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Growing Against the Odds with Katie Finlay
533 Plays2 days ago
Do not listen to this unless you want to reawaken your dormant farming desires and throw yourself into a life on the land. I tell a story about being a grub, before having an animated chat with rural woman of the year Katie Finlay about staunching the loss of small farms in Australia and supporting emerging growers to step up – even and especially if they don’t own land. (What even is land ownership?)
🍎 AND ALSO
Katie and Hugh Finlay are black belt orchardists whose online program Grow Great Fruit is just brilliant for anyone who wants to obtain a yield from fruit trees (with an organic and holistic tilt, of course). It gives me great joy to connect you with their work.
This is their Dream Orchard Masterclass starting REAL SOON on June 12.
🧙♀️LINKY POOS
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Riskilliance and Katie's Story
00:00:06
Speaker
I have a very stubborn cold and a tickly throat. Let's try this. Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned into Riskilliance, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't.
00:00:24
Speaker
These sounds are coming your way from Jarrah Country. central Victoria, where the hills are brown and big cracks have opened up in the ground, parched mouths begging for water.
00:00:36
Speaker
This morning I went to grab some things at our local grocery store and when I got to the checkout and handed over my reusable bags, the woman behind the counter said, wow, there's more grass in these bags than in my paddocks.
00:00:48
Speaker
It was no surprise to hear that my personal items were filled with organic matter.
Impact of Drought and Farming Challenges
00:00:53
Speaker
I'm always finding seeds or soggy weeds or compost in my pockets. One time I discovered a shallot in my underpants.
00:01:01
Speaker
I felt a little bit embarrassed about the state of my things, but the woman wasn't judging me. She was alluding to the big dry, the long dry, the driest of dries in our neck of the woods for 100 years.
00:01:14
Speaker
There is no grass. There are no mushrooms. The wallabies snuffle at dust. My heart goes out to the brittle earth, the withered trees, the dusty creeks, the thirsty birds, the frogs dreaming of mud and the humans doggedly growing Food.
00:01:31
Speaker
Our food. Surrendering themselves to the weather gods each and every season. Back at the grocery store, I wasn't done being a dirty grub. I pulled out my money and noticed that the notes were kind of wet.
00:01:44
Speaker
Don't ask me why, i really can't explain that. And I waited for the woman to say something like, there's more water on this $20 note than in my dam. But she didn't because this drought is no joke.
00:01:56
Speaker
I used to be obsessed with becoming a market gardener before I realised that I wasn't either foolish or fantastically clever enough to make that dream work. I'm not being mean when I say farming is a fool's game.
00:02:10
Speaker
Given the risks involved that include, but aren't limited to a deranged climate and systemic pressures that see farmers flooded in debt, pushed onto tiny islands where supermarkets poke them with sticks demanding lower and lower prices.
00:02:25
Speaker
Farmers receive as little as 40 cents a kilo for potatoes, which then retail for $4. Who gets the rest? I think you can guess. Almost 300 farmers call it quits each month in Australia, and that has been the trend for the past 30 years.
Imagining a Supported Farming Future
00:02:44
Speaker
Small farms are evaporating, like moisture from leaves, leaving communities thirsting for local produce. In my perfect world, farmers are venerated as sacred keepers of our food and nutrition and soil.
00:02:59
Speaker
They're supported and applauded and lauded for their essential work. In my perfect world, people hunger for a career in the agricultural arts, offering them prestige, a sense of purpose and a deep connection to place.
00:03:14
Speaker
And of course, a living wage. How many of you listening are carrying the seeds of farming, dormant in your pockets? How many of you yearn to work with the land but can't find a way in?
00:03:27
Speaker
It's funny, I started writing this intro a couple of days ago and after that, the clouds rolled in and the heavens opened up and it hasn't stopped raining. There are a lot of mills to go before the land is quenched, before the creeks burble and the frogs sing, but it is enough to grow something.
00:03:46
Speaker
And even though it might be tough and unconventional and a little bit daunting, there are opportunities for emerging farmers too.
Katie Finlay: Legacy and Resilience
00:03:54
Speaker
There are pathways, there are greener pastures, there's life-giving moisture in the system.
00:04:00
Speaker
And perhaps today's guest will water your long-held agricultural dreams. It's Katie Finlay, third generation orchardist here in Jara country who heard the call of farming from her faraway life in the city and came home.
00:04:17
Speaker
Katie was awarded the 2015 Victorian Rural Women's Award and it's really not hard to see why. Besides converting their family orchard to organic and heading up a thriving online school of home fruit growers, Katie and her husband Hugh decided that the state of play for emerging growers really kind of sucked and they wanted to do something about it.
00:04:37
Speaker
They established Harcourt Organic Farming Co-op, which supports a diverse array of small enterprises, including a micro-dairy, a fruit CSA, and bush food plot, within an open source structure that distributes power and makes it possible to farm without the freaking massive overheads.
00:04:53
Speaker
We need more of this. Katie and I chat about building resilience through disaster, why apple trees are like people, running the numbers on your business idea, and the all-important self-care.
00:05:04
Speaker
I particularly enjoyed recording this in Katie's farmhouse in the foothills of Liangganuk with the hubble and bubble of farm life in the background. Nose-blowing intermission.
00:05:16
Speaker
Katie and Hugh's Grow Great Fruit program absolutely rocks if you want to harvest buckets of juicy, juicy fruit from your garden. It's like a fully supported mentorship underpinned by Permi principles we know and love.
00:05:27
Speaker
And Katie also gave me the heads up that they're launching an orchard design masterclass this week, which is amazing timing. This is a two session deep dive on designing your dream orchard, which I'll also link in the show notes.
00:05:39
Speaker
Before we bite into this golden delicious of a conversation, I also want to give a shout out to the Reskillians community on Patreon, who are single-handedly funding this show. I did not have a plan to monetize Reskillians at the start, and certainly not through sponsorship or advertising, which has always given me the heebie-jeebies.
00:05:57
Speaker
So I pinch myself every single day that those of you who can afford to are supporting me with a monthly donation, which is slowly, slowly taking the pressure off trying to do so much just in order to survive.
