Ever thought it might be great to put a couple of local organic farmers and some city folk in touch with each other? Sounds simple enough, right? Let some growers know some people are interested in buying their produce, visit farmer, get produce, take it to town, tell people it’s here, share it. Et voila!, a transaction is borne. Well, here we are ONE YEAR LATER and Food Connect Adelaide are about to begin operating. It’s been a long, hard, informative and life changing journey organising the connection of city folk to local farmers. We’ve learnt heaps, had lots of thoughts consolidated, quit our day jobs, leant on partners and families, pulled out our hair, cried and had sleepless nights on many occasions. Our learning curve has been steep but rewarding and we are so close to the starting line. It’s so incredibly exciting! And that’s just amongst our tiny crew!
What about you, the ‘city folk’ (and some keen country folk) our subscribers? Word has it you are excited, too. We are just guessing, but we kinda think you are a mob of committed, ecologically minded citizens who care about where and how your food is produced; its quality and the well-being of its growers. We think you may also be concerned about wider enviro-ethical and social issues like peak oil, peak soil, footprints and community fragmentation to name just a few. The ‘Big Picture’ stuff. We suspect you may be just like us!
We thought it might be good to share with you some of the things we’ve learnt about our local food bowl here in South Australia and how it affects our community, our food choices and expectations and what we as Food Connect Adelaide want to do about it in both the short and long term. We want to get us all speaking the same language, on the same page and to let you know about the dreams which have kept us all going over this past year, so you can get as excited and as enthusiastic as we are. We want to keep you informed of our short and long term goals and the very real challenges that organic farming and farmers (and consumers) face in this ‘age of instant’. Farming is not instant (shockingly, things take a while to grow!) and we want to encourage everyone to remain sensitive to the real issues we face here in SA to eating ‘local and organic’.
Our primary aim at Food Connect Adelaide, besides providing you with local fresh organic produce, is to create a supply chain that is feasible and consistent with consumer demand for variety and quality. When we began this Food Connect journey in Adelaide, organic farmers had been growing and planting produce of a limited variety. The dilemma we faced and still face in this early period is we couldn’t guarantee them a market if they grew more food (hence our expression of interest request), but we have been trying to generate enough interest so that farmers themselves could believe in what we were saying and doing and simultaneously tell the public, you guys, that we are good to go! It’s been a fine line and we have been lucky that farmers have been willing to share with us some of their already sown and maturing crops. We have had to come off the end of their planting season and subsequently there is some organic local produce that is just not available here in SA due to a lack of market for them and being this far into season. We just hope you are with us while we start this amazing journey of developing food sufficiency in our community on a truly sustainable level and see that the future holds some truly amazing rewards and in time some amazing variety of produce.
Currently organic produce in SA is not grown to satisfy the needs of its local people. It’s been a small market and organic produce gets moved around the country to find its markets. There are a tiny number of organic farmers out there – we have an acute farmer shortage, let alone an organic farmer shortage – there are hundreds of acres of certified fallow land out there waiting to be planted! Organic farmers need consistent and reliable demand – and that’s what Food Connect Adelaide provides for them and is the reason behind our up-front 1 month minimum subscriptions. If we want a sustainable local organic food system we need to provide a stable and consistent market for it and be patient as it grows to provide us with all the choices we are used to. Our dream in the shorter term is to provide a fair trading environment where our local organic farmers can ’scale up’ to grow most of the food we want to eat; we look forward to those gourmet boxes next season! And we look forward to sharing with you over time some of the wider dreams and goals we have for Food Connect Adelaide, food sustainability and security and community development in South Australia.
Just small goals… 
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