180. We're Very Close to a Tipping Point: Rachel Ward & Jade Miles, live in Margaret River

Rachel Ward is a famed actress, film-maker and now farmer. Jade Miles is the CEO of Sustainable Table, author of Futuresteading, and steward of the incredible Black Barn Farm. We shared this conversation with a live audience after a screening of Rachel’s brilliant documentary, Rachel’s Farm. It was a curtain raiser to the Regenerative Agriculture Conference in Margaret River WA, and the penultimate event of Rachel’s film tour of 30 or so locations around the country.

That lent a certain perspective to this conversation – a kind of overview of the movement, and the country. And that met Jade’s vantage point, also touring the country and researching the world with a different lens, as CEO of Sustainable Table. You might recall their launch event which became episode 161 earlier this year, Regenerating Investment in Food & Farming.

Unsurprisingly, talking with these two women at this time resulted in a very personal, hard-hitting, and inspired take on where things are at, what’s coming down the line, and the stories helping to make it happen.

You’ll hear the 3 of us in conversation for the first 15 minutes or so, then we interweave into our chat a handful of questions from the audience - who are also among the regenerative pioneers in this country.

Head here for automatic cues to chapter markers (also available on the embedded player on the episode web page), and a transcript of this conversation (please note the transcript is AI generated and imperfect, but hopefully serves to provide greater access to these conversations for those who need or like to read).

This conversation was recorded on 5 September 2023.

Title slide: Jade Miles and Rachel Ward on stage (pic: Olivia Cheng).

Music:
Regeneration, by Amelia Barden, off the soundtrack for the film Regenerating Australia.

Find more:
To screen the film, gain access to resources etc., head to the Rachel’s Farm website.

You can hear Rachel and Anthony in conversation just before the film’s premiere and tour, with Rachel’s co-star Mick Green, in episode 168.

You’ll find Jade at Black Barn Farm, Sustainable Table, and on episode 128 of this podcast: Operating at Human Speed. Stay tuned for more on her next book soon.

This conversation took place after a screening of Rachel’s Farm, as a curtain raiser to the Regenerative Agriculture conference 2023.

Join us at the RE:CONNECTION Festival this weekend (subscribers get a 10% discount – subscribe and see the discount code on the recent posts on

Transcript

Jade: 0:00

It's also a visibility thing, like the number of bloody politicians that tell us that we're a tokenistic tin pot kind of emerging market. Well, actually, let's have a really good hard look at who we are and what we're doing. When you actually look at us all in one place and we're visible, we are actually more than a movement. We're a new paradigm of operation. A nd it's about making it visible.

Anthony: 0:22

G' day, Anthony James here. You're with The RegenNarration, sharing the stories that are changing the story. Coming to you today from the Massy Farm en route to the ReConnection Festival this weekend. I'm sitting on a very quiet hill amongst a stony outcrop that I feel like asked me to sit here. It feels pretty incredible, to tell you the truth. Though, fyi, this isn't the farm of the famed Reed Warbler. That's actually over the way a little bit at the Vincent family's place, and the current manager of that place, Sam Vincent, has just written a fascinating book too, or re-released one called My Father and Other Animals. I've just received the re-release, so hopefully we'll get Sam on at some point. Anyway, I couldn't imagine a better place to record this intro to this week's episode. The voice you heard at the top was Jade Miles, the CEO of Sustainable Table and steward of the incredible Black Barn Farm in Victoria, and this is the famed actress, farmer and filmmaker, Rachel Ward.

Rachel: 1:27

This company, you guys, I mean that's - this tribe has so fortified me and made me feel like 'God, if we can get this out there', if we can, if we can do what we do on a large scale and amp this up, we are going to be okay.

Anthony: 1:48

The three of us shared this conversation after a screening of Rachel's brilliant documentary Rachel's Farm. It was a curtain raiser to the Regenerative Agriculture Conference in Margaret River, WA, in September. We'll have more for you from there soon too. But first this penultimate event of Rachel's film tour of 30 or so locations around the country. That lent a certain perspective to this conversation, a kind of overview of the movement and the country, and that met Jade's vantage point, also touring the country and researching the world with the different lens. As CEO of Sustainable Table. Y ou might recall their launch event, which became episode 161 earlier this year - regenerating investment in food and farming. Unsurprisingly, talking with these two women at this time resulted in a very personal, hard hitting and inspired take on where things are at, what's coming down the line and the stories helping to make it happen. You'll hear the three of us in conversation for the first 15 minutes or so. Then we interweave into our chat a handful of questions from the audience who are also among the regenerative pioneers in this country.

