GROUNDED Live
GROUNDED Festival is a cross between a farming conference and a food festival, held in a different farm location every year, so each festival is a unique, unmissable event celebrating local expertise and culture with an inspiring line up of speakers.
With multiple stages running concurrently, it combines science and technology with ancient wisdom, provides a respectful place for lively discussion, an audience as interesting as the speakers and an excellent menu of local food, drinks and music, all on a beautiful, regeneratively-managed farm.
Each year we record presentations and make them available, free for all, as a podcast called GROUNDED Live. We hope you enjoy the conversations.
GROUNDED Live
GROUNDED Live - 2025: Joel Williams - Plants As Superheroes
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode of GROUNDED Live, we share another unedited session recorded on site at GROUNDED Festival 2025, on farm in Bridgetown, Western Australia.
This session features Joel Williams, a globally respected agronomist and educator known for his ability to take complex plant science and translate it into practical, farmer-focused insight. Joel has spoken at leading regenerative and agricultural events around the world — including Groundswell in the UK, VicNoTill in Victoria, and the RegenWA Conference earlier in the same week as GROUNDED.
What sets Joel apart is his clarity and openness. He’s deeply grounded in plant physiology and soil science, but also deliberately agnostic and non-judgemental — focused less on inputs and labels, and more on understanding how plants actually function. His goal is simple: help farmers make better decisions by understanding the biology at work in their paddocks.
In this session, Joel explores the idea of plants as superheroes — unpacking the remarkable ways plants interact with soil, microbes, nutrients and stress, and how farmers can work with these systems rather than against them.
Joel is based in Canada and has travelled to Australia multiple times to share his knowledge — a testament to the value farmers place on his grounded, science-led and practical approach.
Settle in and enjoy this session with Joel Williams on GROUNDED Live.
GROUNDED Festival is a cross between a farming conference and a food festival, held on a different farm each year. Every festival is unique, celebrating the people, landscapes and food of its host region through an inspiring line-up of speakers, local producers and hands-on learning.
With multiple stages running concurrently, GROUNDED brings together science and technology, ancient wisdom and fresh thinking. It provides a respectful place for lively discussion, an audience as interesting as the speakers, and an excellent menu of local food, drinks and music, all on a beautiful, regeneratively managed farm.
Each year, we record many of the presentations and make them freely available as the GROUNDED Live podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversations.
Thanks for listening, and if you enjoy this episode, we'd love to welcome you to a future GROUNDED Festival.