Nick Steiner On Community Farming And Creating Nutritious Food For Those In Need

Nick Steiner, the Founder and CEO of The Mini Farm Project, is a relentless advocate against food insecurity in Australia. His journey began by transforming his own backyard into a thriving farm.

Recognised for his exceptional community contributions, Nick received the prestigious Paul Harris Fellowship and became an AMP Foundation Tomorrow Maker alumni. His dedication was further acknowledged when he was named Moreton Bay Citizen of the Year. Through The Mini Farm Project, particularly the Loganlea State High School charity farm, Nick bridges communities, businesses, and youth to combat food scarcity, offering fresh sustenance to thousands in need, while fostering community collaboration and dismantling barriers for students and the community.

Nick discusses practically responding to the challenges of food insecurity, and how The Mini Farm Project has leveraged community collaboration to dismantle barriers to accessing nutrient rich locally produced food.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to where you are today?

[Nick Steiner] - I planned to be in hospitality for the rest of my life straight out of school. I was in the hospitality industry in Cairns, worked at all the hotels and resorts, then moved down to Brisbane in 1994. I continued to work for hotels, resorts, high teas, and catering, which I was in from 1998 onwards until I just finished in 2020. When COVID-19 started, I had been in catering for 12 years across various roles, and my last role was as an event and functions manager.

What was the milestone or turning point which led you to working in food insecurity, farming, and with the community?

Hospitality is a hard industry on your body, mind, and soul. It drove me to exhaustion when I was in hotels in the early 2000s, so one day I said to one of my staff, "I look like a zombie, what can I do?" He said, "why don't you try some of this green barley extract and get some minerals?" I had no idea what he was talking about, but then I started on the journey of taking care of my body. I’ve had smoothies every morning since, along with exercise and fresh nutrients. Obviously, I forgot that in the rush of being an employee and working seven days a week in hospitality. For me that was important because I was in my thirties. I decided I needed to make sure I got my nutrients and kept everything intact, but then I started looking around and I saw several homeless shelters and charities giving out food. But it was just getting that gut putty in the cans and the packets; food that would not necessarily be considered nutrient dense, but filling. It's a short-term solution to stop the tummy from rumbling.

I was nutrient deficient, and looking at nutrient deficiency across the board you, me and some of the listeners are nutrient deficient because of the way our food system operates. But people in a situation of survival are completely depleted. I started thinking about what can we do to help these people?

One, we need to feed them, and two, we need to make sure we're building them up so they can make clearer decisions for their future. We don't want to have people on charity supplements 10-20 years. We want to build them up, so they come back into normal society, by giving them good quality, fresh food.

As the Founder of The Mini Farm Project, can you share more about what you do and the impact it's generating?

I was watching a show at the time called Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall River Cottage (the UK version), and I decided I want to do what that guy does. He had a small holding with farm animals and was growing his own food; I thought we need to get back to this. He started talking about land sharing, and I thought let's create a charity which farms and grows food, because there's not enough in the system for everybody. Then, we give that away for free to charity partners. We bought a property in Burpengary, Queensland, and I turned my backyard into a farm to test my hypothesis. We got a charity on board and started the process. I was working a full-time catering job at the same time I was doing this, so it took a while to get up and running. We received a lot of positive feedback that the whole process worked, then we expanded to smaller farms in Brisbane. We had a raised garden bed in an industrial estate behind my work, a grow bag farm next to a childcare centre in Coorparoo, and then we reclaimed some raised garden beds in a corporate building. We wanted to show we could grow food anywhere in an urban environment to then give to charities locally. The food miles are near zero, and volunteers turn up every weekend because the farm is right next to community. We would have 20-30 people show up on a Saturday, and that provided a week worth of work so I would only have to water. That worked out well for a while, but then COVID-19 came around. My events company had to pivot, so I lost my job.

But then I had the opportunity to set up a half-acre farm out at Samford, partnering with Meals on Wheels. We had the funding and a farmer within two-week process, so the stars aligned. It's an international market garden style farm growing seasonal crops. They're high yield turnaround crops, so every four to six weeks a bed is being turned and we're giving free food to people in need. Our ethos and mission are to build farms to feed Aussies in need, and then give that food away for free to charity partners to create meals. We just become the producer, and we do this for two reasons. First, in 2022, one in five households experienced severe food insecurity. Now with this year's cost of living crisis, more full-time people are being pushed to charities. There's not enough food, and that's why people are going without. The second reason is there are no resilient systems in Australia. There's no organisation growing food to give to charities, they all rely on farmers and donations. What happens if there's a weather or financial event that cuts out farms? All these commercial growers, they give food to Food Bank, OzHarvest, Fair Share, Second Bite, and all these other places, which is excellent. But what happens in these negative events, it's not a resilient process, it fluctuates. Sometimes there's a bumper, sometimes there's nothing.

Our proposition is let's create a whole network of farms throughout the state and the country, where we're only focused on growing fruit, vegetables, fish, eggs, bush foods, and anything else we can to create whole meals every week for free for charities.

We aim to become the largest supplier of free produce, and regardless of if charities are getting donations in one area, we're continuously providing food no matter what happens.

What ripple effects have you observed since rolling out this project?

We've proven our concept in Samford and now replicated this success at Loganlea State High School. We've got a farm in a high school; the students and community are involved. We also build community around each of our farms, so that's student led learning outcomes. We have a gardening for good program the University of Sunshine Coast and University of Queensland run on our farms. It's for people living with dementia and their carers. They come to the farm, students from both faculties do an assessment process to see if there's any change with their interactions on the field, which is an inclusion process. Then we have other volunteer programs and mental health activities we're looking at now. A lot of people are damaged after COVID-19, and we need spaces where they can come and touch the earth, do a couple of hours, get out and break the cycle of what they're going through. Our farms deliver that, because we have the space and resources but also need volunteers to help. We employ staff on each of our farms to run them, but having volunteers is an important component to cutting costs down for us. It's important to build community and bring people together to a space if you have it.