Anthony: 3:01

Before we start, thanks very much to Rachel Kirsop for your generous subscription, or what Patreon is calling membership now, which I quite like. And Ben Symons, thanks for jumping back on having been one of the very first subscribing members. I really appreciate it. It's what makes this ad-free, freely available podcast possible. If you're also finding value in it, please consider joining Rachel and Ben and a great community of supporting listeners with as little as $3 a month or whatever amount you can and want to contribute. Yep, there are benefits, like some behind the scenes footage from me, discounts to events like the Reconnection Festival coming up on Saturday and, of course, you'll continue to receive the podcast every week. Head to the website via the show notes RegenNarration. com/support.

Anthony: 3:48

And thanks again. L et's join Rachel and Jade in Margaret River. Rachel Ward! Rachel: thank you, thank you. AJ: And that is Jade Miles, as you heard before up the end. J ade is from a farm in Victoria called Black Barn Farm - worth looking up the website, because I can't possibly encapsulate how amazing it is to be there in a few words on this stage. She wrote a book called Futures teading and she hosts a podcast of the same name, futures teading. She's also CEO of an organisation called Sustainable Table, which is increasingly getting interested in what's happening in Western Australia, but we might explore some of that a bit later. I wanted to say to start off welcome West, it's really special to have you here and it's really special to be able to talk about your film.

Rachel: 4:37

So great to be here and so great to see rain. Can we please just blow it over the east, because we have none!

Anthony: 4:42

This is true even north of here, they'd say the same thing. Now Rachel, first thing to say, is obviously well done on the film. But also it seems poignant to say that you had another grandchild very recently and knowing how much your grandchild at the time meant to you, resulting in this film, I wonder how different the birth of this one feels to you now, in the wake of it and everything you've learned since. It's a toughie.

Rachel: 5:12

Well, I feel like when the other one was born, I just felt I wasn't doing my bit. I just felt an enormous need to weigh in on what I felt was enormous climate anxiety, basically, and particularly highlighted by the birth of my first grandchild and the realization that I was going to be fine. You know, I wasn't really. I mean, it was bad enough. Experiencing those files was bad enough and I just felt it was only going to get more extreme. Events were going to get more extreme and I just felt that I couldn't really live with myself unless I weighed in in a much bigger way into trying to find, trying to respond to what I was feeling was a was a was just enormous.

Rachel: 6:07

I mean, I think everybody responds to it very differently. I mean I wasn't frightened by COVID, but I'm deeply frightened by the fires, the, particularly the fires, the decimation of Canada, maui. I mean those are just. They are just extreme events and I just feel there's no escaping from them. They are going to come and they're going to accelerate and they're going to be enormous and there's yeah, there's some people can bury themselves, somebody can go into denial mode. I couldn't do that.

Audience Question: 6:44

The more.

Rachel: 6:45

I read about it, the worse it became. And I think just being now having turned my farm around made a film, particularly awareness as a consumer, what I'm buying, what I, just as one consumer, every time I eat, making that choice to eat something that is from best practice farms. So I think that when I had by the time I've just had my third grandchild and she came just after I was doing a Q&A and there she was and I felt I felt much more easy about it because not that I feel any more hope, not that I feel I'm going to turn the world around, obviously.

Rachel: 7:30

but I feel that this company, you guys I mean that's so this tribe has so fortified me and made me feel like God. If we can get this out there, if we can do what we do on a large scale and amp this up, we are going to be okay. And I just felt, you know, read Charlie Massey's book and I just felt such hope from that, from his blueprint of what we need to do, I felt, well, that's it, that's the answer. And, you know, ever subsequently, obviously doing a lot more work and a lot more research on it and going on this trip and making the film, I feel we are in safe hands if we can scale this up.

Anthony: 8:16

Jade. I'm curious, then, from your perspective, because Rachel originally set out to make a film about those people and then the film, the producer said, no, no, the story's in you and your experience here, which was a great move too, but there was so much research that went into the back of it, so she got this lens on the country and has since had a lens on the country with touring the film that you're talking to there, rachel.

Anthony: 8:38

I'm curious for you, jade, as someone who's got to know the country pretty significantly too, through your writing and podcasting and everything you run out of the farm and, of course, now with your sustainable table leadership role, that's getting right around the country, indeed, mapping a lot of this stuff that's happening around the country. What are you seeing? What's your read on where this is at and where it's going?

