About us

Tammi Jonas - President, Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance
I think change is is something that keeps this sort of creative and alive and excited and I'm like a changed junkie. Give me something new and creative all the time and that's how I feel about change.

For humanity it's the same as my feeling about change in that change is good for us it challenges us and it makes us think harder about things than if everything's always just the same and that can help us as society get better at what we do because we were challenged.

Derek Smith - Working with Nature; Farmers and Educators of regenerative farming, Gura NSW
I took a group of organic farming students to a friend of mine up at Glen Innes and he had a property up there but he was my AG teacher at high school.  The first thing he said to me when we started he said you know all that stuff that I taught you at school and I said yeah he said don't do that anymore so.. A lot of the stuff I learnt at university was not what I teach at all these days I some of it was almost the antithesis of what I teach now.

Kerry Cochrane - President, Australian Institute of Ecological Agriculture Cooperative Ltd.
Education is about the development of a rounded approach to understanding life it's about the making of meaning in each person's life it's about an individual journey it's about an end point where a person can go out into the world and improve that world. So it has many facets to it but largely it's really about a journey that individual goes on because they have a purpose and that purpose relates to a greater whole.

Bruce Pascoe - Indigenous historian and author of Dark Emu
We need a reward curiosity that's what schools ought to do because inevitably and traditionally the study of science has had rewards for the human world.

Tammi Jonas
We're always doing the best we can with the information we have and sometimes we find out later there was more information that could made us do things differently and that doesn't mean we were wrong it just means we had more to learn.

Our education system is letting us down. So in most of the major universities we are still being taught old-school agronomy you know where it's not whether to add chemical it's how much at what time of year. The hope for me has come out of some of the much smaller and younger universities I think is they have a nimbleness to them where they're prepared to make change and be responsive to society. they're not the establishment saying we already have all the answers.

Kerry Cochrane
In terms of degrees in agriculture in Australia most are agricultural science degrees and they're reductionist in style it's about subjects and about examinations there isn't one on regenerative agriculture in this country the course at Southern Cross University in regenerative agriculture will give students an understanding of the nature of what they're working with the ecosystem that is there how to work with that ecosystem how to know what happens when you do what you do on the farm and how that might impact on an ecosystem.

So that's what we want our graduates to come out with is a knowledge of ecology, a knowledge of themselves and a knowledge of how to work in a community.

Lorraine Gordon - Founder, Regenerative Agriculture Alliance & Direct, Strategic Projects, Southern Cross University
Southern Cross University has taken the lead in this space. They are very well equipped, they've got a leading Soil lab in the world, a leading plant lab, they've got farming together so they've got the networks of farmers all over the country they've got capacity and they've got the will and they're brave enough to go out and actually address things in a holistic manner and so they are now right at the cutting edge of this regenerative agriculture movement and leading the way in all things ecology.