00:06:08
Speaker
I can feel this podcast thriving and it is thanks to you. All my gratitude to the patrons of Reskillians. We're at patreon.com forward slash reskillians and a warm welcome to new patrons Georgina and Sam.
00:06:24
Speaker
While I'm on a shout out roll, hello to our listener from Azerbaijan. I love seeing who's tuning into the show from around the world. All right, let's get to the bit where we talk about the things. Here is the delightful Katie Finlay and P.S.
00:06:36
Speaker
Become
Transition to Organic Farming
00:06:37
Speaker
a Fun. you know you
00:06:41
Speaker
yeah as you were saying just to pick up our conversation where we left it now that we're ensconced in the farmhouse surrounded by lovely farmhouse things yeah I am curious about people's um deviation from the the script that maybe their parents have set for them in the farming sense so when you decided to go organic what was that what internal process was it underway for you? Like why?
00:07:09
Speaker
And also how did your parents react to that? Yeah. It's so interesting, isn't it Because the script ah originally was that we weren't meant to be farmers, that I wasn't meant to be a farmer at all because I was a girl.
00:07:22
Speaker
That was once I decided that I did want to come home and be a farmer that was really embraced, which was really lovely. But of course dad had never thought about organics. his approach pretty much was why?
00:07:38
Speaker
why would we do that? The reasons we were doing it was because we were starting, as we were doing our kind of apprenticeship with dad, we also started hearing new ideas about, wasn't even called regenerative farming back in those days, but we came across the work of Elaine Ingham and Dr. Arden Anderson and Just started sort of learning about the soil food web and the natural fertility system. and And at the same time, like we were just routinely using all these chemicals on the orchard because that's how we were taught to grow food.
00:08:11
Speaker
And we started learning more about what they were and how they worked. And so in the beginning, we weren't even thinking about really going certified organic. We just had a few chemicals that we were like, we just don't want to use them anymore. And so insecticides particularly.
00:08:25
Speaker
kind of dropped them out of our protocols and then started noticing changes. It was, it's really, I mean, it sounds dramatic to say that, but things like woolly aphirid that every commercial epilochard in Australia sprays multiple times for every year, it disappeared.
00:08:42
Speaker
As soon as we stopped, you know, those broad spectrum insecticides and stopped taking out all our predator insects, we started seeing changes in the orchard. And so it just naturally led us along this sort of pathway.
00:08:54
Speaker
So dad's approach was kind of... Who's that? That's the dog trying to get out. That's a dog. Hello, love. Hello, love.
00:09:06
Speaker
she's very polite yeah good girl she'll probably be a bit puffy and panty we like heavy breathing
00:09:17
Speaker
so um yeah we we started taking all these started taking chemicals out of what we were doing and dad's approach at the beginning was why would you not use these incredible tools that were here he was a really progressive orchardist and very connected with the department of agriculture back in the day when you could do that when they connected and so he was always at the forefront of trying new things so it seemed It was a completely different paradigm that just didn't make sense to him. Why would we not use these things that were here to solve problems?
00:09:45
Speaker
But it's a different paradigm. And we gradually started understanding that if you have if you build biodiversity and have a holistic paradigm, those problems go. So you don't need those solutions to the problems anymore.
Economic Challenges in Farming
00:09:57
Speaker
And after after a while, was kind of, i mean, he was always on board because it was our business and he was just happy to support us as long as we weren't making enough money Well, that was my next question. Was he in that very small margin, borderline debt or massive debt cycle that a lot of farmers find themselves in?
00:10:17
Speaker
Maybe in the early days he was, but he no, he made a decent living. He put four of us through school and you know that's not why he got out of out of farming actually. But back in the day, you know when I first came home to the orchard, we still had maybe 40 small family farms here in Harcourt.
00:10:37
Speaker
all of whom probably were making a living Back in the day, there were 80 or 100 small family farms on farms our size or smaller making a living. So what's what's changed, if you just want to put it in a nutshell? I know that's only everything. Only everything, that's right.
00:10:53
Speaker
Input prices have gone um and the price of food hasn't kept pace. I mean, it's as simple as that, really. and All the costs have wages and water and all the input costs that you need, you know, fuel and...
00:11:09
Speaker
There's our puffing, panting dog having lapping drink in the background. I love it. oh it's Everything is alive and wants to participate. And wants to make a noise.
00:11:26
Speaker
Well, I think, well, my understanding too is that we don't spend as much on food anymore. Of course, there's the cost of living crisis, but our idea around what portion of our weekly budget should be allocated to food is smaller. Yeah. And some of the wealthiest people I know are ah horrified at what we spend on groceries. We're like peasants.
00:11:45
Speaker
Yeah. I mean we try and so we source a lot of food directly so it's like premium, the most beautiful food. like You can't even buy food that amazing. And like my cashed up relatives are going to Aldi complaining about the price of blueberries. It's like, what's going on? know, it's so interesting isn't it Because that is true statistically, and I think that's true that we spend a much smaller proportion of our budget on food.
00:12:08
Speaker
actually think it's still very true. I think i share your experience in a lot of ways that it's very true that you can buy smaller quantities of seasonal, really high quality food. And yes, it's, it feels expensive compared to mass produced stuff that you can get at the supermarket, but you need less.
00:12:26
Speaker
If you buy, if you're spending more money on good food, you tend to use it all. Like we throw out so much food. It's just insane.
Innovative Farming Models and Resilience
00:12:34
Speaker
think that's one of the things that, has come really alive for me here on the farm.
00:12:40
Speaker
Now that we've got, like we've got all that experience with fruit, but now that we've got Tess here running the dairy and we've had market gardeners and seeing food being produced at that time kind of really small scale and the very strong connections to all the people who buy their food, they all know each other.
00:12:58
Speaker
All the customers know their farmer when, you know, when they're buying anything from our farm. And so it's really valued. So yes, Tessa's milk is, you know, twice the price or maybe more. I don't even know because I don't buy milk at a supermarket. You might know.