Jade: 9:01

A little bit of context, I guess, is that the way I observe and the way I understand what's happening in countries, based on a childhood that really put me deeply on country in community and Aboriginal communities. For most of my childhood I lived around a campfire and we unschooled and I had the beautiful experience of being raised in an environment where observation and deep connection and interaction with everything that was going on around me became pretty innate. I learnt to read the shadows and I learnt to read the length of the light and I learnt to interpret the landscape in a way that felt pretty intuitive. And so, just like you, rach, I feel like I kind of hit that wall too and thought Jesus at that point had three small children and thought what if one day they look me in the eye and they say you knew what the hell was going on and you did nothing? And at that point we were pretty heavily involved in the food system, in advocacy around food system change and food system policy, and had founded a local food co-op and were building farming networks in our region. There's nothing quite like having your hands in the dirt, because it's a microcosm of really what's happening systemically and it's an ability to really understand the complexity of what's going on out of sight, so under the ground, in that micro-isle network of what's going on above the ground, with the sort of consumers who are starting to shift their lens and their understanding of what their role in this is, and also at a political level.

Jade: 10:51

You know the earth is warming and the narrative is changing and the country is galvanising and there's no doubt that we're very close, if not there, to a tipping point, and you saw Charlie say it online. You know it sits with the power paradigm sits with very few, but I feel like what's happened in the last maybe two to three years, in fact probably since the fires, there's been this sense that now is the time for individuals to garner a sense of collectivism and, as has always been the case, it is the individuals who drive change. At a political level, governments follow, they don't lead, they've never led, and they can't. They're too bureaucratic and they're too slow and cumbersome. So actually it sits in our everyday lives, in our everyday decisions that we make, because if we choose decisions that ultimately result in the regeneration of life for an animal or for a human, or for an ecosystem or for a culture, we actually have the ability to rebuild the systems that define the way we exist and you know, when you decide you're going to buy a yellow berina, you end up seeing yellow berinas everywhere you go.

Jade: 12:13

I don't even know if they made berinas in yellow, but I don't know if it's that I'm sitting in a bell jar or an echo chamber. But there is definitely a more comfortable conversation. I had a conversation on my podcast with someone maybe in the first season, 100 or so episodes ago, and we were talking about collapse and the response that a collapse, inevitability and you know guy, and awakening these sorts of terms that really weren't acceptable at two or three years ago and I feel like they are now not maybe a mainstream narrative, but they're definitely understood and they're embraced and people are leaning right into them.

Anthony: 12:51

That's very interesting. I find that too, and I cue into the fact that both of you really talked about the fact that your sucker is coming from connecting with each other in this. So in a sense, I want to bring in part of what we were talking about outside before we came in here, in that sense, some of the power that each of you have seen in gathering just humbly, almost like this but one of you cared to take up where we were going at this outside some of the power and the value just from getting together.

Jade: 13:23

I've got a few beautiful stories here. Happy for me to chat Rach. So we founded a local food co-op in our community of just two and a half thousand people and as part of that we undertook a fairly solid education initiative to build the audience base. And we did this for a couple of years and as a part of that we developed a local food action plan and we developed local food policy and kind of top down, bottom up initiatives that were all culminating in this sort of local food system gathering momentum. And we were probably into our third year of operating this and a fifth generation farmer knocked on our door and said I've just had coals pull their contract on our family owned farm with small scale, as you know, it's where I have my orchard as well and he said I'm done. That means I'm completely done.

Jade: 14:12

Without him taking the pink ladies and the grannies this year I don't make any profit and really the reality is I probably need to push my trees out. So five generations of orcharding was about to be pushed out and I said don't push them out, this is on a Tuesday, let us get a group of people together and we'll come and do the peak. And he said it's not going to happen. He didn't get back to me until the Friday and he said okay, let's do it. You have two hours, two hours on Sunday afternoon, let's see what happens. So we put it out to our networks. Because we were networked, because people trusted us and because people actually wanted to know where the hell their food came from. So we put it out to our networks. Thanks to social media we could go pretty wide, pretty fast. We had 450 people turn up. They picked every last apple out of that orchard. We had a lot of people who were actually with suitcases and with washing baskets and he came and sat at our kitchen table an hour after everybody went home and he sobbed on our kitchen table and he said do you know what happened today?

Jade: 15:09

He said people asked me my name. He said never in all of my years and all of my dad's years and all of my grandfather's years, while we put food on the back of a truck, did anyone ever ask us our name. He said those people wanted to know who grew their food. They held my arm as they asked me my name and there was this relational thing that happened. He said I've never had that experience and it was that that made me think shit.

