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An excerpt from Fair Food: Stories from a Movement Changing the World (edited by Nick Rose, UQP, 2015)

Food Connect works in the vein of the ‘small is beautiful’ philosophy or what others like to call ‘economies of community’ rather than the old model of ‘economies of scale’. What we’ve seen and experienced over the last 50 years or so is the slow death of small industries serving their regions.

Towns all over Australia have lost their local bakeries, abattoirs, creameries, butter factories, grain mills and greengrocers. Our culture is the poorer for it – everything has a ‘homogenised’ look, feel and taste to it. The implication is that we are also homogenising our brains.

[When I started Food Connect] I knew that distribution was where most of the inequities were in the food system, and localising a food system would address many of them. I figured if Food Connect could demonstrate the ‘how’, then we would have achieved a lot in terms of rebuilding the lost infrastructure – both physical and social – that once served our communities so well.

Fifteen years ago, permaculture grew roots in Timor Leste after the Timorese people’s incredible and tragically brutal passage to gain independence from Indonesia.

Permaculture was introduced to Timor Leste by Steve Cran and a group of Australian permies which included Lachlan McKenzie, Julianne Hartmann, Rob Swain and others. They were hoping to help rebuild and renew the country in a sustainable, culturally appropriate way. They teamed up with some of Timor Leste’s student activists from the occupation, led by Eugenio ‘Ego’ Lemos, who had already started an organic farming movement pre-independence.

Permaculture grew and slowly spread through training and demonstration sites. It was already clear that permaculture went hand in hand with community based development work and could help guide growth, livelihood and agricultural development.

When David Holmgren and Bill Mollison developed permaculture in the 1970s it was an attempt to reduce the growing environmental and social crises of modern life. Their concept emphasised designing low consumption, low pollution and highly productive human settlements. Nearly forty years later, we wanted to know what permaculture-on-the-move might look like. In November 2013, we set off on a journey to find out.

When we decided to travel up the east coast of Australia by bicycle with our two sons (aged eleven years and fourteen months) and our Jack Russell terrier, we had no idea how far north we would end up. When we loaded our panniers onto our bikes and set off from our home in central Victoria we wanted to achieve several things: expand our knowledge of freely obtainable foods in Australia; spend little money; live simply and outdoors; and produce no waste.

With so much focus on the plight of honeybees in the media these days, beekeeping has had a huge resurgence. Beehives are popping up in every suburb, in every city of the world. Everybody wants to help the bees!

WHY AND WHERE TO KEEP BEES?

Bees are the best pollinators: our gardens thrive with fruit and vegetables when we have a hive in the vicinity. Raw honey and wax are amazing gifts of nature. And the enjoyment bees give can be overwhelming. Bees need all the help we can offer them at the moment, by giving them clean organic gardens to forage in they will be much healthier.

Without the pollination services that bees provide our tables would begin to look very bare. Bees are responsible for one-third of the food we eat. In Australia around two-thirds of European-introduced horticultural and agricultural crops are entirely dependent on bees.

Without bees, forget your apples, almonds, avocados, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbages, carrots, cherries, cucumbers, celery, macadamias, mangoes and more. All these fruits and vegetables exist only because the bees exist.

Bees are the planet’s circulation. As plants have no legs they’ve evolved in ways that enrol insects to be their ‘legs’: bees spread pollen from one plant to another, leading to seed development and fruit growth. Bees are the lynchpin that keep the whole web of life alive: if they stopped moving pollen around the planet, life as we know it would end.

I love bamboo: growing, eating, crafting, building, and listening to the sounds of creaking culms and rustling leaves in the wind. It provides me with microclimates, windbreaks, privacy screens, animal fodder, wildlife habitat, an endless supply of mulch, delicious tender eating shoots, lots of materials for the garden and building small structures. My patch also sequesters the amount of CO2 generated by two overseas work flights to Asia each year, or one flight to Europe or the Americas, to teach permaculture.

