Jade Miles On Regenerative Agriculture And Crafting Resilient Local Food Systems

With the bush in her bones and business in her head, Jade Miles is a poly-jobist right down to her toes (which are probably barefoot and muddy). She’s been a local food advocate and educator right across the country for the last decade and founded the Beechworth food coop and North East local food strategy.

In 2020 she launched her podcast Futuresteading and with 140 episodes spanning 9 seasons now under her belt she has also released a book with the same name and has a second one due out in April 2025 titled 'Huddle'.

To be sure she is putting her efforts where her mouth is, Jade is also a regenerative heritage fruit farmer together with her husband and three kids at Black Barn Farm, a biodiverse orchard, nursery and workshop space in Northeast Victoria which opens to the public for u-pick, schools programs and skills workshops from December to May each year.

She’s an active presence in the regenerative space, hosting school programs, permaculture and homesteading workshops while sitting on multiple boards – all in the name of reconnecting people to nature, food and a simpler existence.

From a childhood sitting quietly by her fathers side on Indigenous country around the country as he painted the ochre tones of the land, to dodging exploding jars of homemade tomato sauce as a homegrown hippy kid, Jade went on to teach drama to kids in the bush, hitchhike through central America solo, set up locally supplied cafes in Cambodia and Vanuatu all the while dipping back into the odd spate of strategic development work for values aligned businesses such as Sustainable Table where she is currently CEO.

She has driven a catalytic change in direction at the organisation from a once small scale Victorian based, education enterprise that connected eaters to their food and the growers who created it, to its current day vision of transforming farming, food and fibre systems through regenerative ways of being, doing and knowing. Grounded in care for people and planet, her team facilitates connection, collaboration, funding and learning to catalyse change across Australia's agricultural farming landscape.

Encouraging us all to step outside our comfortable place, be still, be curious, be observant and be united in our celebration of food and those who grow it is Jades super power. Jade joins the dots through the power of storytelling, calling a spade a spade and encouraging all of us to redefine success, celebrate simple and build ritual for community now and for the next seven generations.

Jade discusses catalysing authentic human connections, helping impact investors join forces with regenerative farmers, and creating collaborative local food systems which shorten supply chains and minimise environmental footprints.

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

[Tom Allen] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your passion in regenerative agriculture and business?

[Jade Miles] - It’s probably been in my bones since I was born, this desire to understand landscapes and be in the natural world. It has become second nature really, and I think that started during my early twenties when my husband and I moved to the Stanley Plateau in northeast Victoria.

We now farm here, but at the time we lived in a tiny miner's cottage. We were surrounded by apple orchards and our neighbour was pushing his multi-generational trees out because there was no financial viability in small scale family-owned farming. That began to sow the seed of us questioning our food system in its entirety.

Then we spent a bit of time a few years later in Vermont, New England (America) to understand what a vibrant and vital local food system looks like. We wanted to understand which components of this system we might be able to bring back to this region.

It was a long and winding process to learn about the complexity of our food system, but as we unpacked it, what we realised was our food and the ground it's grown on impacts every single component of every person's existence. It can create a dynamic and catalytic change if we get it right.

Given that there's so much land managed or under the management of farmer stewardship, getting farmers to consider the way they manage their land is a key part of bringing quick change given the systems pressure we're facing.

In your bio you discussed how you are living a simpler existence on the land. It feels like so many of us are living such lives of busyness, can you discuss this more?

The pace of our life is quite obscene. I'm lucky enough for my 93-year-old grandmother to be alive, and she shakes her head and says, "there is no way we could have ever maintained the pace people today are existing at.”

With the amount of information, we’re absorbing and making decisions around every single day, there's something special about living a slower life.

I wouldn't necessarily say it’s less complex, in some ways it's more complex; you’re observing and interacting with the natural world around you. That has complexities of its own, when you start to build that into your own life it changes the way you navigate your day to day.