Jade: 15:38

We've got to shorten supply chains because if we don't do that soon, we're going to have fifth generation orchardists and farmers walking off their land because they can't make a buck out of the long supply chain commodity markets that are dominating in this country. And we've got to know where our food comes from, because when that apple has dents on it because there was a late hail storm or it's got rings of rust on it because there was a late frost, you care if you know the name of the farmer and you care if you understand the vagaries that they underwent. But as long as we've got long supply chains and disconnected humans and we don't know where our food comes from, we're happy to waste it. We push for lower prices. We don't care about the ecological impact that happens. We actually need to come together and we actually need to localize our food systems and we support our farmers and we pay the true price of food.

Anthony: 16:33

I really feel that, jade, because I see it through those things that do bring tears to the eyes. It's magic, it's reconnection. And, Rachel, I wonder if I'm preempting what you're thinking, because when Jade talks about really just the get up and let's do it factor, that's what you've seen a fair whack of too much, not the least yourself, but younger generations too.

Rachel: 16:56

I it's been great. One of the most wonderful things is not only meeting so many people who come and who are interested and who are obviously on the same page and obviously are feeling the same anxiety as many of us, but it's been the people on the panel that I've had after the film. We always have a number of people on the panel from each community that are in the sort of place, whether they be farmers or foodies or education, and there was one that particularly stands up, stands out a woman called Eilish Maloney and she has a place in Barreville and she has something called the what If Society and she has two cafes now where when you walk into the cafe there is a map of New South Wales and Barrel is there and around there are all these little crosses and then beside that is all the farms Blue Duck Farm or Magnolia Farm or whatever where all the produce comes from. And there is, you know, you can't get avocado there, you can't have avocado and toast because they don't grow avocados in Barreville. And also beside each item, each farm, is the distance from where the foods come. So it's all local, it's all seasonal and it's all from best practice farms and it is going gangbusters and you just kind of think everybody's, there's so many foodies out there, there's so many cafes and restaurants and you go.

Rachel: 18:18

Why hasn't have more people understood the virtue of provenance and how really that's what we're looking for? I mean, I find it really hard to go out anywhere because I don't know what I'm eating. I make myself very annoying by saying where is this, where is this bacon from? Because it was not free range, it's a pig that's grown up in a farrow, in a farrow crate. And it's those questions we need to keep asking. And we need to start asking and making ourselves annoying and just sort of you know, go to the. Well, if you don't know, ask the chef. Where is this food from? And in marketing they say that one person who complains or writes a letter or whatever represents a thousand people. So if three people start to ask where it's from, the retailers will have to start changing and we just need to ask those questions. That I think, and just make that. And also, you know, opening a restaurant or a cafe Build on the provenance. I don't understand why more people aren't doing that.

Rachel: 19:25

And also, the other thing that I was very inspired by, too, was these young farmers, young farmers who have not got a farm through succession, who have not got a lot of money maybe were tradies have cashed in their trucks and their stuff whatever you use, the plumbing or whatever that stuff and have started with a small farm.

Rachel: 19:50

Actually, these particular ones their family have retired. They got about 100 acres somewhere and they started using that farm to farm 50 cows and then they just did somewhere else another 50 cows and then they had chickens on another place and that family is just going gangbusters I mean a lot of hard work and they are farming right and they are getting their food into the best restaurants. And you think it can be done because obviously there's a dearth of young farmers out there. We need to get more farmers. Young farmers are on the land and it's difficult because obviously it's hugely expensive. But the adjusting thing is the way to go because you don't need the land and that was kind of a revelation for me to know that that it's actually possible for young people to get out from behind a desk and go and farm, even if they don't, you know, haven't succeeded a farm or cooperatively.

Jade: 20:44

So we've got three other farmers on our farm because there's bits of the farm that we haven't got capacity to deliver ourselves, so we cooperatively manage it.

Anthony: 20:52

Oh, so many ways. I hear so many of these stories come out and obviously we've talked a bit about it. You know the spears and so much of this flies under the radar until you see it in a film like yours. Does anyone want to chime in at this point? Thank, you.

Audience Question: 21:05

I'm a farmer from Manchamup, about an hour and a half away.

Anthony: 21:08

What's your name?

Audience Question: 21:09

Mitchell, just a question for you, rachel, a bit of advice maybe. I've found with Regen it's a big, the journey is it's all about acceptance of failure. I've found because you're implementing a lot of different and unknown pathways. So when times are tough, what have you found that has helped you maintain motivation and keep the passion going and keep your energy levels up?

Rachel: 21:37

Mentors, mentors who've gone before me. I think what's really important is that anybody embarking on this journey needs to have someone you know that they can call and go. I don't know where I'm going here. This isn't working. Is this normal? I've, you know, got these bloody buffalo flies. I'm going to have to do. What do I do? Da-da-da. And I had a guy up the road who's been doing this 40 years and he went it's just, it'll pass. It'll pass.

