Why I farm. Fair Food Convergence. Fruit Vipassana
The second instalment in a series of Fair Food farmers and grocery makers talking about why they do what they do. She started Madelaine’s Eggs on her parents’ Macedon Ranges farm as an 8 year old. Fourteen years later Madelaine runs 2000 chickens and sells her eggs online, at farmers’ markets and through more than a dozen […]
We’re all happiest making cheese.
Side by side in an unassuming commercial kitchen identical twin Ukrainain cheesemakers Andriy and Taras Kogut intently cut curds and form them into wheels of gruyere and mozzarella. Bar the sloop of wet curds the room is silent. In a steel and glass cabinet finished cheeses a displayed like works of art. The scene could […]
Broad Bean Dreaming. Basic Fruit Box
Yesterday between rain showers in the little garden we share with our friends we harvested the broad beans. Sticking out of old cooking pots and shopping bags were huge, instantly familiar green pods. These were unmistakably Joe Garita’s beans, broadies that Joe had planted, saved and improved year after year since he bought the Coburg market garden from a Chinese family in 1945. […]
How to grow a farmer. Vince's broad bean bounty. More CERES tomato seedlings.
Once upon a time we were all farmers – well most of us were. As the industrial revolution took hold more and more of us left the the land to become shopkeepers, doctors and digital insights analysts and we finally came to a today where hardly any of us are farmers or even have family […]
Social / unsocial it all comes around. A box saved.
I get the feeling there’s more than just stolen wages involved in 7-Eleven’s systematic underpaying of it’s workers. Same with Coles’ and Woolworths’ “Mind the gap” programs demanding suppliers cover their losses. When our leading companies demonstrate that bullying and meanness are more important in a “successful” business than kindness and respect it filters down setting a tone for […]
The wisdom to know the difference. CERES farm open day.
Twenty-five years ago Premier Jeff Kennett took power in Victoria and with it he also took 90% of CERES’ funding. Overnight teachers lost jobs, education programs were cut, a hard gloom descended over the park. After years of growing a living classroom from an old tip site, years of working bees, years of scraping funds together, years of […]
