Two Victorian agriculture ventures that have taken significant steps towards encouraging a circular economy and reducing waste have been recognised for their efforts in driving a sustainable future.
Social enterprise collective Moving Feast Network and vegetable waste company Nutri V have been selected as industry leader finalists in the circular economy innovation category for the 2023 Premier's Sustainability Awards.
The Moving Feast Network was formed during the COVID-19 pandemic and consists of many Victoran-based groups working on projects toward regenerative food systems.
Organisations part of the network include the Collingwood Children's Farm, the regenerative agriculture operation Common Ground Project and the social initiative STREAT which provides young people with horticulture and urban farm training.
STREAT chief executive officer Rebecca Scott said she was excited the network was chosen as a finalist as it was a recognition that small organisations can make a difference.
"Moving Feast started our work humbly as a heap of little organisations, and what we realised is that we're not big organisations, but we have scale collectively through collaboration," she said.
"It was through linking up all of the different parts of our work together in where we would start to have a bigger impact."
Ms Scott said it was easy for smaller organisations to be overwhelmed by challenges like climate change, but working together can "create ripple effects".
"It's all of the tiny things that we do and decide that we aggregate together to make the change that we need," she said.
Ms Scott said the collective will continue to reach out to regenerative regional farmers in Victoria next year, especially those with a glut of produce.
She hopes it can mean the collective can become a major purchaser and then sell long-shelf life products.
"We'll start to get more line of sight of that produce when we move across to work more at Queen Victoria Markets because that's a location where a lot of produce is coming in, not just from Victoria but across Australia.
"Part of what we want to do next year is to start getting stronger links with regional areas, so they can see us and we can see them."
She mentioned the organisation's goal to promote conscious consumption and educate city residents about food production.
"We have to be able to do better at educating consumers about what local seasonal regenerative eating looks like," she said.
"I think there's a lot of people who go to a supermarket, see they can buy anything at any time of the year and don't understand that you can't grow everything at all times of the year in Victoria."
The second finalist in the category, food manufacturing company Nutri V, was begun as a collaboration between vegetable grower Fresh Select and the CSIRO.
Fresh Select chief executive John Said, who runs a horticulture farm in Werribee South, said the collaboration aimed to commercialise those technologies to turn surplus vegetables into ingredients, products and supplements.
These included vegetable puff snacks and unique ice cream flavours such as cauliflower.
"As farmers we have battled farm yields for many years, meaning, if I plant, for example, ten plants of broccoli, in any perfect situation I would cut no more than seven and a half to eight of those plants," he said.
"One and a half to two of those plants or 15 to 20 per cent is lost on out-of-specification product, or it's damaged by people harvesting or running a tractor through the field.
"Whatever the case is, there's losses and the challenge we've had is those losses end up as being purely food waste."
As his farming business expanded, food waste became a greater problem. He turned to technology when he attended a CSIRO seminar about drying vegetables to upscale them to edible food snacks.
"If you think about that percentage as we grow, if I'm to plant a million plants a week and only harvest 800,000 of them, then 200,000 of those plants at an average weight of, say 300 grams, is in the vicinity of 60,000 kilograms of good food just going to waste," he said
Utilising the technology helped to achieve a 100pc crop yield, with every vegetable harvested and potential for expansion, with a Queensland pumpkin grower also asking for help in buying excess product.
He said he was "over the moon" about being selected as a finalist in the Premier's Sustainability Awards.
"I'm so grateful that people have taken notice of us being able to contribute towards helping food waste and more importantly, viability and sustainability," he said.
The third industry leader finalist in the circular economy innovation category joining the Moving Feast Network and Nutri V is ecologiQ, which reuses waste materials from road and rail infrastructure.
