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Farm It Forward - Emmanuela Prigioni
17 Plays3 years ago
'Farm It Forward' is a not-for-profit peri-urban farming social enterprise connecting landowners and local young people who are passionate about growing food. The project develops skills and creates training and job opportunities, while tackling social isolation and fostering community wellbeing. Join Host Mykal as he chats with 'Farm It Forward' coordinator Emmanuela Prigioni about community building through veggies.
CLICK HERE FOR PATREON
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Episode Links:
www.farmitforward.com.au
Farm It Forward Spring Fundraiser
Farm It Forward Instagram
Emmanuela Prigioni instagram
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Growing Media Links:
GROWING MEDIA WEBSITE
Instagram - @Growingmediaaus
Facebook - @Growingmediaaus
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Mykal's Links:
Instagram - @mykalhoare
Facebook - @mykalhoare
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Transcript
Independence of Growing Media Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Growing Media is a proudly independent podcast produced by me, Michael Hall, with zero corporate or network interference in our content. But this means we are running on the smell of an oily rag over
Support Through Patreon
00:00:17
Speaker
here. So if you like the show and would like to make a small contribution, you could head over to our Patreon. You can find the link in our show notes.
Acknowledgment of Aboriginal Land
00:00:28
Speaker
The producers of growing media recognise the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is recorded and pay respects to Aboriginal elders past, present and those emerging.
00:00:44
Speaker
Community building takes many forms.
Farm It Forward: Connecting Landowners and Growers
00:00:46
Speaker
So why not veggie growing? Farm It Forward is a social enterprise that's based in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. It aims to connect landowners with young local growers, creating friendship and fresh produce. Farm It Forward coordinator, Emmanuela Perigione is with us today to share the joys of community building.
00:01:06
Speaker
You start by telling us a little bit about yourself, where you grew up and where your personal gardening journey started.
Emmanuela's European Roots and Influence
00:01:14
Speaker
I grew up in Europe, so I only came here when I was 19. So I grew up in the mountains, mostly actually, in Switzerland and in Italy, northern Italy. Beautiful. And I was brought up by my non-norm, my grandfather, my Italian grandfather,
00:01:32
Speaker
mostly because my parents are very busy. And he would take me out foraging for the entire day. Those were my days when I was little, preschool days. And I think that's where I got the bug, that's for sure.
00:01:50
Speaker
So yeah, he'd take me out foraging for hazelnuts and cherries and roadside apples, and that was just absolutely amazing. In the village where I lived in Switzerland, it was the French part of Switzerland, and there was a market gardener in our village, and his name was Monsieur Liberté, that means miss the freedom.
00:02:19
Speaker
And he would let us just run around. All the kids in the village would just go and hang out in his market garden. And people would come in and pick their own produce. And that was pretty amazing. Yeah. So when did you move to Australia?
Journey to Australia: Emmanuela's Story
00:02:37
Speaker
I moved here when I was 19 and I moved here just out of curiosity because a lot of very interesting people in my family or not a lot too interesting people in my family who were artists moved out here or who were quite creative individuals came out here to live. So those were my great auntie and my great uncle and on either side of my family. So I was quite curious to see what Australia was all about.
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And how did you find it coming out here? I mean, the climate's fairly different. Yes, yeah. It was really very, very, very different back then to anything I'd ever seen before. I'd visited Australia before a couple of times as a child, but it was very, you know, just quite, quite incredible. I also
00:03:27
Speaker
just, you know, I loved the, I moved to Sydney and I really loved all the different backgrounds, all the different cultures that were around. And yeah, I just, I stayed. I was here to stay. You're here to stay. You've set up home in the Blue Mountains, which I suppose can be kind of similar. I mean, nowhere near as cold, let's be honest, but kind of similar climate to a European climate.
00:03:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. I am a bit of a mountain goat through and through. Hey, me too. Let's talk about Farm
Community and Social Outreach of Farm It Forward
00:04:07
Speaker
It Forward. What is Farm It Forward? So Farm It Forward is a social enterprise that grows local food for the community here in the mid mountains. And we're a social enterprise. So we have four paid farmers, young farmers who
00:04:27
Speaker
work on seven different properties and all together it's one and a half acres of land under vegetable production and we sell the produce. We've just transitioned to selling the produce direct to our community via a farm gate.
00:04:47
Speaker
The beautiful thing is that none of the land that we grow on is ours. It's all borrowed from residents who are happy for us to grow food on their excess land or their unused land.
00:05:07
Speaker
And we, we do a huge an integral part of what we do is actually social outreach so once a week we hold volunteer sessions where anyone from the community can come and help us on a different plot, every week.
