About me, the local area and why I built this website.

Locally growing food for local people, thriving rural communities, gardening / permaculture, regenerative farming and farm life in general have been passions of mine for a long time.

I decided to write this about my local area on the "Discovery Coast" a little place called Agnes Water / 1770 and the surrounding towns and areas of Deepwater, Baffle Creek, Euleilah, Rosedale, Miriam Vale and Captain Creek to highlight this incredible area, full of interesting and wonderful people, growing all sorts of plants and animals.

I hope it can serve as an invaluable local resource and also a source of inspiration for other areas to show that just one person with passion and commitment can contribute to the food security, sustainability and vibrancy of their local area.  

A trip around Australia back in 1995 was a real eyeopener for me, it started when I asked the local fresh fruit and vege stall owner at Karumba, in the gulf of Carpenteria, Queensland how much of the fresh produce was local. If you follow this type of thing you will probably know the answer, none, yep there was absolutely no local fresh produce sold.

Normally things were trucked in from the east coast but if you are familiar with Kurumba you will know it floods there regularly, most years. So of course I asked the owner what happened during the almost yearly floods, that totally isolate the town from the outside world. He said they sometimes get some flown in but generally just don't have fresh produce available, this can be for months.

I will soon be offering simple farm stands for sale or perhaps to rent for those who just want to give it a try.

My preference is to make them from old pallets (heat treated only for safety)

For the remainder of the around Australia trip I asked at lots of towns how much produce was locally sourced and the answer was mostly the same. Many rural towns were (or could be) self sufficient in beef or sheep or both in some areas. Areas that are considered the "food bowl" type areas tended to have a lot of local supply of what they grow (Gayndah - oranges, Stanthorpe - apples etc) most of their other fruit and veggies came in from other areas.

Then there are the big supermarkets, I won't go into them too much here but even in areas that grow lots of fresh produce the supermarkets get very little or none of their produce from local farms as they have bigger contracts to fulfil with state-wide and national distribution networks. Smaller supermarkets tend to get supplied much more locally but with both them and the big guys, sustainable, regenerative, spray free or nutrient density are not even in their vocabulary as far as qualities they seek when sourcing produce.

So I continued my education (some might say obsession) with all things local, sustainable farming, even travelling over 700km every week from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland to the little town of Quirindi in central New South Wales to complete my associate diploma in Holistic Management, where I took particular interest in planned stock grazing. I had already been introduced to exceptional farmers / graziers / educators such as Joel Salatin, Bill Mollison, Morag Gamble, Paul Gautschi etc but this course introduced me to many local and international legends of regenerative practices, such as Colin Seis (pasture cropping), P.A. Yeoman (yeoman's plough), Gabe Brown (treating the farm as an ecosystem), Allan Savory (holistic management), Derek and Kirrily Blomfield (The Conscious Farmer), Sepp Holzer (hugel culture and terracing) and many others.

These days I love to grow food forest type plants and talk with others who have similar interests, my partner sometimes teaches people about edible weeds and Australian bush flower essesences and we forage lots of weeds and seeds to eat fresh or made into flour for baking. 

My favourites are elderberry "champaign", kombucha, fritters made from root and other veggies (cassava, sweet potato, potato, yams, zucchini etc) , Bunya nut flour, Dock flour and pickled purslane.