A Harvest Worth Celebrating
Here at SHA we’re gearing up for the Harvest Festival. It’s a time where we can come together as a community at different events, farm tours, long lunches and an extra festive farmers market. It’s a time to celebrate Summer’s abundance and prepare ourselves for the cold weather ahead. It’s prompted me to do a little thinking about how fortunate we are in our community to be able to celebrate right now.
I read a news report this week that said price of fresh and frozen vegetables in the supermarket is set to rise because of a war across the world. It is no longer economical for big brands to sell frozen chooks as a ‘loss-leader’ to entice customers into the store while they jack up the prices on other items. Suddenly the chickens cost more to feed because the industrial feed pellets are made with Ukrainian wheat, there’s a delay in the supply of industrial fertilisers, and the ships that cart the frozen peas from Europe rely on Russian oil. Floods have wiped out industrial crops, distribution centres, roads and other resources in QLD and Northern NSW. Long and unwieldy supply chains are tangling, snapping, and unravelling.
For many people there is a disconnect from the rhythms of the seasons and the natural times of feast and famine. The promise of capitalism was a never-ending feast. Over the past few years our broken industrial food system has begun to show its deep cracks and flaws to consumers who are experiencing supermarket shortages; some for the first time in their lives. This was a rude awakening from a world where there was always a huge abundance of food at our fingertips, to one where people felt compelled to hoard and stock up in fear. The fall of the false ‘perpetual feast’ feels like a broken social contract to people who assumed there would always be food on the shelves because that’s how it has always been.
It’s times like this I feel very lucky to be part of Southern Harvest. While others despair over the skyrocketing prices of cauliflower I know that a war in Europe will have little impact on the farms just down the road who are growing the vegetables that end up in my produce box. We keep transport costs to a minimum by sharing deliveries, de-centralising pickup locations, and giving farmers the opportunity to sell their produce at the Bungendore Farmers Market, rather than travelling into Canberra. Organic, regenerative, and agro-ecological farms require few inputs, and certainly not agro-chemical fertilisers from halfway around the world. While rain has severely impacted some members of our community, others have been spared due to the incredible diversity of microclimates across the different bioregions our producers span. We are obviously very lucky to have been spared the worst of it, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the producers further North who have lost everything. This hyper-local focus has cut out those unwieldy supply chains and brought us back to community relationships that are far more resilient and resourceful.
As we approach the Harvest Festival I find myself filled with a hope that I suspect those staring at empty supermarket shelves do not feel. As a community we are able to support each other through famine and feast. We celebrate the harvest not just because it represents abundance right now. It is also part of a social contract that is much much older: we will make it through the Winter. It’s the promise of a community to care for each other in the certain knowledge that a garden is a never-ending circle.
The harvest this year is perhaps a little soggy, and some has been lost to the rain. But we will celebrate the bounty that we do have and do our best to honour the people who worked really bloody hard to produce it. We’ll pay a fair price, use it all, waste nothing, and preserve the excess. And as a community we can come together to support those who don’t have a bounty to celebrate, because our relationships go beyond the transactional.
Harvest Festival is a wonderful way for you to get more involved in our community: meet the producers, have meaningful discussions about our food system, and – of course – celebrate a bounty of delicious food! Come along and be part of a vibrant and resilient food system.