00:05:23
Speaker
And often the residents whose land we grow food on are in social categories that are at risk in the mountains of social isolation. So, young families with children and older residents with lower mobility.
00:05:45
Speaker
or recently retired or about to retire residents. And yeah, so it's been really fantastic to reconnect those wonderful people to their community. Absolutely. Have you seen much change in those people in the landowners after having kind of that social interaction that maybe they were missing or starting to miss?
Impact on Landowners and Community Engagement
00:06:10
Speaker
Have you seen growth in those people?
00:06:13
Speaker
Absolutely, I've seen a lot of positivity coming out of this program in the sense that a productive garden actually really gives you a sense of purpose. Even just knowing that a productive garden is happening on your land really re-includes you in
00:06:33
Speaker
in a social system just by knowing that you're enabling and helping this happen and you're helping to feed a local community. And that gives people a great sense of hope and a great sense of purpose.
00:06:48
Speaker
And that's right. And that's not even not even just feeding the local community, but providing the local community with nutrient dense food, with food that we know hasn't traveled from across the world. It's grown in our backyards, literally.
00:07:04
Speaker
Absolutely and it's that nutrient density from looking after the soil because we use all regenerative growing methods and that nutrient density that comes from the amount of microorganisms and nutrients in the soils that we build means that the produce tastes incredible and so it makes us happier and healthier overall
00:07:30
Speaker
The volunteers that come and help us as well get to take home projects. And so there's just so many positive ripple effects just in coming to help us and getting some skills. And a lot of our volunteers start food gardens of their own at home. Lovely. And it's just a wonderful, very, very logical system.
00:07:54
Speaker
That's it. It makes far more sense than food coming from across the world and travelling into a supermarket and it's tight skinned and flavourless because it needs to be to get there. Absolutely. What are the other differences between the product you're producing and something that you might find in a big supermarket chain?
00:08:15
Speaker
Some differences are the fact that we do like to grow from heirloom seeds and we do like to save our own seeds where we can. So the tomatoes, the cherry tomatoes that we grow have been grown by us for the last three years now and we've saved seeds from our previous tomatoes the previous season, which means that they have embedded in their DNA now more information
00:08:44
Speaker
more and more information about our local situation and our local climate, which is incredibly resilient if you think about it, that we are growing on seed that is more and more accustomed to the place where we are, you know, hyper local, and that's really important too.
00:09:03
Speaker
And that has to be nourishing our bodies with nutrients that are almost required because we do live here also just as the plants do. Absolutely. And also, as opposed to a lot of the veggies that you get from supermarkets which are hydroponically grown,
00:09:21
Speaker
and often grown in soils that are devoid of any of any life or beneficial microbes it means that yes the taste as you were saying before the taste is gone and there is a lot of water it's it's really not as nourishing also in microorganisms so that
00:09:43
Speaker
there are some traces of beneficial soil microbes that our bodies are really hardwired for, you know, has been for eons to ingest and that make our gut well and make our own microbiome really healthy as well.
00:10:04
Speaker
So speaking about the volunteers as we were before, obviously they get skills, they get companionship. What else are they benefiting from?
00:10:16
Speaker
The beauty of our volunteer sessions is that they're extremely diverse in age. So there's a lot of social connection that is quite intergenerational. So you get quite a wide perspective of your community, not just the people your age, but also people from all different walks of life.
00:10:38
Speaker
And that's really beautiful. There are some incredible things that happen where people bring their kids along and then the older people help with the younger kids, et cetera. It's just so, so wonderful. And then there's also the younger people who come and just reconnect and
00:11:01
Speaker
It's such a lovely buzz about our volunteer sessions and it's just wonderful. The thing is that you do pick up a lot of skills and you pick up a lot of connection in the sense of social connectivity. So you hear that someone's doing something else further afield or you're going
00:11:27
Speaker
you know, help them on their farm when you hear about a farm that's not too far away that someone is working on, etc. So it's just really wonderful in that sense. Like a spider web putting out its sort of like tendrils and, you know, embedding itself in the entire community. It really is all about community building.
00:11:47
Speaker
It is, yeah, it's that idea of interconnectedness that, you know, I always love to quote Rachel Carson, she says that nothing in nature exists alone. And I have to say, we as humans have been kind of taught by consumerist culture to that we have to be independent.
00:12:10
Speaker
And that's quite a myth. Nothing in a natural system works independently from something else. Everything is interdependent. We need to depend on each other in a healthy way and we need to be interconnected to be happy.
00:12:26
Speaker
That's right. Speaking of that interconnectedness, you mentioned before about taking care of soil and, you know, regenerative growing.
