Why We Created the Activating Food Systems Course

The Living Earth College Activating Food Systems course grew from many years of working with farmers, communities, designers and policy makers who all sensed the same problem: modern food systems have become disconnected from soil knowledge, community participation and practical decision making.

Most courses talk about food systems. This one helps you design one. In the Activating Food Systems course you will develop a practical project to strengthen a local food system in your own region.

On Magical Farm Tasmania I asked a simple question: what would it look like if communities could actively shape their own food systems again?

Photography by Ness Vanderburgh

Over twenty years my explorations in designing thriving food systems expanded across Tasmania and internationally through design research, teaching and collaboration. The result is this course.

Activating Food Systems is designed to bring together practical knowledge of soil health, regional food networks, community enterprise, economics and policy design.

Participants explore how small scale farms, local markets, schools, councils and citizens can work together to regenerate food systems from the ground up.

The course is not abstract theory, it is grounded in lived practice, observation and collaborative design. Each participant develops their own project idea supported by dialogue, examples and shared learning.

My hope is that people around the world who care about food, land and community will find this work and feel encouraged to act where they live.

Photography by Ness Vanderburgh

If you are searching for practical ways to strengthen your local food system, this course is an invitation to begin together now. With courage, clarity and care for soil, people, place everywhere.

With life “Con Viv” and Love

Dr Demeter / Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne

We Are All Designers: The Case for Life Systems Literacy

Design has long been understood as a professional discipline, practised within studios, universities and consultancies, shaping products, services, policies and environments. The design professions matter deeply. They influence how economies function, how cities are structured, how resources move.

Yet design did not begin with institutions. The first tools were designed, as too was language. Markets and governance systems were designed. The supermarket, the local market, the digital platform, each of these is a designed architecture of economic flow. These structures shape how money circulates, how food travels, how culture gathers, and how power concentrates or distributes.

Photography by Ness Vanderburgh: Finn, Perrie, Zach, Abe, Simone the Duck, Emily, Jenny and Noam (behind the apple tree!) from Magical Farm

We are all already designers. The question is whether we understand the living systems within which we are designing.

From an anthroposophic perspective, the human being is not separate from the social and ecological organism but an organ within it. Our daily decisions, what we eat, where we purchase, how we spend, how we organise time, how we participate in civic life are a pattern of our reality. Economic flow reflects or mirrors ecological flow. When value moves through distant, centralised supply chains it is our farmland, landscapes and communities that thin. When it circulates through local markets and small farms, relationships strengthen and resilience thickens.

Food is not simply nutrition it is in fact formative. It shapes the body; the body shapes perception; perception shapes culture and design. A culture that eats together generates cohesion. A region that grows food regeneratively restores soil, biodiversity and water cycles. Healthy land produces healthy food; healthy food supports healthy bodies; healthy bodies enable clearer perception; clearer perception supports wiser design. The loop is ecological, cultural and economic at once.

Localised, biodynamic food systems are therefore not nostalgic gestures, they are perceptual and civic infrastructure. As both farmer and design theorist, I have come to articulate this through Con Viv: convivial living systems design. Con Viv does not reject professional design; it deepens it. It asks designers to consider metabolism alongside materiality, governance alongside geometry, soil alongside system and policy. It recognises that everyday citizens are co-designers of economic and ecological futures through their habits and participation.

Photography by Ness Vanderburgh at Magical Farm Tasmania

Grow Small, Feed All campaign emerged as a structural application of this thinking, redirecting economic flows toward nourishment, decentralising value, strengthening localised food economies and restoring dignity to producers. It is not a campaign alone; it is a design proposition at regional scale, in Tasmania and possibly for other places too!?

Living Earth College is now emerging from this work as a translocal education platform dedicated to life systems literacy. Its premise is simple: soil processes, cooperative economics, phenomenological observation, real world place-based food projects coming to life as prototypes for sharing, co-design of policy and cultural practice must become foundational within design education, not peripheral.

The professional designer has a critical role to play. So too does the student, the policymaker, the farmer and the household. If life systems literacy were embedded across disciplines and daily life, design would shift from extraction toward participation. We are already shaping the future. As we are all designers, the invitation is to design consciously, in service of living systems.

Dr Demeter

Why Local Organic Food?

Food is part of our everyday life, so it crosses our paths many times in our days weeks and years. That is why the choices we make around food are so significant. Our choices cause ripple effects in wider systems. If we look at the industrial food system today we have been “designed” into this system. So it makes it hard to avoid the monopoly supermarkets and the mechanised food system that they reinforce.

So how do we ‘design’ our way out?

It’s a question I have been reflecting on and actioning for over a decade. At its essence, it is POWERFUL to buy local. Support local farmers. Eat food that is not laced with pesticides. Your local dollar does make a difference and can reinforce a regenerative food system. You also enter into the exciting and reassuring world of ‘living systems’ what I describe as “Con Viv” (with life)! Engaging with healthy and alive soil, meeting dynamic, zesty and caring community members and discovering opportunities to vision and share regenerative stories for healing the past and embracing the present and future in a new light.

Helena Norbert-Hodge from Local Futures states that

“If you want to create a more sustainable society, a good place to start is by helping to rebuild your local food economy: food is something everyone, everywhere, needs every day, which means that even relatively small changes in the way it is produced and marketed can have immense effects. And since eating is a natural part of daily life, we all have frequent opportunities to make a difference.”

So the Magical Farm food box is a special project for us to create. We hope we can inspire more regenerative conversations, local dollars spent, more support for our local organic farmers and growers, convivial celebrations and gastronomical events and further spread the much needed regenerative changes in our world. You can order our food box on this website www.magicalfarm.org

Local and organic veggie boxes are available fresh from the farm to your table. Magical Farm will provide you with delicious produce every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month. We will post 7 days prior to the next box so you can order before the end of the week prior to the ‘box day’. You can pick up from our farm gate in Allens Rivulet or our distribution points in Hobart. We are more than happy to hear from you! info@magicalfarm.org

Basil leaves - so yummy but also representing opening our hearts, minds and hands to a new way of living on our planet.

Magical Musing by E Samuels-Ballantyne

Welcome to Magical Farm

Magical Farm welcomes you to our website and community. We have a vision to make holistic lifestyles a reality. Everyday life is our ‘canvas’ and the seven elements of food, art and crafts, conviviality, the land, hand skills, wellbeing and rest are our ‘paint brushes’. Everyday life makes up the seven days of the week so we have many opportunities to create moments, practices and actions that can change our life and systems (social, political, economic and ecological).

We are a critically focussed, convivial minded and heart centred business :) that offers:

• educational workshops and courses that enable holistic lifestyles such as living systems thinking philosophy, conviviality philosophy, food systems design, wood working, local food project making and much more.

• services such as local food production and delivery, wellbeing classes such as fencing, meditation, yoga and massage.

• products such as aromatherapy oils, flower essences, herbs, local food, local art and crafts.

Thank you very much to the talented Louise Thrush Graphic Designer and Illustrator from Tasmania for working with us on the brand for Magical Farm. http://www.louisethrush.com/

Thank you also to the beautiful rainbow which also has seven sacred colours that can enliven our everyday life canvas. The rainbow has been a wonderful symbol that has inspired me for over a decade, and as it happens now live in a valley surrounded by mountains, so I see rainbows on average once per week. Just recently for the first time in my life I saw a night rainbow!