to let our food systems evolve with the changing world. Resilience in food systems doesn’t mean returning to a past version of stability. It means building systems that can bend without breaking—accepting that change will come, and designing with that in mind.

Learning to Eat With Impermanence

There’s a lesson here for all of us. Impermanence doesn’t have to be just loss. It can also be an invitation—to eat with the seasons, to rediscover forgotten foods, to savour what’s here now rather than clinging to what we think should always be available. Global food systems will continue to shift with prices rising and falling. Some crops may become luxuries, others may disappear. The challenge is whether we treat these changes as crises—or as openings to build something more resilient, more diverse, and perhaps even more delicious.To eat is, in the end, to participate in impermanence.

The tomato that ripens, the bread that goes stale, the seed that grows into something new. Impermanence teaches us to honour diversity, to build locally, to share seeds, to design flexible networks, and to let our tastes evolve with the seasons.To cultivate resilience is to accept that there is no “normal” to return to—only "now." In that now lies possibility: for systems that survive, thrive, and transform, not despite impermanence, but because of it.Impermanence teaches us to honour diversity, to build locally, to share seeds, to design flexible networks, and to let our tastes evolve with the seasons.

Our food systems are changing. The question is: will we change with them?