Food Forever

Follow up local farming event

Join us at our next Food Forever gathering for local food enthusiasts who want to work together to:

• improve our access to local food and
• support local farmers.

Time: 2-4:30pm
When: Sat. 28 March 2026
Where: Mullumbimby Civic Hall
Entry: $5 (kids free)

Food Forever on 28 March will feature:

• "How we benefit from investing in Byron's Food Economy", an exclusive conversation pre-recorded specifically for our region with tangible actions we can take as a community to shore up our local food system.
  Featuring: Michael Shuman, US lawyer, economist and localisation expert and Helena Norberg-Hodge, Pioneer of the localisation movement, founder of Local Futures. Helena will be present in person to take questions afterwards.
• Solutions focused discussion groups, based on suggestions raised in our first Food Forever session on 9 February, which fall under the following broad headings:
  • Increasing growers' access to customers
  • Housing for growers
  • Land sharing to assist land owners with harvests and to give landless farmers access to land
  • the campaign for raising awareness of the need to grow our local food system.
• Community song with Caroline Cowley: After a rich and inspiring day of talks, Caroline Cowley will lead a fun and freeing closing session, bringing us back into our hearts through sound, rhythm and song.

Michael Shuman was in Byron in May 2023 for Local Futures' sponsored Localisation Weekend where he inspired local residents about the immense potential of local investment. With his decades of experience working with communities around the world, Michael has informed motivated personal investors of how fiscally and socially rewarding a shift out of the volatile and increasingly vulnerable global financial markets into "Main Street" can be. You can watch an interview with Michael and follow his work from here.

With our food sources becoming increasingly globalised and centralised, we're losing access to healthy, fresh food that's grown locally. We're all too familiar with the impacts of bush fires, floods and the pandemic on accessing food that's from the local region. Once roads become blocked or borders closed, the impacts on the supply chains are visible within a couple of days on our supermarket shelves.

Empty shops are a strong indication that most of the food consumed here is trucked in from outside our region. We shouldn't be this vulnerable to economic, environmental or political challenges that will keep coming - especially as we live in such a fertile region.

We're eternally grateful to our farmers' markets that have been the one reliable source of food for our region, but they only supply a small fraction of our population.

Let's come together to explore the many options available to us to support the growth and production of food in this region. Together we can make our local food system resilient and abundant!