From Soil to Self: Rethinking Health, Food and Resilience

What does it really take to build a healthier, more secure local food system?

📍 Where: The Farm Byron Bay, 11 Ewingsdale Rd, Ewingsdale NSW
🕓 When: 3:45pm arrival for a 4:00pm farm tour, followed by the Fireside Chat and dinner
🎟 Members: $35+GST (enter code on checkout)
🎟 Guests / Non-members: $45+GST
🍽 Includes: Farm tour, Fireside Chat and a seasonal meal made with local regeneratively grown ingredients
👥 Who: Vitality Farms members, guests and curious locals are all welcome
💧 Please note: The restaurant will be closed. Catering includes the meal only, so please bring your own water/drinks.

From Soil to Self is an intimate evening with Blair Beattie from Farmer’s Footprint and Bunya Halasz from Growing Roots Permaculture, two highly respected voices bringing deep, practical experience across farming, ecology, food systems and community wellbeing.

Rather than a formal panel, this will be a smaller, conversational event designed to create space for real discussion, questions and shared learning around some of the issues that sit at the heart of food security and healthy communities.

Blair will explore farmer health - mental, biological and spiritual, and why the wellbeing of the people producing our food is inseparable from the health of the land, the food system and the communities around them.

Bunya will take the conversation into one of the least discussed but most important challenges facing local food systems: seasonality and flexibility.

If we genuinely want more food grown, sold and eaten locally, then we also need to rethink our expectations about what should be available, when, and in what quantity.

Bunya will explore the opportunities and constraints of localised food production, including why chefs, retailers and consumers need to become more responsive to seasonal abundance, shortages and natural fluctuations.

It raises an important question:

Can we build a truly local food system if we still expect local farmers to supply food like supermarkets?

The conversation will look at what greater flexibility could mean for menus, purchasing habits, grower viability, waste reduction and stronger relationships between producers and buyers, and why adapting to the seasons is a critical part of building a more resilient regional food system.

Before the Fireside Chat, Bunya will take guests through his growing area at The Farm, offering a firsthand look at his approach to regenerative production. The evening will then continue over a seasonal meal prepared using produce from his crops.

Together, Blair and Bunya will help connect the dots between soil, farming, food, farmer wellbeing, consumer behaviour, local economies, food security and community health.

These are not separate issues. They are parts of the same system, and understanding those connections is central to creating a healthier and more resilient food future for the Northern Rivers.

Hosted by Laticia Braving, founder of Vitality Farms Northern Rivers, the event reflects our mission to bring people together around the knowledge, relationships and conversations needed to strengthen our regional food system.

We will share a delicious and nutritious meal from Bunya's garden, prepared with love by the Roots and Rivers Collective, who support growers to establish and evolve food forests.

Come for the farm tour. Stay for the food. Join a conversation that matters.

Tinola — Filipino chicken soup made with chicken from Misty Creek Farm plus green papaya, moringa, lemongrass and ginger from Bunya’s own food forest.

Purple yam okonomiyaki with Japanese taro, daikon and miso sauce.

Crunchy cassava, pan-fried over the fire.

And a few delicious sweet treats to finish.

Please note: The restaurant will be closed for the event. Catering covers the meal only, so please bring your own water or other drinks.

MEMBERS DISCOUNT - apply code at checkout.

Contact the host of From Soil to Self: Rethinking Health, Food and Resilience.