As humans, we weren't designed to move at the pace we're moving at. We were designed to move in complete cohesion with the natural ecosystem.

As the founder of Sustainable Table, can you tell us more about the work you're doing at Sustainable Table?

What we have realised was there was a shift during Covid in people’s need for access to information about how to eat ethically. It had evolved over the decade Sustainable Table had been on the ground, and that was no longer where the need was.

What we were finding was there were these regenerative farmers and aggregators, those who were working with other parts of the food system or within the supply chain, who had a mindset that ultimately, we can't be extractive, but we need to be collaborative.

When you try to combine that mindset with people in the financial sector, it was difficult to find people who weren't extractive. These are ultimately looking for the best returns, they are not necessarily looking at the impact of them pressuring farmers to generate a return has on the food system in general.

We went about trying to explain in black and white exactly why this extractive approach can't work, what a non-extractive regenerative approach looks like, and why we needed to enable our farmers to financially be able to expand the work they're doing.

It meant we have slowly but surely put one foot in front of another to build a network of funders who are open to the idea their role is to support those who are growing our food and stewarding our land. This is in a way that doesn't necessarily generate the highest financial returns, but it might create other impact returns.

It's slow and educationally oriented, so the best way to do this is to put investors on country so they can talk to the farmers themselves. Farmers help the investors to understand the differences between commodity monoculture production and integrated regenerative food systems, which shortens supply chains and looks for potential locally to get food into people's hands.

It's complex and slow. It's happening quickly in some parts of the world and very slowly in others. It requires a lot of conversation, but it's incredibly worthwhile when you see how the money or investment flows into our farming networks who are then enabled to scale, teach others, or trial things that are transformative and wouldn't get funding through any other streams.

What are your thoughts on the broader systemic issues that are holding back this regenerative agriculture movement? How do you think we can accelerate it?

This is a two-pronged problem, and I think the movement is challenged fundamentally by the Western growth culture we all exist in. We must unpack that system and come to terms with the fact we don't control the natural world, and that ultimately, if it fails us, we're all going to fall in a heap.

That endless growth paradigm leaves our framing of success in a difficult place to have some of these conversations that could ultimately transform the way we navigate agriculture. In terms of making, it happens quickly, it has moved quickly, slowly! Hurry slowly, isn’t that a beautiful saying? We can only move as fast as the relationships around us allow us.

We have this beautiful saying in our team, you can only move at the speed of trust. You can only build trust when you have existing relationships, and you can only have those relationships if you understand the language they're speaking, and you get on to the country they're stewarding.

You truly understand their reason for going against the grain and pushing against the culture that tells them they're crazy, because that's a regularly heard statement. We ourselves understand this, because we farm differently to the way everybody else who is farming.

There's not that many of them left anymore, but those who are still doing it have told us on several occasions that the way we're doing things is crazy, but slowly we're building relationships with them and they're starting to understand that while it might be different, it's not crazy.

It's deeply embedded in understanding the landscape we're in and working with it rather than setting out to kill everything around it. We're trying to grow food by working in cohesion with the land.

Tell us more about the work that you're doing with Stone & Wood and Jahdon Quinlan in the space of regenerative agriculture?

We try and do everything in partnership and working with Stone & Wood has been fantastic. The grain sector, as you would well know, is one of the largest in Australia, but it is the most commoditised.

The grain is mostly exported, and for the most part, it's the one produce of ours that has the least number of stories attached to it. Grains do not captivate the eater's imagination, it’s difficult to get people to consider where the flour for their bread, pizza base or pasta came from.

It has become this innocuous thing that none of us give the time of day to, and because of that, it means we've got massive swathes of our country under monoculture that are being heavily grown with synthetic sprays.

There are very few people in the grain sector who are transitioning over to regenerative practices, and those who are don't necessarily have premium products in the market. That means they spend a whole lot of extra money, but they don't have the ability to recoup that.