Rachel: 22:12

It's nature rebalancing itself. For anyone who saw Biggest Little Farm and saw that once you take your foot off the neck of nature, nature goes boom, boom. You know it's like fires off all over the place. And so where they got the snails and the voles? We've got the buffalo fly and the ticks, and we've already seen this year the buffalo flies were already much less bad. We got the ticks this year and you know there are times when you just want to go. This is great. It doesn't work.

Rachel: 22:41

In my area, you know, I've got a particular area. I'm subtropical, my soil is leached, it's not going to work. And then you find somewhere. It's very important that that person is in the same environment that you are in and that has been at it and has gone through those times and can just, you know, just assure you that you are on the right path or if there's something else you can try. And I also found the EOV very comforting too, because I you know, this year we've pretty much steadied my last EOV reading. I'm not doing that huge leap forward, but I'm definitely still moving forward. So that tells me. I mean, you can do it with a soil test. You don't need to have the EOV, particularly unless you really want that detail, but you can tell in your soil when you're on the right path. And yeah, there are going to be setbacks and Terry Makoski here is. You can nudge him and ask him because he knows it all.

Anthony: 23:45

You're in the right place right there, Jade. Actually I'd love to come to you at this moment because you are increasingly involved in some of the stuff happening west right now. Can you tell us anything about what you're seeing and what you're working at?

Jade: 23:58

I can't tell you about the exact projects.

Jade: 24:01

We are trying to replicate something with the state government that is similar to something we're doing in Queensland with the Office of the Great Barrier Reef, and that's really about bringing funding from the private sector. So high net worth individual philanthropists fund us and they then that enables us to go out and find projects that are replicable or scalable right across the country and, given that you've got some really exciting grains projects happening over here, they're a fair priority for us. There's also a bit of collaboration really strong collaboration, going on around distribution, key distribution portals, and that's pretty exciting because for a state that's as geographically big as it is, it doesn't have a lot of infrastructure in place because you've got the domination of centralised processing facilities, and that changes the way this whole state operates from an agricultural perspective. That doesn't necessarily play out in every other state, but it certainly does in WA, and so if we can get some private funding into some on-farm solutions that are then shared collaboratively across multiple farmers, it can change the system because it changes the supply chain.

Anthony: 25:14

Terrific, very exciting stuff. We were just up in the Kimberley attestation, which I did mean to say. Rachel had buffalo flies happening, yeah, but they too were finding their passing. They sort of did the whole Nicole Masters wait five minutes and, metaphorically speaking, sometimes a bit longer, and it's not always easy, is it? But yeah, it was playing out there too. And yeah, speaking of those vast terrains where it's under agricultural lease, these are the things that could be done, and we'll hear some of this at the conference too, no doubt Anyone else A blithe counten here from Runnymede Farm near Harvey.

Jade: 25:49

Rachel, I'm just curious about what you're excited about now, both in the farm and your life in general. What's next?

Rachel: 25:58

Well, I'd really like to. We've sort of come to the end of the Q&A tour and you know, with these films you have quite a long tail because it's really hard to get them out into the theaters and for them to stand the theaters and for exhibitors to hang in there with them. Documentaries really play better when they're on. I mean, they just get an audience when they go on to streaming and hopefully some free-to-wear. So that will come. We'd really like to get it into the States and into Europe, but it's hard. It's hard because you're not going to get these days, you're not really going to get into the theaters and you're not going to get what's called a theatrical distribution. This is a feature doc, so it's a theatrical length. The streamers aren't buying them and the exhibitors don't really want them. So you kind of have to do this thing called forewalling, which is where you set up. You have a service provider who sets up cinemas in areas where people are interested, where you get a collection of probably out of the cities more, where you get farming communities, food communities well, they're everywhere, but farming communities, people who you know are going to, you're going to target them specifically and that gets put on and you get a cut of the ticket prices and that goes on to fund the next one and the next one, and the next one. So it's a lot more work, it's a lot more involvement. It's much harder than just releasing a narrative, so you really have to get behind it and push it.

Rachel: 27:41

But I think it's really. That's what grassroots movements are and that's the way they've always gone. You just really have to kick ass and make sure it's like I was just going. You can take a horse to water, but in this case you've got to hold its bloody head in the trough. You've got to make it impossible for people.

Rachel: 28:00

But really I didn't make this for farmers. Really I made this for the consumer. I made this for someone who was as ignorant as I was only three years ago. I did not know where my food came from. I didn't care, I had no idea what was being sprayed on it. I had no idea of the whole chemical thing. I mean, I sort of knew, but I didn't want to know.

