• Lauren Branson & Cara Cooper - Founders, Your Food Collective
Here, they’re checking out a local community garden in Newcastle, NSW
This delightful guest blog is from Lauren Branson and Cara Cooper, the founders of Your Food Collective in NSW.
We love gardening.
We both have gardens in our backyards. It is such a great way to reconnect with nature, in particular the soil. We garden with our children.
Far from green thumbs, our success rates are about 50/50, but when it works, it tastes delicious and it's a different kind of reward to eat something that you’ve nurtured and grown. We even find positivity in failed crops. As in life, gardening failures are a rich source of humility, laughter, and learning: not enough sun, the wrong season, or perhaps planted on the wrong moon!
• We love this low cost vertical garden solution for herbs
We’re also big believers in the importance of local gardening to the environment and public health. We acknowledge that many people lack the skill (e.g. us), space, or time to feed themselves today.
And without this, it’s really hard to know where your food comes from, how it’s been grown, and the effort it takes to grow it. We thought someone should do something about helping people reconnect with their food and how it was grown. We convinced ourselves to start a company that does exactly that, delivers fresh locally grown produce directly from the fields of local farmers.
It’s so exciting to see the groundswell of interest around regenerative farming at the moment. From Kiss the Ground on Netflix to the recent Charles Massy interview on ABC, it’s so refreshing to see something so important start to step onto the main stage of public discourse.
One of the reasons we founded Your Food Collective was to give customers the power to choose what food they eat and the future it creates.
YFC gives customers in Sydney & Newcastle an option to lower their carbon footprint, and transparency around where their food comes from and who grows it.
For example, they can see on the website that melons and grapes are grown by Tinkler Wines, who use conservation farming methods, including crop diversification. We’re always working to connect YFC farmers to the network of people innovating in regenerative practices. We pay fair prices and so as YFC grows, more farmers are encouraged to adopt regenerative practices.
• Leo, Lauren’s oldest, learning about harvesting on a recent farm visit
Yes, money is important, too.
Farmers that work with us tell us that we pay more than the supermarket majors, and that we buy crops that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to find a market for.
Our price benchmarking indicates that once you take delivery costs into account, we’re on par or even cheaper than supermarket majors. Some items are more expensive, like beef mince because we know that ours is grown on native grass pastureland, and our free range eggs go above and beyond industry definitions of free range.
We source over 95% of our produce from within 250km to minimise food miles and improve freshness. Typically food is delivered within 1 day of harvest
We’re currently exploring ways to promote even more regenerative farming practices by connecting farmers to the growing network of innovators in this space in Australia. If you have ideas on how we might do that, we’d love to hear from you.
We encourage you to look a little deeper into the food you’re eating and the future it’s creating.
As Charles Massy put it, "It's actually nature that's supporting us and it all starts with good farming. Healthy soils, healthy landscape and healthy foods from those landscapes." By choosing to support local producers who use regenerative practices we are nourishing both our bodies and mother nature, reestablishing the delicate balance of life that we seem to have disturbed.
Lauren Branson & Cara Cooper
Founders, Your Food Collective
Reach us at:
lauren.branson@yourfoodcollective.com
or
cara.cooper@yourfoodcollective.com