00:13:13
Speaker
But it's so worth it. Yeah. It keeps longer. It's better for you. It tastes amazing. Yeah, that's so right. There's a holistic context around our grocery bill and there are there are buffers and values and behaviours that all factor in. And the factoring in is a really big thing that we're going to be talking about today, which is you know the viability of small farms and how we can bring in some of these um exiled values that you in the commercial food space,
00:13:44
Speaker
um aren't factored in and aren't part of the equation. But before we get too kind of heady, i really want to stay on your story, Katie, because it's not just a story about being ah woman coming back to the land, defying those expectations and gender roles. It's not just a story of going from conventional to organic. It's also a story of sharing land and finding radical and funky models of cooperating and providing access for people so ah wonder if you can take us on a little bit more of a journey we can skip down that path together of okay so you're back here and organically farming and seeing the benefits in the orchard then where are you taking that so the kind of the next thing that happened i have to say this story is is never linear my there's nothing about my story that's linear our story here on the farm so things didn't necessarily happen in the order that i tell them
00:14:39
Speaker
but it feels like they did. So it kind of feels like what happened next was a whole series of disasters. We went and into the drought not that long after we had come home.
00:14:50
Speaker
um and taken over the farm ourselves. And so then we had the millennial droughts, 10 years, and we were converting to organics in that time. And man, we made every mistake that you could possibly make, which we would have done anyway, I think just going organic, but it was all compounded by the drought. So lots of bad things happened in terms of pests and diseases and crop losses and all sorts of terrible things.
00:15:15
Speaker
And then we came out of that into flood And we had flood we had several flooding years that, you know, we lost whole orchard. We lost the entire cherry orchard, which is probably about 40% of our income at that time.
00:15:30
Speaker
We had massive bird plagues. We had bushfire. Where did you piss off? I know, right? It definitely felt like, we have felt like,
00:15:42
Speaker
I think we've been through pretty much every bad thing that can happen on an orchard, especially now we've got fruit fly. We haven't got fire blight. Don't say it. or fire ants, like there's some exotic pests and diseases we've never had experience with.
00:15:57
Speaker
So all of that happened and we built resilience through that because, and particularly in the early days of of that, because you know, everything was just a new challenge.
00:16:09
Speaker
It's not to say i personally didn't cry a lot of times. And I think I've still got a bit of PTSD about rain in spring. i cannot sleep through rain in spring because it makes bad things happen to fruit crops.
00:16:25
Speaker
But we did learn solutions pretty much to everything as we were going because because we had all of these challenges. But it was beating us down the whole way. You know, you just like, yes, it's good to learn solutions, but it it just gets very hard to go through, heart you know, challenge after challenge. And that's one of the reasons why so many small scale farmers have left.
00:16:49
Speaker
We're down to about five or six, maybe, family farms in the Valley. And it's a combination of what we were talking about before, Katie, with you just can't get the prices anymore that you actually realistically need to get to be growing at our scale.
00:17:03
Speaker
We can't compete with you know, mass produced food. It's just getting harder and harder to do that. Not that we can't, we can, but... Not on the same field. Not in the same field at all. It's not a level playing field. Plus all of these environmental challenges that are happening and they're happening more often and they're bigger.
00:17:20
Speaker
That's kind of undeniable now. So we got to the point where we, it was when we lost the cherry orchard, we got some flood funding at that point. And we went off to see beautiful business consultant who is now a very dear friend to write our exit plan from the farm. That's kind of what the funding was for.
00:17:41
Speaker
and this lovely, lovely woman, Claire, that we were working with, the very first thing she got us to do was to go to separate rooms to answer one question, which was, did we want to stop farming?
00:17:55
Speaker
Did we still want to be farmers or not? Telling this story still often kind of makes me cry, but I won't do that. So I went off by myself and I had to sit there and think, do I still want to be a farmer? And I was kind of horrified to find out that I did.
00:18:09
Speaker
Because I knew Hugh didn't. And so I knew I was going to have to come back into the room with Claire and go, I think I do, but I know we can't because, and Hugh went through exactly the same thing. It's amazing. But he also came back into the room going, I think I still want to be a farmer. Is that okay?
00:18:25
Speaker
And so within that first session, we went from thinking we were going to write our exit plan to writing our recovery and growth plan.
00:18:35
Speaker
The co-op that we have now came out of that and our online business came out of that. Almost came out of that one day. like They were both months and then years in the making, but they both came out of that event, out of us deciding that we still wanted to actually be farmers.
Community-Led Orchard Model
00:18:53
Speaker
As insane as that is.
00:18:56
Speaker
Farmers with an asterisk and then you added some things and took it in different directions absolutely took it in different directions and ah there were there probably was a bit of a time there where we thought we really don't want to be actively farming anymore when we were setting up the co-op we were just thinking we still want the farm to be farmed but we don't want to be farmers but that turned out to not be true and so we have the little fruit tree nursery business here on the farm and I'm actively involved in that and we weren't involved in running the orchard for a while we leased that out to two different sets of lessees along the way and then when the second lot of lessees left we thought well we can't just keep looking for new lessees all the time because that doesn't feel sustainable so let's think about a new model and so now we're running the orchard as a community sort of a community-led model we're the second year into that model which means we're back on the tools in the orchard
00:19:51
Speaker
And ah love it It's kind of the best of both worlds. I get to be an orchardist in just a um little part of my live It's not too much responsibility, but enough.
00:20:03
Speaker
I get to share all the things that I know and I'm skilling, a we, you know, we're both doing it. We're skilling all these people up into being able to, how to grow their own fruit. So it kind of ticks all those boxes and I still get plenty of time to do other things in know my life. I'd love to hear why you love farming so much. Like what is it about being in the orchard,
00:20:27
Speaker
in this place that keeps you here? ask people this question all the time. i ask people because we, with our Grow Great Fruit online business, we we work with backyard growers all over Australia and even internationally. Now we've got a theory in New Zealand.
00:20:42
Speaker
I ask them this question all the time because I find it so hard to articulate. It is deep down, you know, and i i I'm sure you feel it. I know you feel it.
00:20:53
Speaker
And I've just never really been able to articulate
Connection to Land and Farming Benefits
00:20:56
Speaker
what that is. But there is something very profound and it's really ancestral and it's obviously, obviously we have to have this, that we need to be able to grow our own food.