When I acquired Djanbung Gardens near Nimbin, northern NSW, in the early 1990s, bamboo was going to be an important part of the overall design. I gleaned information and practical tips on the most useful varieties from several bamboo enthusiasts and growers, including Hans Erken of Earthcare Enterprises, and Victor Cusak, author of Bamboo world: the growing and use of clumping bamboos (Victor Cusack 2010), and took care where I placed the varieties in the design. We held our first bamboo workshop at Djanbung Gardens, with Hans and Victor, in 1994 and started planting. Ten years later we held another bamboo workshop, with Julianne Hartmann and Rob Swain, where I learned more of the art and tricks of building with bamboo. Since then we have conducted annual bamboo workshops during the harvest season.

Food is poised to change, more profoundly than ever before: what people eat in 2114, how it’s made and consumed, would be as strange to us as the foods our own ancestors grew and ate before the age of cold storage, takeaway and cooking shows.

This food revolution will arise out of resource pressures building up in the global food system, coupled with new technologies and emerging trends in farming, health and sustainability.

In this article I make some predictions about the future of food, based on trends and constraints. Many foreshadow magnificent new opportunities in the Age of Food.

Permafund is the ‘Permaculture International Public Fund’, for tax deductible gifts (donations), run by Permaculture International Limited trading as Permaculture Australia.

Permafund has provided much-needed funds towards projects in both Australia and overseas such as: assisting with land restoration, erosion control and vetiver grass propagation in Haiti; communitybased training and earthworks in Kenya; food-growing workshops through the Neighbourhood House in Wodonga, Victoria; and training and support for remote herder communities and livestock keepers in Pakistan. Details of two funded projects are included in the boxes.

Permafund is administered by a dedicated group of seven committee members who offer their time voluntarily, and answer to the elected board of Permaculture Australia. The committee was formed three years ago in Katoomba (Blue Mountains NSW) at a gathering titled ‘What does good permaculture aid look like?’ Bill Mollison was fond of saying that permaculture was the best aid program ever invented, so we were curious about what would work.

When it comes to growing anything, it’s all about water. You want to catch every drop of it. Moisture in the soil builds organic matter and fertility, which equals naturally healthy plants. Regardless of what you intend to grow, shaping your landscape to harvest the water is step one.

Contrary to modern landscape design, that does its best to get rid of water as quickly as possible, we want to look at our homescape as a mini-watershed where not one drop of water is going to leave. This goes for the overflow from the neighbours too; that problem is about to become a solution.

So what does this have to do with creating a planting bed? Everything: you want your beds to water themselves and pump fertility, naturally. Most raised beds you see are boxed up, and while that is a step in the right direction, you are still missing the flow.

Bulldozers are often seen as symbols of destruction, but when they are in the hands of a permaculture designer they bring about a transformation of rural landscapes beyond anything that can be achieved by hand. Yandoit Farm, between Castlemaine and Daylesford in Central Victoria, is undergoing a five-year wholefarm makeover. In April this year, many litres of diesel were burned in a permaculture festival of earth moving! These once-in-a-lifetime landscape improvements were carried out alongside an earthworks course so that students could get direct experience of the process.

When Michael and Lisa Jackson bought this beautiful 140 acre property along the Jim Crow Creek, they took on a going concern, with tractors, equipment, a shed full of hay … and cows, lots of them. With a great sense of responsibility for their sixtysix newly acquired family members, they dived into everything bovine. Michael said, ‘It wasn’t long before we noticed health issues emerging within the herd. Although minor and considered “normal” by traditional farming folk, we weren’t comfortable with this. A friend introduced us to Pat Colby’s book Natural Farming [Scribe Publications, 2004] which provided many of the answers. The overgrazing had depleted key minerals and compacted the soil drastically, reducing its microbial biodiversity. Sick soil = sick pasture = sick cows, and so the quest began. We are fortunate to have David Holmgren, Dan Palmer and Darren Doherty in the area and, as well as drawing on their advice, we have completed our PDCs and are fully focused on the regeneration of Yandoit Farm.’