Get your group together to understand the organic farming movement
For groups with any serious curiosity about organic farming systems. Food and wine societies, educational groups, farmers, product buyers or any groups involved in intelligent tourism.
Did you know that Australia contains more than 50% of the world’s farmland classified as organic?
Agricultural Tours Riverina is about to release a new flexible tour itinerary focused on a sample of sustainable organic, regenerative and low-input farming systems.
The program allows tour groups to choose among clusters of appropriate farms, processing plants and infrastructure services in the Albury and Leeton areas of NSW. Sites on the list of potential visits have been chosen to reflect a range of farm products and farm business models. The sites also cover large and small scale enterprises, and dryland and irrigated production systems. All are within reasonable travel time from the City of Albury or town of Leeton.
Announcing the new product John Collins of Agricultural Tours Riverina said that the project is a response to requests from travel agents over a period extending to well before the COVID crisis. The two clusters of farms will particularly suit groups travelling between Sydney and Melbourne.
Peter Randall of Randall Organics briefs Sydney journalists on his farming business model
Developed with assistance from ORICOOP (see https://organicinvestmentcooperative.com.au/), Canberra-based researcher Mayra Escobedo and various farmers and farmer networks, the project covers a cluster of 6 exemplar sites around Albury and another cluster of 6 sites focused on Leeton. Tour groups can choose farms to visit from a list supplied in the electronic brochure. Most groups will want to choose to visit 4 to 5 sites each day. Each visit is intended to last a nominal hour.
The National Environment Centre at Thurgoonah (Albury) is just one of the sites available on the program. Part of the NSW TAFE system, the Centre runs an organic farm for its teaching programs in sustainable production techniques.
Rob Fenton explains regenerative farming systems at TAFE NSW National Environment Centre.
Organic farming techniques are growing in popularity in most Australian rural industries and consumers are increasingly interested in the provenance of their foods.
The new tour will be of interest to Food and Wine Societies, organic groups, conventional farmers interested in going organic and schools and other educational and training organisations. Contact us on riverineagtours@gmail.com for further details. We can suggest an itinerary suitable to your purpose and time budget.