00:21:06
Speaker
And so all we're really doing is just honouring that, I think, of, yeah, I don't know. Can you articulate it better than that? What it? I've really struggled with how to put that into words. Yeah, it's definitely, ah it's a felt sense.
00:21:20
Speaker
I feel it when I'm around... folks in agricultural scene, at the farmers market, when I come to a ah property like this. It's just, um when I went to Tasmania, as I was telling you before, it absolutely stole my heart. And I think it was because it was the first time i'd interacted with the food system in a really meaningful way and something clicked into place, like an animal instinct around, this is honest and real. There is no bullshit here.
00:21:49
Speaker
People understand life and death. And we're all just doing this thing together and it's very human. It's very human. It's very real. it's I mean, it's grounding. There's you know all sorts of evidence about that how healthy it is for you to actually be touching dirt and obviously being outside and seeing green plants and nurturing things, whether it's plants or animals or, you know, all of those things are physically and emotionally and spiritually, i think, really good for us.
00:22:16
Speaker
And it's something else. It's also something else about, no and it's not being self-sufficient, it's being in in place right connected to mean i guess it's being connected to country right in our you know and and as as a non-aboriginal person i don't have the words or concepts really to be able to even express that but i guess that's what they're talking about when they talk about being part of country but there's also just something about growing food and i see this like i'm always really surprised when people
00:22:49
Speaker
claim to not have a desire to grow food. like I reckon you probably do somewhere you're just maybe out of touch with it. Because we see this all the time. So many people have at least got a pot plant, right?
00:23:02
Speaker
Or a lemon tree in a pot or And then a lot of people, you know, are trying to grow a few veggies in the backyard or like, it's very, very, very common if they have at least some security of housing that that this often will come next. Trying to grow some sort of food. Yeah.
00:23:20
Speaker
Just the the gratitude that I feel for the food when I can tell its story to someone I'm sharing that meal with makes my life feel so rich.
00:23:31
Speaker
I just had family come and stay last week and I'm definitely like the black goat of the family. And I introduced, we introduce our meals when we eat together. It's like, this is, this is Cosmo the the the cow and he lived six days down the road. And this is a dear little lamb. And we got them from Oggy and we, my friends, Sophie and Mick grew this amazing zucchini. And we kind of talk about the story of it like that.
00:23:58
Speaker
And I saw my family almost, um, blanching a little bit like Are you just being so pretentious like talking about this provenance business and how you milked the goat that made the ice cream that we're now eating I'm like, I'm not being a wanker. I swear to god This is just the story that that's what matters.
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah I know it's so beautiful to be able to tell that story and of course that like that does feel out of reach for so many people and and I was talking to you about this before that, you know, ah people often feel like, yeah, I'm kind of driven to do this thing, but so what? It doesn't really matter.
00:24:38
Speaker
I think it really matters. i think just having a lemon tree really matters. Oh, yeah. yeah Give us the like home growing spiel, the pep talk that we all need to hear when we think we're not doing enough when we just have a pot of parsley.
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. I think it's growing anything is honouring that part of yourself that is in there for so many people. And look, probably, know, historically, not everybody did grow food, but their community definitely grew food.
00:25:05
Speaker
So i think it's honouring that fact that we actually, everything we eat is coming from a plant or an animal that somebody has tended. And even just having a small connection to that starts you on that road of being connected to the process of doing it.
Pruning Philosophy and Farming Realities
00:25:23
Speaker
Even just wanting to do it is enough.
00:25:26
Speaker
to To ignite that little spark inside you. Not everybody has to be a homesteader. We're not in favor of people trying to be self-sufficient. It's not about being self-sufficient. But the more connections that you can make, even if it's just going off to a farmer's market sometimes, you know, and actually connecting with some of the, or even just seeing the fact that there are people there growing food that you can then,
00:25:49
Speaker
each that's a really good place to start. So you don't have to be amazing at anything. Every time we look at people's fruit trees, you know, we often go and do case studies and we connect with lots of backyard growers.
00:26:01
Speaker
Nearly always the first thing they say is, sorry, sorry about the state of my fruit trees. And we are completely accepting and loving towards every fruit tree.
00:26:14
Speaker
What's the saying that you have that about there's no good and bad, there's just cuts and consequences? Am I quoting you correctly? Almost. That's ah that's one of our one of the things we say when we're teaching people how to prune. There's no right or wrong with pruning. There's cuts and consequences. i love it.
00:26:30
Speaker
And there's no right and wrong with any fruit tree, really. i mean, yes, they'll thrive if you give them particular things, but it's pretty simple. And just having a fruit tree, you're winning. Yeah. If only that applied to human limbs.
00:26:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:46
Speaker
Yeah, so okay, this this passion that you have for helping or coaxing out people's confidence in these growing spaces, whether they've got one tree in their backyard or maybe they're edging up towards a more commercial operation. Tell us a little bit more about that and how you see...
00:27:04
Speaker
this is a continuum continuum as well. You're speaking to folks who are just growing for their household, just in air quotes, and then also maybe folks who want to be more more active feeding their community. Which then kind of segues into the the farmers that we have here on our farm.
00:27:21
Speaker
So I think that one of the things that's really great for people to understand, and I know you grapple with this all the time on your podcast, is how are you going to make a living, right? How do you actually make the numbers add up? And so if people are wanting to grow food of any sort as part or all of their income, much iki as it sometimes feels, we reckon it's really great to actually know your numbers. You have to do the numbers and not just the numbers within your farming enterprise, but your life numbers, because you know it's been true forever that as long as you've got a dollar more coming in than you've got going out, life is much less stressful. So one of the things one of the themes that we've seen, because it's so much harder to make a living on a small scale now for small producers,
00:28:11
Speaker
And small scale farmers, like so many small business people, they're in love with doing the thing, right? They want to grow the veggies or write the book or run a podcast or, you know,
00:28:26
Speaker
have cows and you just have to have that within the context of some just doing some business numbers. us It's as simple as that really. So yeah one of the things that I have loved about listening to some of the podcasts, some of the people you've interviewed is that what those numbers have to add up to is completely up to you. You can have your life at whatever scale works for you. It's not like you have to be you know, putting loads of money away in super and buying new cars and whatever, you get to decide what that scale is.
