Hello from Scone, I'm home 👋🏽

For the past week I’ve been in Tasmania, a little island similar in size to Ireland that sits at the very bottom of Australia.

I was there attending the inaugural festival conference, hosted at Matthew and Sadie Evans’ Fat Pig Farm in the beautiful Huon Valley.

I was incredibly honoured to have been asked to host the Soil Tent. How appropriate!

It’s difficult to describe how this affected me personally and professionally. 

So I’m not going to.

I’ll save that for another time. Because none of this is about me.

This is about the people attending, speaking and organising this incredible gathering.

To increase awareness around the way we treat the soil in which we grow our food. 

It affects the very health of the planet we call Earth.

A few people had a very profound effect on me with the words and stories they shared so I’m going to clumsily quote them.

Excuse me if I have misquoted, but I think you’ll get the idea.

[Thank you Eli Court for recording some of these more eloquently that I!]

• Nothing exists in isolation.

• We are mostly microbes. 

• Almost all of our microbes come from the environment.

  
  

  Prof Craig Liddicoat

(Research Fellow at Flinders University)

• Supplements do not equal food.

• Diet is intrinsically linked to medical disorders.

• Our Western industrial diet is the leading cause of early death.

• Only 4% of us are eating enough vegetables.

Prof. Felice Jacka OAM

(Director Food & Mood Centre at Deakin University)

• We eat food not nutrients.

• The microbiome of the human body is the microbiome of the soil.

Stacey Curcio

(Naturopath, Culturing Wellness)

• The more I understand nature, the less work I have to do.

• Symbiosis is the model of nature.

• Nature is so beautiful. The systems she has created are profound.

• Nutrient density variation (as in how many nutrients there are in the foods we eat) is determined by where and how the food is grown.

• The level of life in the soil correlates to nutrient density.

Dan Kittredge

(Executive Director, Bionutrient Food Ass.)

• Listen to your landscape. Tread softly on the earth.

Dr Jack Pascoe

(Senior Research Fellow, University of Melbourne).

What we do with our soils - as farmers, land holders, small holders, gardeners, directly affects the quality of the food we eat.

Listen to your landscape. 

Observe nature. 

Watch what your land is trying to tell you.

Take care of your soil as if your life depended on it.

Because it does.

I want to say a special thank you to Matthew for entrusting me with this job. I was scared, excited, blessed, sad it was over.

Thank you to Sadie for feeding me.

Sorry to Nicola for being a liability in the kitchen (making videos, asking for coffee, tramping through the incorrect areas, putting my hands in the bin).

Thank you to Nadia for matching me up with the most divine human, Elaine, as my host.