In conversation with Jahdon and the rest of the crew at Stone & Wood, we decided that the craft brew sector has incredible potential to be a key lever to start the conversation, the conversation about why we need to make decisions based on how our grain is farmed. Who doesn't love a good craft beer?

This has the potential to translate through to consumers who could then start to think about the fact that the grain that goes into the creation of products like bread and beer can move the needle for growers who are looking for alternative paths to market other than just going to the big grain silos that get exported overseas.

This initiative has got a few different aspects to it, and one of them is that we've identified four different, amazing projects in the grain sector who we will fund. We are providing them $25,000 each over the next 12 months to undertake their research, trials, and shortening of supply chains.

We've also created an industry guide, which is designed to help us go out to the craft brew industry and say, “these are the things you might not have been aware of, but you could and should consider them when you're making your decisions as to who you buy your grain and barley from.”

Sometimes it truly comes back to just being the most human we can possibly be rather than using heady and jargon filled language. Amongst policy makers and industry, there's a whole lot of jargon people don't understand.

It’s powerful when you sit around a beer or a pizza to talk about the flour that's being used, the wheat that made that flour or the barley that went into the beer.

What important traits do you think help impact led leaders or entrepreneurs in the regenerative agriculture space to stand out and make things happen?

Making things happen comes second nature to those who are in this space, because predominantly they're farmers. I don't know how many farmers you know, but they just get on with it. If things break, they fix it.

Farmers are looking for solutions all the time and they're right in the face of complex issues daily that need to be unpacked and solved before they can get to the next thing. I think what probably what makes them stand out is that they are incredibly practical and courageous.

They're used to being in a paddock on their own, so the idea of being isolated because they are thinking outside of the box makes them just that bit braver and more likely to have a crack. That’s something I see with every farmer I work with.

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

There are so many amazing projects. We've got some grain millers nearby who are relatively small scale, but they are looking to stone grind their grain.

Then it goes into localised markets, so they're in the process of expanding now which is bloody exciting. We thought we had scratched the surface on this, and we might only find two or three local agriculture initiatives, but we found 35 of them.

Localised abattoirs are wanting to resurface, so we've lost in Australia more than 80 percent of our abattoirs in the last 15 years. For the most part, that has meant it's moved out of private family ownership and instead moved into corporatised ownership.

It means that some states have only one or two abattoirs, and if you can imagine the backlog of demand and how that impacts a farmer, it also puts many people out of business. The freight, transport costs, and stress on the animals is simply too much for farmers to undertake.

If you think this idea of returning us to a localised abattoir system is in its infancy, it's not. We thought it was, but when we scratched the surface, we found a whole lot of them, all various sizes and models. Some of them are cooperatives, some of them farmer owned, some of them privately owned but exciting, nonetheless.

It takes us back to having agency over where our food comes from and how it gets to our plates. That's something incredibly exciting, and for the most part, we are bundling those projects together to present to an organisation from the United States.

We're not quite ready to share who this is, but they have come to the table with us, and we are building capital stacks that help the farmer first and foremost.

This capital is relatively short term in nature, but long enough for the farmer to endure what will inevitably be a year or two of difficulties. This financing is not so debt based that it backs the farmer into a corner.

That's quite exciting because it's not been available to us in Australia. We just haven't had the appetite from our financial sector, but these guys have been doing it in the States for quite some time.

They've grown quite rapidly, and they've got a solid understanding of what it is our land stewards need, so they don't put unrealistic terms around their capital.

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

There are so many, and they’re normally sitting right next to me. I could just point them out to you, but Culture Carnival Capital by Daniel Fleming is one I'm always happy to share. Matthew Evans has just released Milk, and he also wrote Soil. They're both incredibly foundational reads. Call of the Reed Warbler by Charles Massey is another one I would recommend sticking your nose into.

I've just had a couple of weeks off work, and I managed to solidly make my way through Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I've been trying to read for a long time. I never quite managed to get to the end of it with all the other work I was involved in.