00:29:00
Speaker
It's awesome if you can manage to solve the security of housing issue in there somewhere with that. And that's what traps a lot of people, of course, into needing to make a lot of money.
00:29:11
Speaker
But once you've sort of decided what scale it is and how you're how much money you do need to be coming in, it's, It's just really good to know that. And then to you know, have a realistic look at what you're intending for your farming operation and see if there's a shortfall there and how you're going to make that up without killing yourself.
00:29:31
Speaker
We've seen quite a number of small scale farmers who haven't done that haven't been able to fill that gap. you know that what they All their work is going into growing food that then they can't sell for enough money to make enough to live on. And it's tragic.
00:29:48
Speaker
It's so sad to watch. And it's yes, of course, it's a systemic problem. Wouldn't it be amazing if communities were supporting people who just all they want to do is go out and grow food You know, it's such a pity that it's a terrible broken system that that but that has to happen.
00:30:03
Speaker
But at the moment, if we work within that system and and, you know, answer those questions and solve that problem, then you can farm happily. So that's at that sort of farming scale, right back down to your household scale.
00:30:15
Speaker
it there's It's just a sliding scale, really, of how much time, how much do you love being in the garden? How much time can you manage in your in your lifestyle to be in the garden?
00:30:27
Speaker
And if you've got, like with fruit trees specifically, if you've got good systems in place, you can grow an amazing amount of food for ah couple hours a week. Fruit trees
Barriers for Young Farmers
00:30:36
Speaker
are so generous. They're so generous. Yeah, you'll have a problem on your hands processing all of that fruit. Absolutely. But then you're just going to give it to your friends who are going to swap you back for some zucchinis, right? Exactly. yeah Yeah, so on there, maybe more um people wanting to get into...
00:30:53
Speaker
farming front because I mean I don't know what your perspective is being much more in touch with this than I am but in when I was in the city we did some kind of urban farming market gardening and that kind of business and I suppose what we saw was there was a lot of energy and a lot of appetite for like young people wanting to be part of their local food system and to start market gardens or small enterprises and has that continued like have we seen those people be able to actually manifest those dreams or have they just dropped off like I feel like there was this peak of enthusiasm and I'm not seeing those people progress with their projects no so is it people don't actually want to when they look at the numbers and they're like oh shit like being a farmer you actually don't you make pennies but I could have a corporate job making like 100k next you know tomorrow yeah i'd I'd love to dig into this with you Katie because part of me is like
00:31:46
Speaker
Are we having the same expectation? We're putting the same expectation on our farming enterprise as say like a ah career in the corporate space and we're hoping to make that much money and it's actually like we've got to look at things a little bit differently.
00:31:59
Speaker
Or are there just like so limited opportunities for people to access land? I'm sure it's it's all of those things. I actually feel like it's... probably a bit more the former people can make more probably a better income and a more secure income as a barista it's not even that you have to go get a corporate job you know it's it making an income that is weather dependent is inherently super risky and at this small scale that we're kind of talking about this entry level running your own small business because there are other ways of getting into farming
00:32:32
Speaker
But you are there's there's not a lot of buffer, you know, so you are really vulnerable. And so it's a big leap. One of our kids is, well, a couple of our kids really have thought long and hard about whether they want to come home and start farming.
00:32:45
Speaker
And at the end of the day, it's just a bit too risky for them because they still haven't solved the secure housing. Yeah, those overheads put the pressure on us and then we can't experiment and flex and respond.
00:33:00
Speaker
Absolutely. So they're feeling like they actually need to be making sure that they're making a good consistent income. They're building up a potential deposit to be able to buy something. And so it so i think that's a really significant thing.
00:33:13
Speaker
But we've also met lots of other young people like you're talking about along the way. And because of what I was talking about before with, we really encourage people to do the numbers and they pretty much all fall off at that point. Mm-hmm.
00:33:26
Speaker
so Blind ignorance is the best way to start a business. People don't look at those numbers before you start. Do it later. It's undermining Katie's advice. Well, if I think that's actually not a bad thing either because it is also a big, scary leap, right?
00:33:43
Speaker
starting any new business, but particularly one like this, going going into farming. And so as long as you're willing to embrace it at some point, I actually think that's not necessarily a bad thing is just jumping in But um the way our business model operates is that people sign up for a three-year lease. And so it's not a quick sort of jump in and you can test it.
00:34:03
Speaker
So we have kind of expected that people do those numbers and and most people have dropped off there. We're much more in touch now with Landowners, we probably get asked much more often by other landowners how they could connect with
Cooperative Farming and Land Access
00:34:17
Speaker
farmers.
00:34:17
Speaker
Well, that's another piece, isn't it? The succession, ageing farming population and what what's going to become of their land. So i guess we're kind of holding... in this conversation, the reality that there's less and less small farms locally and more and more kind of consolidated, centralized things going on and taking it as a given that we really want flourishing, vibrant communities full of producers who meet lots of different needs in lots of different niches.
00:34:45
Speaker
I think that would be amazing. But, OK, challenge is capitalism. and access to land and whoever has the land can profit and do the thing and if you don't, you can't.
00:34:58
Speaker
Very simplified. yeah And so, yeah let's talk about, because I know you're about solutions and what are some of the opportunities and solutions that you're seeing in this space? and obviously you're demonstrating some of them here at Harcourt.
00:35:10
Speaker
Our solution has been that we we've got the Harcourt Organic Farming Co-op on our land, but there's actually two levels to that. So as land owners or as the current custodians to this of this land that was stolen, we have individual leases with all of the enterprises that are on the farm, except for the Bush Foods patch. they They have free access.
00:35:34
Speaker
And the lease documents stipulates things like the lease payment, how much land they have access to whatever like other infrastructure they have access to, how much they pay for water, all that sort of stuff and how they how they get the water.
00:35:49
Speaker
That's all within the lease. The co-op is an extra level that we laid over the top of that because there is that inherent power imbalance in that relationship. because we're the landowners so you know there's that just is the way that it is our leases have actually come down over time because we have we value different things Now, originally we were trying to set it up as a, we had a figure in mind for how much we wanted to make out of, out of the land when we weren't planning to farm it.
