Tammi Jonas, Ethicurean farmer

My guest today is Tammi Jonas.

Tammi describes herself as an ethicurean farmer and a mindful meatsmith. Tammi, her husband Stuart and their three children, own Jonai Farms, where they raise pastured rare-breed large black pigs and a small herd of cattle, just outside Daylseford in Victoria.

They started their farming life in May 2011, when they left their suburban Melbourne environs behind.

In 2013 they were the first in Australia to successfully crowdfund major infrastructure for their farm, via a very successful Pozible campaign that gave them the money to construct a butcher’s shop on their property. Today they do all their own butchering in the converted 40-foot refrigerated container that is now licensed as Jonai Meatsmiths.

In 2014, they successfully crowdfunded again, this time to build a commercial kitchen and curing room to make a range of farmstead salumi, as well as to turn their operation into a full nose-to-tail, no waste offering.

They have a thriving Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) membership model and limited custom orders available in their region. You can read more about it and join to ensure you have a reliable source of ethically-raised meat!

Tammi is also the President of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance.

You can find Tammi on her website tammijonas.com or at jonaifarms.com.au.

You can connect with Tammi Jonas on twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

How @tammois transitioned from a vegetarian to a pig farmer to a butcher Click To Tweet

You can listen to this episode via the link above, on iTunes or Stitcher or via the podcast app on your smartphone.

If you fix the food system, you fix a lot of the problems in the world @tammois Click To Tweet

What Tammi Jonas and I discussed

• stopping her PhD
• productive leisure and enjoying our work
• designing your day
• moving to Australia from Oregon, USA
• US politics
• transitioning from being a vegetarian to a pig farmer to a butcher
• reading Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation
• starting to eat meat after many years of being vegetarian
• deciding to become a pig farmer
• retraining as a butcher
• getting funding via Pozible campaigns
• Hand Sourced
• the rural revival
• selling via a CSA, and what a CSA is
• the Teikei principles of a CSA
• testing their CSA model during a low supply period

We had to test our CSA model this year, which I didn't expect to have to do @tammois Click To Tweet

• are all farmers’ markets for farmers?
• Chinese garlic
• Victorian Farmers’ Market Association
• naming and shaming on social media
• Food Connect
• what food sovereignty is and how it differs from food security
• regulatory challenges faced by small farmers
• the “salami wars”
• the criminalisation of raw milk
• dealing with the vegan abolitionists and the haters
• finding out more about your meat – FlavourCrusader
• Rob Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu
• bacon and fried bread
• being socially useful and what messages we should be passing on

We need to educate people more about what local produce is and when it is in season @tammois Click To Tweet

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