Principles of Regenerative Growing
00:12:37
Speaker
Can you dive deep into that? What is regenerative? I can't even say it. Regenerative.
00:12:45
Speaker
What is that? Regenerative growing is a method of growing where you're not depleting the soil. So yes, you are harvesting your food and that means you're removing some of the nutrient.
00:13:03
Speaker
from the soil, but you are cycling it back into the soil by topping up with compost at the end of each season, at the beginning of each season. You make sure that there is plenty of organic material in your soil so that it provides habitat for beneficial soil microorganisms.
00:13:25
Speaker
And you let plants function the way they do in a natural system. So you don't feed them fertilizers, which I like to call junk food for plants. It's fast food that they have access to straight away. It's in a soluble form. Whereas really in a natural system, no one's out feeding, giving, you know, spreading fertilizers in forests and yet the trees and the plants thrive there.
00:13:53
Speaker
And the reason for that is that plants have an inbuilt swap system. And we were talking about interconnection before. Plants are interconnected with the microbes in the soil. They create sugars. A lot of the photosynthetic process, the process that the plants have to
00:14:16
Speaker
get some energy from the sun and convert it into sugars and starches. A lot of that happens in order to feed those starches to beneficial microbes in the soil. And the reason they do this is to get their nutrients in return because those microorganisms are the ones that are holding the nutrients locked up in their bodies. And by trading them some sugars,
00:14:45
Speaker
Dr Elaine Ingham, who's a wonderful soil microbiologist, loves to call them cakes and cookies. The plants make cakes and cookies to give to the beneficial soil microbes so that the beneficial soil microbes will exchange nutrients in return.
00:15:01
Speaker
So they don't get anything for free. It's not fast food. And that's a wonderful system. It's since the beginning of time. That is how plants have thrived and that's how we need to start growing our plants without making the system too human-centred.
00:15:23
Speaker
So just to clarify, the idea is is that instead of using synthetic fertilizers or junk food, you're using plant material composts and I assume some natural fertilizers like manures and putting that back into the soil to feed the soil, not feed the plant.
00:15:44
Speaker
That's right, exactly right. So it's really very much about feeding the soil, making sure that the soil is healthy and the soil contains habitat for beneficial microbes. So yeah, we use a lot of aged manure as well, so not fresh manure, composted manure.
00:16:06
Speaker
And that adds an incredible amount and of course that mimics the natural, in a natural system, mammals and animals that live on the forest floor leave their droppings and that is that manure that keeps soil healthy and compost down with dried leaves on the forest floor. So you're really mimicking, it's called biomimicry, you're mimicking a natural system.
00:16:31
Speaker
So I imagine when you start a plot when, you know, I'm a landowner and I've got a bit of spare land, I give you a call. How does the process work? What's next? Take me through sort of the full transition of a spare bit of land that someone has right through to growing beautiful veggies.
00:16:50
Speaker
You know what's really interesting is that some artists that have visited us in the past love it because it happens within a day. So generally we get the landowner to mow all the way, if there is any grass, to mow the grass all the way down to the ground.
00:17:12
Speaker
And then we take it on from there. Usually we do a nice volunteer call out, so we make quite an event of it.
00:17:24
Speaker
Yes and so we bring lots of compost and we cover the entire area with cardboard from the local liquor store because liquor store cardboard doesn't actually have sticky tape on it so you can use it straight away. That's a good tip actually.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yes so we cover the entire area with cardboard which you know is quite a large area and it's great it's a great use of cardboard instead of putting it through an energy intensive recycling process and then after that we form our beds with a really big thick layer of compost so that we are
00:18:09
Speaker
really adding a good 30 to 40 centimetre layer of compost down and that's how we form our beds that we're going to grow food in. And then we get a local arborist who's super supportive here to dump a lot of wood chip in the area for us and we form our paths with arborist mulch, so arborist wood chip.
00:18:35
Speaker
The beauty of arborist woodchip is that it's free and it's a wonderful habitat for fungi so we find that it's a wonderful thing to use in paths because it also allows for fungi to thrive and
00:18:52
Speaker
It transfers over also to the soil. And then we mulch, of course, we mulch the compost beds that we've made in order to protect them and not to expose them to direct sunlight for too long.
00:19:08
Speaker
And often we actually plant on the same day. So we have a greenhouse and we also get some beautiful organic seedlings from Carmen at patio plants and away we go. And within a day we put in really water efficient drip irrigation, usually, which is really easy to assemble. We've done it so many times. And also probably allows you to take a step back then and go, I know it's OK.