00:36:19
Speaker
And that's kind of all shifted now, partly because we're back farming it and partly because, uh, we don't need it We make money from, um, our other business. So you're kind of subsidizing the leases. Um, we, we, not really the,
00:36:35
Speaker
the land All of our lessees pay for their any of the outgoing costs. So they pay a share of the rates. They pay for the water that they use. They pay for the power that they use. So we're not subsidising it in that way.
00:36:47
Speaker
And they are still paying leases. The different enterprises are still paying leases, but they have gone down because we're not seeing it as a money-making thing. nearly as much as we were at the beginning. As the relationships have evolved and the whole model has evolved, it's come to mean different things to us now. What's important to us now is that is the people, actually, that we have here and the community that we've built here and the fact that the our farm is so much better looked after than it ever was when it was just the two of us doing it or you know and with with Dad here.
00:37:18
Speaker
like Having a a team of people working on the same farm is gold. It is just... amazing having that happen and there's so much life and energy and people coming onto the farm you know helping out with all of that so that is a lot more important to us and significant than it than it um was, I think, at the beginning.
00:37:39
Speaker
we are all members of a co-op that sort of laid over the top of it and we all have an equal voice about a whole lot of other issues. And that's where a lot of the land management staff, fire management, our organic certification, we tried to get insurance happening at that level and couldn't get any insurance company to even understand what we were doing.
00:38:00
Speaker
And we do farm tours and stuff. So that all happens at that level, the community management stuff. This model is perfectly replicable, but actually is it? You know, it's like what has really worked well here is the specific people that we've that we've found.
00:38:18
Speaker
So but it's all open source. We're very happy to share it. There's a whole lot of information about what we do on the Harcourt Organic Farming Co-op website. um And we're really happy to talk to people about what we've done, but it's about building relationships with the right people.
00:38:34
Speaker
So ah for any young farmers that are out there, emerging farmers, you don't have to be young, you just have to have decided you wanted to get want to get into farming. There are lots and lots of land owners out there ready and willing to share their land.
00:38:51
Speaker
it's a It's really a theme. They don't necessarily, they might be thinking about doing that for different reasons. to where we're sitting at the moment, but that it really is just about connecting and building relationships.
00:39:09
Speaker
Is there a sense like a hub where... I know there used to be kind of farm Cupid services. There's a couple of private services that do that. AFSA is probably one of the best places to go. So AFSA has a ah a committee called FUPLE, Farming on Other People's Land.
00:39:26
Speaker
And they've got ah a Facebook page. Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, yes. And they've got a Facebook page where people can connect. And they'll often post... opportunities on that page as well there's also some stuff on the AFSA website about some guidelines to help guide people actually I think our lease is on there yeah and they they they're building resources building they're gathering resources from people because ours is just one model there are some other amazing models out there and AFSA at the moment is also working on a new another idea
00:40:01
Speaker
called an Agrarian Trust, which is the potential subject of another podcast possibly because it's awesome. No, not with me. No, i am on the- You can tell us about it, Katie.
00:40:13
Speaker
I'm on that committee, but there's people who know a whole lot more about it than i do. It's awesome. it's ah And it's a model that's quite mature in both America and the UK where land is bought or gifted or maybe fundraised to purchase land.
00:40:31
Speaker
It's then managed by the land trust, which can be at various scales from national to state to regional. It's usually managed by a collection of people that include the the farmers who lease the lisa land, other interested local people, and then people from the parent.
00:40:50
Speaker
body whatever the parent body is the big trust who are usually the ones that access the funding to purchase the land so it's a way of taking land farming land out of um the common market so divorcing it from the ridiculous market forces that are making farming land so stupidly expensive and then leasing it to farmers at reasonable rates with security so it's often like 99 year leases And then the farmers can also build infrastructure on the farms and then they have an asset that they can actually sell. So they're getting access to land much more affordably without those land pressures being on the top of what they're doing. So it's just a sort of preserving farmland and getting security for it.
00:41:34
Speaker
It is often connected with housing, low-cost housing. And i have to say one of the big challenges, so there is a committee in AFSA at the moment looking into this, but one of the big challenges is our zoning is quite different to America, for example, and so it's not easy to connect housing to farmland in Australia.
00:41:53
Speaker
Well, that sounds it very exciting. We'll have to look it up and proposition the relevant person. I'm interested in talking a bit more about is it ah possible and sensible path for someone to pursue if they're kind of feeling that call to be a farmer in any capacity.
00:42:12
Speaker
And what I'm hearing is there are these opportunities, there are openings, there are things that are going to facilitate that to some degree. Like what are the other hacks for one of a better word, like life hacks or relationship hacks, or maybe even adjustments in our expectations that can really assist us if we want to enter that space, but feel a little bit daunted or like it's just an absolutely harebrained scheme.
00:42:39
Speaker
um First thing I would say is absolutely follow your passion. It is So rewarding. It's really a wonderful thing to do. If you're feeling drawn towards farming, find yourself some opportunities to start farming. One of the things we love to see is people getting experience, and that can be quite hard to do. Woofing, wheeling workers on organic farms or even work away.
00:43:02
Speaker
are really good opportunities to do that. Go hang out with the farmers that are doing what you're interested in doing and the more that you can do, the more different types of enterprises that you can see, the better.
00:43:14
Speaker
So it can be pretty hard to kind of carve out time in your life to do that but one of the advantages of doing it that way is that you normally get bored and food along the way so that can support being able
Grow Great Fruit Program and Personal Insights
00:43:26
Speaker
to do that.
00:43:26
Speaker
One of the ways that we Weatherproofed ourselves along the way was after the flood when we were seeing this beautiful consultant and we got the whole co-op idea on ticking along.
00:43:38
Speaker
And then she, at that stage, we were still, our main income was fruit. We were still growing, running the orchard ourselves. And so she said, what are you going to do next time there's a flood? How can you actually future-proof yourself a bit and weather-proof yourself?