Rachel: 28:21

And it was really only when I was sort of forced to face, really, the I mean it was really listening to Zach Bush, really understanding the whole what was going on with our endocrine, the diseases, the exponential health issues that are coming from our gut, problems which basically move exactly in the same degree as our crops are our farming goes. This thing that really struck me was he was trying to find evidence that glyphosate was really impacting on us and he was convinced that that was absolutely impacting on cancer. He had this thing. Where he went cancerally in America is between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. That is cancer. That's where the most cancers are in the States. He went oh, that doesn't kind of work because that's not big farming country but of course it was the bottom of the All the farming countries where all the tributaries are of the Mississippi.

Rachel: 29:26

So all of the glyphosate is coming into the water table, getting into the rivers and concentrating right down in between Baton Rouge and he. Just there are little stories like that that just you can't unthink. You just they're there forever, and I guess that's what I wanted to do, was to just get some of those. Yeah, just make people understand, or help people understand, how important it is that they look for food from best practice farms and really weigh into that, because it won't change unless we start to ask, because at the moment, all we're asking for is cheaper and cheaper food and still we start to go no, we want healthier and healthier food. It won't change.

Anthony: 30:13

We don't need to look to the US for those examples either. The Murray Darling is in all sorts of trouble, obviously.

Audience Question: 30:18

Yeah, yes, michael from Kinship Farms, and thank you very much, rachel. It's wonderful what you've done with this documentary, the film, in getting this message out, out into the communities to, I suppose, be that other voice against those competing industries that we've spoken about. So I just wanted to raise the point that it's sort of implied how do we increase that message, how do we amplify it and really make a difference when we've got that big corporate umbrella sitting over the top of everything? Kinship Farms, we're embarking on doing our part. I won't use this platform to promote that Visit Kinship Farms website if you want to understand what we're doing, but one of the things that we can do at the grassroots level, I think, is being educated in the conversations that we have. And I'll just use one example In our endeavours we've looked and done a lot of research into what the United Nations do through their United Nations environmental program and through their food and agriculture organisation.

Audience Question: 31:36

Just one statistic that comes from their research we need to increase food production by 60% by 2050 to feed the growing population. But they go on to say that it's not possible through conventional farming, through the practices that dominate at the moment, and that we must do things differently. So my point is I think it's incumbent on everyone to educate themselves with firm statistics or firm facts that they can introduce into conversations, just to have that little bit more impact that then drives people to say, hang on, this is a real problem and we need to address it.

Anthony: 32:21

Thank you, I'm going to you for that. I've got your next book in mind.

Jade: 32:26

Australia is the global leader in food waste and last year we wasted 63% of all food that was produced in our country. That happens right across the supply chain, but the vast majority of that happens at either end of the supply chain, so at the Farmgate, where they some sectors are worse than others, like the banana industry and the cane industry. There's quite a bit of waste there. Some of those firm facts I agree a lot of people lean towards facts and I know when I talk about some results that came away from the Australian Farmers Federation survey that's done annually are shocking. One of them this year was that 35% of all farmers that were surveyed in the last 12 months have considered or have undertaken self-harm or suicide. 45% of them have considered walking off the land because of the pressure of the debt that they're facing into. The reality of that is that we don't have a food system, because if they walk off the land, it's not just those that are farming that are impacted or those farming communities. It's everybody who puts food in their mouth.

Anthony: 33:34

I don't even think it's what we would call a food system with them there. If that's how it's done, that's something else and it's not healthy. But just to go on, the main gist of your next book coming out sort of extends that point, though, doesn't it? With regards to what else?

Jade: 33:52

So, while you guys were watching, we were conversing and we were talking about the power of collaboration and collectivity, and the first step for people to really start to change the way they think about the food on their plate is to understand where it comes from and to start to build some of those skills themselves. And with a centralised, disconnected, long supply chain system, it's very difficult to get people to understand where that food comes from because, like Rach just said, it's all about costing convenience and it's not about actually thinking about the way in which food actually connects all of these other systemic issues within our existence. But we were talking when we were out there about the fact that we have this very reductionist approach to the way in which we engage and communicate, and that is done largely through the written or the spoken word. But the thing with words is that it's been so heavily dominated across especially the last industrial century, by the scientific paradigm, which tends to remove heart and it tends to remove feelings.

Jade: 34:59

But as a custodial species, we were born with a head and a heart and hands that give us the ability to interact so deeply not only with each other but with our ecology and truly understand how we form an integrated part of that, and so the way in which we communicate doesn't just have to be through words.

