World Earth Day
While playing with chickens and Maremmas out at Runnymede Farm this week, I asked Blythe Calnan why she wanted to be a Dirty Clean Food Farmer. This is her wonderful reply above, in amongst her happy flock of laying hens and the next generation of guardian dogs.
Her response had me reflecting that we as a company really are in a unique position to support regenerative farmers, and get the best produce to our customers.
When I first started working for Wide Open Agriculture back in 2019, I was managing our research and development projects. We began looking at how we can get the word out there about regenerative agriculture, and how we could convince more farmers to switch to regenerative.
This was somewhat like leading a horse to water - you can provide all the information on why Regen Ag is great, but every farmer needs their own reason to transition! Often unless they have had a catalyst - a health scare, financial pressure, a natural disaster - that makes them question the status quo, or challenges their paradigm or way of thinking, then they may not be open to looking at their farming system from a different perspective.
Through this process we realised that there were already a heap of fantastic regenerative farmers already out there - we didn’t need to create them! What these farmers really needed was a pathway to market for their produce - a way to market their produce as regenerative, without taking up all of their time. Because farming itself is a full time job, and adding packaging, distribution, customer service, social media and all sorts of marketing can end up taking away from the time and energy required to produce top notch produce. Some farmers can do it for a few years, but often they end up burning out.
With this realisation, we wanted to become the ultimate conduit between regenerative farmers and conscious consumers - rethinking the role of the ‘middle man’ to benefit everyone. Our farmers can focus on what they’re fantastic at - growing the best regenerative produce, and we focus on getting that produce to our customers, with an emphasis on quality and transparency.
What better time than on World Earth Day, to give a shout out to our fantastic farmers, who are standing by their beliefs and challenging conventional thinking to work with us and bring you the best regenerative produce in WA.
The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970, when a United States senator organized a national demonstration to raise awareness about environmental issues. Rallies took place across the USA and, by the end of the year, the US government had created the Environmental Protection Agency. Groups that had been fighting individually against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness and the extinction of wildlife united on Earth Day around these shared common values.
I’d like to take this opportunity to ask you to unite with us, Dirty Clean Food, and our band of passionate and dedicated farmers, to make the switch to regenerative, to support farmers and a farming system that is working to regenerate and heal our landscape.