Prom Coast Food Collective

Building Food Communities after the Smoke Has Cleared

After the fires are out. After the communities are safe. After the financial aid starts; and it stops. Then. We need to build food communities. And I mean community in its truest sense; everyday connection, working together, shared experiences. Economies which operate in solidarity and mutual respect. *********************************************************************** When the smoke from the fires found its way to the major capital cities, I think it drove home for many, the intensity of the situation. From that experience, there was a much needed acknowledgement from the public that financial and in-kind aid was needed. So how do we continue to foster the connections between country and city after the smoke clears? How do we bring country and city closer? Initiatives such as #emptyesky are great. Do that. A much needed economic boost will be had. But let’s talk lasting change. Small-scale producers and farmers often have little to no financial buffer…and many won’t recover from the hits being taken. We’ll lose more and more family farms to this set of events and the ones to follow. For my family farm, Colin and Sally’s, we have our own food community, our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members. They ride the farming waves with us, promising to take our meat over the year and paying us upfront or monthly to do so. It gives us surety, confidence and…our food community. CSAs bring the city and country closer. After becoming organic, it is the next best thing we ever did. Our CSA members make our farming viable, and, in turn, we feed them. Pretty darn simple really. In an effort to create a larger food community around us, myself and Amelia Bright founded the Prom Coast Food Collective, now in its third year. This food community has been one of the most satisfying things I’ve been a part of, with no capital investment, we regularly return $20,000 a month in sales to our farmers and makers. A female-led, farmer-focused, initiative, we pull together every month, orders from those who purchase food from all our organic and regenerative farms. It is bootstrapped, make-do, empowering and my family has never eaten better. Farmers on the Collective receive 95% of the retail dollar. Unheard of in our commodified system. How do we manage it? We work as a team, we are creative in our systems thinking, we work on the idea that if it doesn’t work fairly for the farmers in our food community, then it doesn’t happen. Perhaps your area needs one? CSAs, buying groups, food collectives, farmer’s markets, veggie patches, food swaps. Grow it, or know it. You know what they say in the plastic-free community…we don’t need one person doing this perfectly, we need a whole lot of people doing this imperfectly. The building of community remains a deep need after the fires. Don’t think of community-building as the “soft option”; the power in bringing people together is well-documented. #dontmakemedigoutmyartsdegreereadinglist I ask you to use this time of calamity to think about the what you put on your plate and why that matters. Support the farmers building soil, farming organically, farming well. Re-localise. Renew. Respect. We need to build food communities now more than ever. This is a call to arms, not alms. When the smoke clears, we ask you, not to just throw money into a tin, but to change the way you think about what you eat and how you buy it. You can make the most impact in the regional and rural communities in your state by supporting the farmers in it. Food communities, built in the wake of disaster, can heal, reinvigorate, and build-in resilience. #shakethehandofthefarmerwhogrowsyourfood #putyourethicsonthetable