Jade: 35:20

We can find deep connection in place with trees and with animals, and with insects and with gut biome, and with song and with dance and with food. There are so many ways that we can find to build deep connection, not only to place and to ourselves, but to our kin around us, not just our family, but our slightly broader community. But it's about having a desire to do that, and that would also require a huge amount of compromise, because humans are complex and our modern day world encourages us to be individuals, but at no point in time prior to the industrial age, where we had access to low cost energy, where we ever silos, we never operated in isolation because we didn't. Our survival depended on these complex communities that we were part of, and so we actually need to find a way back to that, and that's why we were talking about all these other ways that we can do it, because sometimes words aren't necessarily an easy way to navigate humanity. Sometimes it's easier with a casserole.

Anthony: 36:33

Sounds bloody good to me, frankly.

Audience Question: 36:36

At the start of the documentary. Rachel, you said that you grew up in the Cotswolds I did too still in the world. The thing that I find about living in Australia is there are no public rights away across the country. We don't have access into our agricultural land. We may be able to go for a walk on a path that DBCA have put through the forest, but we can't walk into our lands. I say our lands, but the collective agricultural lands are shut up and we have no access to it. So how can we connect, how can we feel that connection with the livestock? How can we feel proud of our practices if we're literally shut out of it? 100%.

Rachel: 37:24

Aren't they wonderful, those bridal paths all the way throughout England, brilliant, anybody. And it's up to the custodians to maintain those paths too, so that it's absolutely accessible for anybody to walk on those places and take their dogs, and it's magic.

Anthony: 37:44

Interesting, given in the context of the enclosures being so fundamental to how our system set up, but that that remains, it's one of the things I miss the most Funny.

Rachel: 37:55

after that, I did a bike ride today and I went down the Wadiah path. That was like it. I actually felt when I was on that path I went this is like a bridal path. Councils are starting to do that, and particularly when the old railway lines have been disbanded and they've put access for bikes and things like that. We just need to push councils to do it more. I agree I was sitting there thinking, god, I would really love to have this through my property. I'd love people to be able to walk through it and to be part of it and to do it. But we've got this terrible thing at the moment, which is over the top, which is this you know that shut. It's not shut the gate, it's the biosecurity, that bloody over the top biosecurity. I mean, really, where did that come from and where did we get so pedantic about this whole thing? I mean, I can't go anywhere and I used to ride all over my area and through farm properties. Everybody was completely okay about it and welcome to it.

Anthony: 38:58

So it came from the industrial system, because, if you do it like that it's like, wipe every other form of like, wipe the microbes out. So some of the small operators around here which, by the way, have the Bibelman track going through it they're down in the south west but some of the small operators here have had that sort of health system look for compliance from them and they're like you want to know where the waste goes. It's on the paddock, so just that inappropriate. It goes with that territory.

Rachel: 39:25

And also it goes with people hiding things. You kind of feel like nobody really farmers are nervous about people coming through. And also the over the top reaction to weeds, like suddenly we're going to drop some weeds somewhere and it's going to. I mean, I'm sure that it does happen and I'm being glib about it. But yeah, I agree, missed that and maybe that's something we all need to push councils on, as well. As stop using glyphosate on the road sides. I don't know about yours here, but you look like you're a bit better than we are. It's just shocking. Near bus, near where the kids get the buses, just the whole side, just the whole paths, or just dead from that, from that spread, get contractors in with the glyphosate and they just spray it everywhere.

Anthony: 40:14

I think your question is a very good one and I think there are many, many answers to it as well. I chime in that a lot of our national estate is public land. It's least held in stations, so it is a house, you know, as you put it. And again the good ones will say that I said this is yours, I'm managing it for you. How would you have me do it and how can you help me get a constituent base? Because they'd aren't it? There was like a few of them out there over millions and millions of acres. They don't carry political power but we could for them. So they want to connect to say that that's some of, I think, the answer. But, Jada, I think of your situation.

Jade: 40:51

I would also say that if you connect with a farmer who is happy to have you on their farm we are open 24 seven and people come through our property all the time, quite intentionally, because we want them to see how we farm, why we farm People say to us all the time it looks like a bloody mess, but really that's because we intentionally let a fair bit of wild take place between all our orchard rows and all our berry rows, because we want rich biodiversity and you know, those ecosystems are what we're enhancing and so we encourage people to come. So there's lots of people just like us that encourage you to come to have a look and to ask questions and to understand. It's critical we need to open these pathways of communication.

Anthony: 41:32

And then, of course, you do have welfare programs and the like, which I don't mention glibly because you were saying before that that's how you've ended up with the partners that you referred to earlier is through people who stuck and build trust and your connection and things are happening from there Over to you.