As a participant in the AMP Foundation's Tomorrow Maker program, what support have you received, and changes have occurred in your business during this program?

That [Tomorrow Makers] program allowed me to run the charity for a whole year without worrying about where my wage would come. It paid for my wage for a year, which has just now run out. We're now looking at self-funding models so I can continue doing what I'm doing. The support was very good in relation to connecting with other founders and organisations, and we had that collaborative approach. We talked to other people and what they're going through, which helped me realise we're not crazy, these are real issues I am experiencing. It was also good to have other people say, "you're actually doing a great job, and what you are doing is valuable." Sometimes you don't see it. When you're in the minutia and running around like a crazy headless chicken, you're often left thinking, "why am I doing this?” I can walk away from this any day, throw my toys in the pram, and walk off, but that doesn't serve anybody; it doesn't serve me or the community.

We've now built something amazing and are on the cusp of explosions. It's great to get that feedback, and the most important thing is for founders to have that support mechanism where they can talk to other founders and say, “I'm not a mental patient, the stress is real, these are the feelings I'm having because I care and want to make this work.” Now I can manage that as opposed to being isolated and not knowing.

You have a lot of founders who implode because they don't know where to turn for help.

They have great ideas, and we should be supporting these people, but our economy is not set up to help people running charities or not for profits like in America or other places.

It's quite difficult for people with a great idea to get the funding they need, and when you're the everything person like I am, I'm running around doing seven people's jobs. This is very ineffective at the same time, but we're getting things done. However, it's not as nice, pristine, and organised as I would like it to be. A lot of people have the same problem, and that damages people after a long time because it's not sustainable. This experience was reassuring, as it let me know other people are going through this as well.

After working in various capacities across the regenerative food system space, what advice would you give to listeners wondering how they can contribute to healthier and more secure food futures for themselves and their communities?

I would recommend growing your own food at home if you can. If not, look for a local community garden that doesn't have an overabundant personality overshadowing everybody else. Then, also have a look at local food charities; start getting a lay of the land in your own area. Once you start looking outside your own home and into your community, you will start seeing very clearly what's going on. Even for myself, I live in the Caboolture Burpengary area, and there are over a thousand homeless people living in the centre of Caboolture. I've never seen that before, and it's only in recent times I've started venturing out and going, "oh my God, this is actually a big problem." We're very sight blind on issues when we're going through our little muggle days, while running to and from work we don't see these things. But when people start exploring their community, talking to other groups, and getting a lay of the land, you find out quickly what's going on. Then you build those networks where you can start going, "I can work here and collaborate." Then you start getting ideas, you might realise, “we can do a farm here, a community garden there.”

The most important thing I've learned in my entire working career is relationships are everything. When you have those connections and relationships, that helps you move forward. People can share advice with you, and then you can move forward with ideas in the regenerative farming space.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating positive social change?

I recently did the Sustainability Demo Day in Moreton Bay. That was the first one, and I was lucky enough to be one of the nine participants. There are quite a lot of amazing projects around new apps; waste management is so rich with talent and ideas. The underlying block is funding, and I just want to win the lottery and give everyone money! There are a lot of amazing projects, and one of the exciting things I have seen over the years is water aeration generators. They suck the humidity out of the air and create water. They can create 80,000 litres of water through a shipping container size machine, even when it’s planted out in the desert. We're looking at different ways of growing food using sustainable and climate sensitive technologies; water is always going to be an issue when we're creating our garden farms. what happens if we have these water aeration technologies where we're sucking it out of the atmosphere to water our crops? There was a story I saw on YouTube about eight years ago with some young teenager who invented a solar panel tree. It was built in the sequence of the Fibonacci Sequence and Golden Ratio, and it replicated a tree with all the leaves being solar panels. It will get full impact of the entire day of the sun in a particular area to generate electricity, but it was in the shape of a tree, so it wasn't an offensive rectangular panel. That was inspiring, and there are a lot of technologies out there. There are now tiny wind turbines you can put on your home to generate power, there's an abundance of action and activity.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

We use a system called JADAM on our farm, which is a principle of South Korean natural farming. It's a no till, weed free system using fermentation processes to create microbial inputs in fertilisers. What we do is we get all our green waste from the farm (including weeds), and we put that into vats to become a liquid like tea. Then we get microbes in the area and feed them to potatoes, so they grow and colonise. We put that through our dosatron and into our watering system, so when we water, we fertigate the plants. They receive an abundant range of nutrients and microbes which are dropped onto them and the soil; they suck up what they need and then the soil takes everything else. Every time we water, we're building the soil, and every time we harvest, we're building the soil. The most important thing we're doing is building that soil content to create the best quality plants, so we can give the most nutrient rich produce to the people in need. That's by Youngsang Cho, he's the author. He's the son of the South Korean natural farming principles guy who developed that in the 60s. The son's now living in Hawaii doing JADAM, and he's doing great work. Our farmers we employ use that technology early on. We love these natural principles, and we need to get back to that instead of using pesticides.

Nick is an AMP Foundation Tomorrow Maker alumni. The current Tomorrow Maker cohort will present their projects at the Spark Showcase on the 6th of December in Sydney, Australia. If you like to learn more, click here.