00:43:51
Speaker
and because we had been through droughts and floods and fires and every sort of pest and disease we had this big body of knowledge and we'd been standing at markets selling our fruit for nearly 20 years by then and so we'd talk to thousands of home fruit growers and really noticed that they were asking us a lot of questions and it was nearly always after a problem had happened they would come to us and say oh You know, all the birds, I was just about to go and pick them and all the birds got this. Or I had this disease again. Or why haven't I had any fruit on my apricot? Or, you know, it's the same questions again and again.
00:44:25
Speaker
And so that was when we decided we could put all that knowledge together and start a program for home fruit growers. And so that's where Grow Great Fruit was born. So that's our future proofing kind of weather proofing, I should say, income stream.
00:44:40
Speaker
And so it's really great to think about that, to have ah have another income stream that is not as inherently risky. And a lot of people, by the time they're thinking about farming, they've also already had another career under their belt or been to uni or, you know, have got other skills that they can they can use.
00:44:58
Speaker
Along the way, i think it's really interesting to think about building in either volunteering opportunities for other people as you start farming and getting some experience and or some education opportunities for people.
00:45:14
Speaker
Like you don't necessarily want to start teaching what you don't know too early, but it's a really good thing to kind of tuck in your pocket for a little bit further down the track because as soon as you've got some experience, you've got more experience than anybody that's never done it before.
00:45:30
Speaker
And it's really, really valuable for people to just be able to connect with that in any way and offering workshops or, you know, in our case, it's an online program when we do online masterclasses and that sort of thing. However, whatever format you decide to offer that in, it's a little bit of a gift as well to give other people the opportunity of connecting. Yeah.
00:45:52
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. Tell us about Grow Great Fruit. Grow Great Fruit is my passion project.
00:46:02
Speaker
We started it in 2013 after the flood. It's a weekly, it's a membership program. It's a whole lot of things actually, but at its core, it's a membership program that people join who have anything from usually not one fruit tree, but maybe five fruit trees up to small scale commercial. We have quite a lot of community gardens as well who are members.
00:46:24
Speaker
So it's a weekly email. It's a seasonal program. You get an email every week that tells you what you should be doing with your fruit trees that week. But then we've also got a members website that has got lots of other resources as well. And we've got a massive database of every question anybody has ever asked about a fruit tree.
00:46:43
Speaker
And there's various ways that you can connect in to get the information that you need about your fruit trees. But the goal of it is to equip people with the information that they need just before they need it.
00:46:55
Speaker
And we kind of, we try and set people up with a fruit tree diary as well, so that they've got the ah the jobs in mind before they need to do them that are actually on their diary. And we really encourage people to actually create a diary somehow, either in, you know, whatever, in your diary that you're using or create a spreadsheet or something.
00:47:14
Speaker
So it's just encouraging people to, giving them the Giving them the how information, but also the when is really important. I love that weekly cycle. And I'm always thinking about that, even in what to plant in the garden, what to sow, when, what to forage for, what to put up. It's actually, it's such a, like these yearly rhythms too. a year goes by and I've forgotten what I did last year.
00:47:38
Speaker
Absolutely. My brain is like a colander. just put it in my inbox, mate. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Honestly, it's it's intended to be an annual program. We've got people that joined in 2013. Let's hear it again.
00:47:51
Speaker
They're still there. and every now and then we kind of go, you sure? Like, do you still... yeah And they're like, yeah, yeah, I need the email. I need to be reminded about when I'm going to do my thinning, my fruit thinning. Awesome, Katie. Yeah.
00:48:07
Speaker
And what do you find enchanting about fruit trees? Because I totally fell in love with apples in Tassie and I, you know, such a classic urbanite. I was like, what do you mean this apple tree goes back to like the Roman times because it's been carried on and grafted and blah, blah, blah. How do apple trees work?
00:48:25
Speaker
And I just found their story really, really mesmerizing. So I wonder if you have like a love affair going on with with fruit. Oh, totally. and I think it's like fruit trees are way more like people than you think. They're very, very hormonal.
00:48:40
Speaker
Wow. Their immune system, which for their in their case is essentially their roots in the soil, is so like our gut, right? It's all the same principles, you know, you just need to provide the right environments for the right microbes to thrive.
00:48:55
Speaker
And then your fruit tree is going to be healthy. They're so like us. And once you kind of understand what a fruit tree wants and it's trying to do and work with it, then...
00:49:08
Speaker
it's not that hard to keep them kind of happy and productive. All they really want to do is produce seed, right? They just want to, they want to get to the sun. they want to get as big as they can, which is often not we want what we want them to do, but we can work with them to help them do that in a way that works for us.
00:49:23
Speaker
Yeah. and they they want to have fruit. I thought you were going to say they want to have fun. like, how can they have fun? they just want have fun. They can in the wind. Do you have any really old specimens here?
00:49:37
Speaker
uh not super old here on this farm because they've been we've got definitely old varieties one of my little minor sort of side projects is i've got a heritage apple orchard where i collect apple varieties i'm up to about 80 which is nothing it sounds like a lot but that is nothing there are thousands there are thousands and thousands and thousands i haven't quite filled up that orchard yet and then i'm going to start multi-grafting i'll just graft new ones on So whenever I'm anywhere, I was just down at Apollo Bay staying at a friend's place and she had two apples in her backyard that I don't have. And so I brought home some grafting wood from them and have grafted them on.
00:50:14
Speaker
There were also all these beautiful trees on the side of the road. So this is something that's not really celebrated in Australia. We went to America a few years ago. They celebrate roadside trees. roadside Like feral apples. Feral apples. Yeah. We bought this amazing book about seedling apple trees that have just grown from seed.
00:50:33
Speaker
In Australia, they're kind of despised because they don't grow true to type. And so they're not, you don't know what they are. We just have no sense of adventure. Yeah, I know. amazing. And so i ended up not having time for various reasons. I couldn't stop. I was planning to stop and try all these apples and then bring home some grafting wood.
00:50:52
Speaker
But anyway, that didn't happen. um I just really love fruit trees. I really love the fact that it doesn't even it doesn't even take very much planning and you can be growing pretty much fresh fruit in your garden all year with not many, maybe 20 trees, maybe a few more than that. but You can have fresh fruit. And how amazing is it to have fresh fruit, you know, that you can actually don pick out of your garden? Like there's nothing really like that. Well, except veggies, but like veggies.