Audience Question: 41:49

Thank you. Distribution of the film, as you said, it's very hard. Like the whole of Australia, there are rotary clubs, Lions clubs, apex clubs. They could come on board. There's also people like here, the art center. There are community. Various communities around Australia have arts centres and community resource centres. They would be very happy, I'm sure, to put on a film night for their community and that would be one way. I don't know what the costs involved are, but that's you could get it to quite a wide audience.

Rachel: 42:33

Yes, a lot of things that social impact documentaries have now is an impact campaign, which we do have, and we have it through Regen Studios, which have been the producers of Damon Gamu's films, 2040, regenerators and so on. That is Jade's map. Jade has this amazing map where the farmers that are best practice farmers whether they be Regen, organic permaculture, women ran, indigenous ran, whatever you can find what you want on that map and if you indeed have a farm and you are you don't even have to be paddock to plate. If you just have a farm, get on that map. You know, because it's, you do have to go through quite a, quite a vetting process.

Jade: 43:20

Which is every single applicants. There's no grainwashing, I promise.

Rachel: 43:24

Yeah, but we need more and more because we need to. We need to give people options, and if they don't have options, they can't navigate around the locked-in food chain system. If we offer them Alternatives, I'm sure people will go, because I think it's an awareness. There's no question that consciousness is changing.

Jade: 43:45

It's also a visibility thing, like the number of bloody politicians that tell us that we're a tokenistic Tim pot kind of emerging market. Well, actually, let's have a really good hard look at who we are and what we're doing. When you actually look at us all in one place and we're visible, we are actually more than a movement where we're a new paradigm of operation and it's it's about making it visible. So if you are one of those, jump on. It's free. It just takes you about half an hour to fill it out, but that's just so that we can feel confident that everyone that we put on there is true.

Anthony: 44:18

That's with sustainable table. If you didn't catch it earlier, it's almost like you were a plant. That's the perfect way to end it Because we are out of time, but there is a website that you might have caught at the end of the film where you can go on with all sorts of other things, including requesting your own community screening.

Anthony: 44:35

So if you're in such right clubs or Any other place, schools, whatever, or even just your house have a sort of a house concert with the film. You can do this. Just request it and they will set you up.

Rachel: 44:46

It's all part of the. You host it. You sell tickets, so the host has has a nominal fee. It also comes with a lot of Fantastic additional materials that you can hand around to everybody who comes to your screening. Absolutely, that is. That is the way to go so that website. It's either the Regenerators or it is Rachel's farm filmcom.

Anthony: 45:13

I do want to thank Saul Cresswell. I s he in the house? There he is, Saul Cresswell. He's really responsible for us being here at all, triggered it, and then everyone else joined in. It's another great case in point, in his work with the Shire. A nd Anna Kaplan and the team at Regen Studios, who have been mentioned here and were on screen too. And everyone else involved in making this happen. A nd you guys being here is just terrific.

Rachel: 45:39

AJ: I know it wasn't easy. Rachel: And thank you, Anthony, very much. AJ: Thanks.

Anthony: 45:45

Thank you. I Also want to thank Danny and the team at HEART for having us and managing this so well. Thanks very much to our mic- holders and, above all, please thank our special guests, Rachel Ward and Jade Miles. That was Rachel Ward and Jade Miles live in Margaret River. For more on Rachel and Jade, how to see and support the film Rachel's Farm, and how to follow up any other threads spoken about here, see the links in the show notes.

Anthony: 46:16

The next major gathering is just days away now in the northern rivers of New South Wales. The Reconnection festival features Zach Bush, Charles Eisenstein ( virtually), and a range of brilliant artists, performers, farmers, doctors, writers, educators, media, entrepreneurs, facilitators and more, in conversation with each other and me as emcee. There'll be many other trailblazing folk in attendance too. And podcast subscribers you get a 10% discount, so just see my recent posts on patreon for the discount code. Subscribers also get behind-the-seeds footage, photos, invitations, tips and other stuff, so if you've been thinking about becoming a subscriber, I'd love you to join us.

Anthony: 46:58

It's with thanks, as always, to this community of generous supporters that this episode was made possible. Just head to the website via the show notes RegenNarration. com/ support and thanks again. A kookaburra just flew straight past my face. It was quiet so you weren't to know, so I had to tell you. Anyway. Thanks also for sharing the podcast when you think of someone who might enjoy it and, of course, for continuing to rate and review it on your favored app. It does all help. The music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barden off the soundtrack to the film Regenerating Australia. My name is Anthony James. See some of you on Saturday and thanks for listening.