Josh Williams

[Josh Williams]

My name is Josh Williams. I'm a proud Ngarrindjeri and Narungga man.

Growing up with the countryside as the backyard, the bush always kind of around me, I’ve always been an explorer.

It created this yearning to get back on land as an adult once I’d ticked a few of those boxes as a young man: went travelling, went to university, studied horticulture.

After uni, I got into landscaping and landscape design, had a passion towards system thinking and plants and all things that kind of grow.

And then recognising and understanding how, in Australia, we treat land and how we grow food, for me, was like there has to be a better way to do this.

So, for me the share farming model was a way that I didn't have to work my whole life to save up enough money to find a piece of land that I probably couldn't have afforded, when I am young and passionate about getting in the game of growing good quality produce.

Tumpinyeri Growers has been operating for 5 years now.

We are market gardeners, so 2 people, small farm, efficient and intense production is what we're doing here, and we want to provide the most nutrient dense, delicious, healthy food to the community.

Food is culture and for me, our people, we have a food culture.

Indigenous people basically treated the land like one big, massive garden. They tended to it in a way that an old lady would go out there and tend to her roses.

We manipulated the landscape for the benefit of everything, not just ourselves. I think agriculture can take a lot of wisdom from that.

And First Nations people, we've been broken from a lot of these practices, but it's not lost. Once you start to scratch the surface and participate in ethical farming systems, such as agro-ecological practices, it just starts to come through. You start to see and feel nature as a part of you, and that comes through in the food, that comes through in your life.

Another big component of what we do here is that sharing knowledge. We have these educational farm tours. That knowledge sharing is huge and we’re not just doing it for us, we're doing it to gather as much of the information as we can and pass it on.

I want to share how connecting to Country, through growing food, has made me feel like I'm belonging to land and I’m belonging to culture.

What I’m most excited about is this introduction of bushfoods into Tumpinyeri, and not only just for me, I want to bring other mob in and teach them how to set up systems like this, so they can participate in the industry.

We’re setting up the wash and pack facility and the market garden to be able to accommodate 50 to 100 families: a vegetable box every week, for 6, 8, 9 months of the year.

We need the consumers to support not just Country, but culture.

We are designed to help one another.

Life’s a bit too short to go it alone, so it’s nice to combine where you can with the right kind of people.

[Josh Williams]

Share farming is, I think, a necessary way that we can produce and provide food for local communities.

You've got people at your back. You help one another out. It's that, ‘it takes a village’ mindset, not just to raise a child, but to produce the right kind of food in the right way.

Access to land is really challenging today in the landscape of Australia, not just for new and emerging farmers or want to be farmers, but particularly for First Nations people.

The thing you need [is,] a lot of capital, or you need to be born into it, or if there's land back arrangements, which there are few and far between.

It's really challenging. A lot of those land back arrangements too aren’t, kind of, prime agricultural land.

So, it seemed like it was almost born out of necessity for me. Having that fork in the road moment in my late 20s, thinking, do I continue the career path that I was on and save up money for the next 10, 20, 30 years to buy the land?

Or do I just find somebody that has the land that would be willing to enter into an agreement that was mutually beneficial, based on shared values and reciprocity?

And that's what we've landed here at Jonai Farm and set up the business here with these guys.

These relationships strengthen farms which strengthen food systems, which is pretty much what our whole business is here.

This is connecting to Country for me, and having the opportunity with the land holders, like Tam and Stu, to be able to do that, that's a dream come true.

[Josh Williams]

For me, it was like, well what's my passions? What do I like doing? I like growing things, I like growing plants, I love soil, I love working with my hands, I love working outdoors, I love building.

Just seeing all these skills and knowledge come into a framework to produce food, right. Real food in the right way. Cultural practices go hand in hand.

Caring for Country is how you grow, like, ethical, nutritional, fair food.

So that for me was like, ok, I want to be a farmer. I can utilise these skills. And just in the essence of being a farmer, you have to be on the land you're observant, you're witnessing the seasons, you're watching nature. You are in it all of the time.