00:19:37
Speaker
That's right, exactly. That is really quite an important part of what we do is all of our growing plots are on a timed drip irrigation system. So they go off once a day and water plants really regularly and we don't have to worry about that part. So it's really great. Some of our plots are on tank water and some of our plots are on town water, but we cover the cost of town water when we use it. We have special water meters.
00:20:08
Speaker
And that's about it. That's, that is, and it's like a, it's really like a performance almost. We haven't never done a time lapse of it, but maybe we should in the next one.
Nationwide Expansion Potential of Farm It Forward
00:20:20
Speaker
So do we think, do you think this is a model that can be expanded nationwide? Should we be seeing a farm at Ford in every community?
00:20:31
Speaker
I think every neighborhood definitely should have a farm it forward, absolutely. So it is a beautifully replicable model and it is flexible enough so that you wouldn't need to apply it as a one size fits all. You could tweak it to suit your particular context.
00:20:55
Speaker
And for peri-urban and suburban environments, it's absolutely ideal. It's a win-win. We're lucky here in the Blue Mountains we've had a very supportive council. And councils love the idea. A council that cares about its people loves the idea of
00:21:17
Speaker
nipping issues in the bud to do with social isolation, to do with community health, with community connectedness, et cetera, et cetera. No council wants to funnel heaps of elderly people in aged care facilities and no council wants to see people's health degrade and mental health degrade due to social isolation.
00:21:44
Speaker
It does make perfect sense in peri-urban and suburban environments. I bet there is a number of people out there at the moment, you know, during this pandemic that have probably seen their elderly friends and family deteriorate, you know, quicker than they have because of that social isolation. So I suppose my question would be, were you able to still work throughout
Operations During COVID-19
00:22:10
Speaker
the pandemic?
00:22:10
Speaker
Yes, we were. We were able to still work. So food production is absolutely an essential service. So we were able to continue operating. We couldn't have large volunteer sessions, but we could take one or two volunteers with us on our plots. And of course, we are on a good amount of outdoor area, which meant that we could absolutely ensure
00:22:39
Speaker
social distancing and that with wearing appropriate masks, et cetera, et cetera, it was completely safe for us to continue doing what we were doing. And it meant that those people did not get socially isolated in a COVID environment, lockdown environment.
00:22:58
Speaker
Hmm. Fantastic. Um, so what's next for Farmer Forward? What are the plans?
Supporting Farm It Forward: How to Get Involved
00:23:05
Speaker
So we've just, um, we, we, uh, obtained a farm business resilience scholarship. So we have a business coach and she's just absolutely wonderful.
00:23:18
Speaker
And she's really helping us with our systems, you know, with our market gardening systems, with our farm gates, with our new farm gate system. And we want to really streamline all of these things so that the model becomes even more replicable and more easily communicated to others who want to start in their local area.
00:23:45
Speaker
How could we support Farm It Forward for the future? Well, there's a couple of ways you can come and volunteer if you're local to the Blue Mountains. We have people coming from Sydney. It's quite amazing. People coming from Canberra even.
00:24:04
Speaker
So it's lovely. You can also buy our produce if you're local to the mid mountains. That really supports us and what we do. If you're further afield, we have a crowdfunding campaign online. So if you jump on our social media sites, you'll see that there is a link to our chuffed crowdfunding campaign.
00:24:25
Speaker
We're raising money to build a mobile farm stall so that we can go and sell our produce a little bit further afield in the mountains. Beautiful. And yeah, that's a great way to support what we do is jump on there. We've got lots of beautiful fair trade t-shirts and totes and cards. They're just lovely gifts that you can get for Christmas for your friends. Those cards don't, they have seeds in them, don't they? They look fantastic.
00:24:53
Speaker
That's right. Yeah, we have cards that are embedded that have lettuce seeds embedded in them. So good. Yes, it's really fun. And we've had a few misprints, so we've had fun testing them out as well. And they work well?
00:25:12
Speaker
Yes. Thank you so much, Emmanuela. I really appreciate the time today and I'll be putting all your links to Farm It Forward to yourself and to that fundraiser within our show notes below. So all our listeners out there, please check that out. But yeah, thank you so much. Oh, I thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Engaging with the Podcast Community
00:25:42
Speaker
And thank you to you, our listeners. I really appreciate you tuning in week on week. It would do us a massive favor if you could rate and review the show. It just helps get the word out there about us. Also drop us a line if you have an idea or you have someone in mind that you would love to hear on the show.
00:26:03
Speaker
I'm willing to hear it. I want to know. Also, don't forget to tell your two best buds about us. Follow us on social media and I'll see you in a fortnight.