Sustainable Table is applying research for regenerative agriculture

Not-for-profit organisation Sustainable Table members gathered in Melbourne recently to explore working to harness First Nations knowledge and put regenerative agriculture practices at the forefront of farming.

The organisation started in 2009 and aims to change Australia's food, farming and fibre systems.

Sustainable Table chief executive Jade Miles is a regenerative heritage fruit farmer in Stanley and said the organisation looked to apply international studies to Australian farming practices.

"We know that in order to change food systems in regions and agriculture that we need to change the financial system and move from being extractive to regenerative," she said.

"In order to do that, we need to completely change the paradigm of the players that are playing and the best place to start is a conversation.

"This hasn't been done in Australia before, we've mirrored it really closely on a research piece done in the [US] about five years ago.

"When we tried to apply those learnings, it just didn't apply to an Australian context so we've re-cut the learnings completely."

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Ms Miles said the research showed the agriculture industry needed to act to help preserve the land for future generations.

She said a key ingredient to creating change in the food and fibre industries was "trust".

"We're facing into the reality that we need to act urgently but we can't panic so we need to go slowly and deeply, but we need to act immediately," she said.

"We know and understand farming intimately.

"We work with farmers everyday, we have been on the ground for a long time and [most of us in the team] are farmers."

Sustainable Table industry development manager and sheep farmer Tanya Massy, Cooma, NSW, said the overarching goal included sharing the key parts of the research.

"I think the message is that we're not alone in this anymore, I think farmers have been at the face of climate change and impacts and felt really isolated but there's this growing interest," she said.

"One of the things that we're trying to show really clearly in this research is that it's not simple, there are no silver bullets.

"It's a very complex and inter-connected systems that we're working across but all of us have a role to play with regeneration."

She said she wanted to join the Sustainable Table movement after she witnessed the effects of drought and bushfires.

"I grew up on a family farm, steeped in a rural community that I loved and landscapes that I loved," she said.

"So I witnessed the struggles of rural Australia and the beauty of rural Australia and how much diversity, knowledge and richness exists in our farming communities and how bloody hard it is.

"For the past few years as I stepped into the Sustainable Table space we were being hit by the summer bushfires and catastrophic droughts and heat events we had never seen.

"The impacts of that - not only on the landscapes and ecology but on the people that I loved - was distressing and scary so it was like I couldn't not [join Sustainable Table]."

Ms Massy said people considering their role in the supply chain would be the simplest immediate action for change.

"Some farmers don't identify with [regenerative agriculture] but we're trying to wield it in a really inclusive way and say that it's a movement happening globally to bring us back into a way of living, farming and eating that sustains life and doesn't extract from it," she said.

"Ask those questions about whether you're working on the side of life or whether you're working against it."