126. Seeding & Protecting the Cultures We Need

With Serenity Hill & Kirsten Larsen

This is a profound personal and collective story right at the heart of systemic and cultural change. Serenity Hill and Kirsten Larsen are regenerative farmers and co-founders of the Open Food Network. You might remember my conversation with Kirsten online two years ago, as Covid took hold, and Open Food Network took off. At that stage, they’d experienced a tenfold increase in both people signing up to the platform and in turnover, while spanning over a dozen countries.

A lot has happened since, too, with the Network, with the trailblazing land ownership and succession model we touched on last time, and on a transformative personal level. So when our family visited theirs recently, we had to pull up a pew on the front porch together, and press record.

Serenity & Kirsten (L-R), just before pressing record on this conversation (pic: Olivia Cheng - full pic below).

“So Pukawidgee and other farms and other community food enterprises, these sites of creating a different culture, it’s like monasteries, right? It’s like this protecting potential. This is why we’ve worked so hard on the legal structures and the economic structures that are protecting those. So that they’ve got a membrane, and this interchange, with the external economy. But you’ve got the cultures - we’re creating the cultures - that we need, in these spaces. Then they spread. ”

— Serenity Hill

Our conversation starts with a very frank and vital conversation about land, ownership and money, and how investment can work best for those doing the actual work of regeneration. From there we delve into other ways to enable more of that work, including more values-based supply networks.

And that leads us to where this pioneering couple is currently exploring further layers of personal transformation. Oh, and how over a decade ago, Serenity foresaw the independents movement that has just transformed Australia’s parliament.

More on the Open Food Network: it’s a not-for-profit, global collaboration building food distribution systems that are fair, local and transparent. The Network’s flagship open source platform enables new, ethical supply chains. And in the wake of COVID-19 has gone to a whole new level, as producers look for alternative ways to sell quality produce, and eaters look for alternative ways to access it. The Network website says: Food Unincorporated - sometimes the best way to fix the system is to start a new one.

This conversation was recorded in Violet Town, Victoria, on 29 March 2022.

Click on the photos below for full view, and hover over them for descriptions (pics by Anthony James except the first one - that one’s by Olivia Cheng).