On Saturday, Jacqui and I spent the morning with Oli Madgett at Willunga Farmers Market in McLaren Vale. Hundreds of locals kept the 60+ stallholders busy as they displayed the local delicacies well known in this part of South Australia. Amongst the many displays, one particularly stood out. We were stoked to see a ‘Farmers for Climate Change’ stall in the middle of the market.
‘Farmers for Climate Change’ has a vision for farmers and its representatives to be climate leaders. In Australia, it has 7,000+ farmer members supporting the vision. Its mission is ‘to influence Australia to adopt strong economy-wide climate policies and realise a prosperous and sustainable future, full of opportunity for farmers and farming communities’. You can learn more about their vision & mission at www.farmersforclimateaction.org.au/what-we-do
What struck Jacqui and me as being particularly inspiring about the stall was its visibility and how it shared the farmers message around the impact of climate with an audience of end-customers. Real farmers. Real people. It’s not something we have seen before in New Zealand.
At last week’s evokeAG conference, the challenges facing AgriFoodTech & ClimateTech were closely aligned. Given the extreme weather events that have recently occurred in both Australia and New Zealand, this comes as no surprise. One unexpected surprise for me was the opportunity to catch up with Mick Liubinskas, founder of Climate Salad at the Investor Pitch Dinner last Monday evening. Mick spoke at both the Adelaide and Sydney pre-2035 Oceania Summit workshops back in May last year. As of today, Wharf42 is one of the very few kiwi members of Climate Salad.
No trip to McLaren Vale is complete without a visit to a few of its famous wineries. Oli did not let us down. Saturday afternoon was spent tasting a number of the region’s best-known wines. We learnt about some of the sustainability methods being used by local growers and the impact this was having. The good news from a New Zealand perspective, is that most of these were not new to us. Kiwi winemakers lead the world in some significant areas of sustainable production.
Following last week’s evokeAG conference and the 30 external events that supported it, we’ve had an awesome 10 days in South Australia. There are just so many similarities with New Zealand, the opportunity to collaborate is clear. Building on the successes of last week is key.
Thanks to Oli, Michael, Brad, Penny and a host of others in South Australia’s emerging AgriFoodTech ecosystem for helping make it happen. We look forward to building on that opportunity in the weeks and months ahead.