00:51:23
Speaker
You can't climb a zucchini, can you? No. You can climb an apple tree and enjoy that. Yeah. they just I just love them. ah Another thing that's quite hard to articulate, I think. but um Yeah.
00:51:35
Speaker
Whenever we go anyway anywhere, we just look for fruit we haven't tried before. Have you had a Huonville crab? no crab apple yes the pink the one i have seen them and are they edible as a crab apple yeah they're like a not not a crab size they're kind of mid yes crab apple yeah yeah but yeah this lurid shade of pink yeah from huonville the least pink town in all of
00:52:00
Speaker
but that's really magical when i see something like that have you been to the apple museum down there yes yeah yeah at willie smith's yes oh such a favorite it's so great i actually was staying with lisa kingston who's bob magnus's daughter and that was kind of like where i fell in love with heritage apples and yeah i just had this whole kind of dreamy future laid out in front of me swanning around in an apple orchard in Tasmania.
00:52:26
Speaker
Might still happen. Good plan. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of apple orchards available in Tasmania because yeah they're experiencing the same things everywhere. Yeah. I think there was one more question, one more apple question I wanted to ask you, Katie.
00:52:39
Speaker
Oh, well, seeing as this, um, I will release this pretty soon. What kind of things are on the horizon for people who have orchards? I know it's probably climate dependent, but what might you be talking about in your Grow Grapefruit program in the coming month or so?
00:52:55
Speaker
Oh boy, we did record this a little while ago now, so please excuse the summertime references, but hey, it's still relevant for next year's fruit shenanigans and it leads into some other cool and interesting shit. ah Summer pruning is next.
00:53:07
Speaker
Summer pruning. Summer pruning, yes. So ah we tend to have two sort of masks. We talk about pruning a lot. because there's no right or wrong with pruning, there's just cuts and consequences. And so you can actually prune at any time of year, but we normally would choose to prune particular trees at particular times of year, and people get really confused about that.
00:53:29
Speaker
So we'll be having a so an online masterclass on summer pruning. um which we'll go through all the pruning principles because we don't teach pruning rules. It really gets people into trouble of, you know, things like you should cut off all the bits of your fruit tree that go into the middle of the tree, for example, is not true. And then we'll do a winter one as well.
00:53:50
Speaker
Okay. Because that's where most people prune most of their fruit trees. Yeah. Yeah. In summer, my association is, ouch, that's going to hurt tree. Is that thing? no no No, no, no, no, not at all. In fact, it's better.
Self-Care and Philosophical Reflections
00:54:03
Speaker
So there's the two sort of main reasons you would prune your fruit trees in summer is if you're doing renovation pruning. So if you've got a really big tree and you want to bring the height down, you'll tend to get a lesser growth response if you do that in late summer, which is kind of now when we're recording this.
00:54:20
Speaker
um And then there's some trees that are particularly prone to fungal diseases, for example, apricot trees in our climate. and so if you prune them in the lovely warm still dry weather of autumn there's less risk you're going to be spreading fungal disease around the tree or from tree to tree ah makes perfect sense it does doesn't it when you know that yeah yes and katie bringing it back to your personal patterns in life and i'm just sitting here thinking wow you know you've got so much on the go and so many people in your life and in your orbit and
00:54:56
Speaker
so so much kind of enthusiasm and zest and i wonder how you tend to yourself like what are some of the things you might do day to day to make sure you can keep on showing up as this wonderful effervescent being that you are i love that question i think that's a beautiful question because i have really had to learn that and i've had to learn it you know at times in my life the hard way i exercise every morning I either do yoga, which I love. I could cheerfully do yoga you know for an hour every morning and I can't quite manage that, but it's often yoga or or some other sort of exercise.
00:55:34
Speaker
And I really try and take the time and I don't get this done at all every day, but meditation has just changed my life. Yeah, getting out of my head and remembering one of the things I'm really meditating on at the moment is that we are on a big spaceship.
00:55:53
Speaker
I need to say a little bit more about that. So there's, I can't remember how many kilometers between us and like cold dark space, but not a lot.
00:56:04
Speaker
And outside of that, like if you think of those pictures where you see the earth from the outside, there's like there's only a really tiny little buffer between us and that sp that cold, dark space.
00:56:20
Speaker
And it's just that little buffer that's keeping us alive. And we're all just on this gigantic spaceship. What we don't kind of feel or remember is that this we this tiny little planet that we're on is whizzing through space the whole time. We're rotating and we're going around the sun and the whole thing's expanding the whole time.
00:56:43
Speaker
And we're not even aware that all of that is happening because we're just cocooned in this tiny little spaceship and we're all in here together I actually often think of it as a spaceship, like we're just in this room of the spaceship called Australia.
00:57:04
Speaker
And I just find that really connects me back to how tiny and insignificant we are and all the things that we get really fussed about and how important the things that we should be fussed about.
00:57:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's really beautiful with like a sci-fi geeky overlay. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to think about that too. Bit of a sci-fi nerd. Yeah.
00:57:28
Speaker
Well, is there anything that you were on the edge of your seat to talk about today that i haven't asked you? I think you've done a great job of asking me all the questions. Thank you. Yeah, I guess I just really want to reiterate to people that, you know, look for that inner connection to wanting to be connected to the earth and and go with it.
00:57:48
Speaker
you it matters oh well thank you for welcoming me into your space today to conduct this conversation it's been such a joy i've been waiting to meet you so what a great way to do it likewise recorded for posterity yeah thanks katie thanks so much for being here
00:58:07
Speaker
That was Katie Finlay of Harcourt Organic Farming Co-op and Grow Great Fruit. And you'll find all of the linky poos and good things in the show notes. I'm pretty damn excited for the next episode, which is with a palliative care nurse named Pippa White, who'll be answering a whole bunch of your questions on death.
00:58:24
Speaker
And after that, I'm going to be wrapping up this season with another tangential talk fest with my beautiful man, George Osmond. Just a reminder that I'm releasing fortnightly at the moment, and I have no idea if subscribing on the various platforms notifies you when a new episode drops, but it can't hurt, right?
00:58:42
Speaker
Thanks for being here, you wonderful humans. Catch you in 14 days and counting.