Jeff Pow and Michelle McManus are bringing chicken farming back to earth, and playing a part in rebirthing opportunities for communities and regions everywhere. They’ll say they’re doing nothing particularly new, but they’re finding a way to regenerate country, community and economy in an unprecedented context of crises.
For them, most recently, an horrific bushfire devastated their historic Southampton Homestead and Farm. We explore their soulful and award-winning journey of recovery, as they form part of a leading trend in farming – tending healthy people, animals and country, while reclaiming the terms of trade. That means taking back responsibility for the growing, processing and value-adding of all the food on the farm, and bringing it directly to the community.
Jeff is a former corporate, now first-generation farmer with his wife Michelle. He had regenerated this land once already, after arriving in 2006 to a landscape devastated by pine plantations, before that horrific bushfire razed the place to the ground in 2013. He felt the call to go again, as an old friend came back into his life and ultimately became his wife. And together, they’re creating an incredible story, with their hand-reared chicken and other animals on perennial pastures, insects and sunshine.
Now Jeff is standing for parliament at this month’s state election and, much like the Haggerty’s in episode 68, they’re inviting the return of farmers and others back on country, to scale the regeneration together, rather than as individual empires. They’re “growing food and farmers”, reclaiming the story of people and nature from Hobbesian nightmares, and restoring custodianship on country as our way out - creating the new system, as a means of emerging from the old.
This conversation was recorded on location at Southampton Homestead and Farm on 3 December 2020.
Title slide: Jeff on the farm (pic: Anthony James). You'll see more photos on the episode website.
Music:
Faraway Castle, by Rae Howell & Sunwrae.
The System, by the Public Opinion Afro Orchestra.
Find more:
Tune into the special extra with Jeff and Michelle.
Southampton Homestead website.
2015 short film by Regrarians with Jeff and Michelle, ‘After the Fire’.
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