A NOONGAR farmer on the regenerative farming journey was joined by a special guest on his 832 hectare property at Beverley recently, with WA Governor Kim Beazley paying the farm a visit to learn more about bush food production.
Oral McGuire, through Yaraguia Enterprises Incorporated, purchased the farm in Beverley in 2006 and since then has worked to re-establish the natural systems that native plants thrive in.
Through a partnership with Greening Australia, he has planted about 600,000 plants and trees, every single one of which are native to the area and roughly 85 to 90 per cent of which are production plants for food or some sort of economic value add.
Mr Beazley said there were a number of farms associated with the regenerative process and he wanted to visit Yaraguia as it was enormously important in terms of lessons to be learned about landcare and comprehending the spiritual character of the original inhabitants.
"There is a spiritual dimension for the First Nations people involved in regenerative farming, but for the broader community there are the prospects of new and profitable products," Mr Beazley said.
"It's important that there has been a recognition that native foods, or bush foods, are enormously popular and have great export potential.
"But it's critical that it benefits the people that discovered their use thousands of years ago, as at the moment only about one per cent of native foods are actually produced by Aboriginal commercial bodies."
Mr McGuire, who is also the chairman of the Noongar Land Enterprise Group (NLE) which Yaraguia is a member of, said he wanted to show Mr Beazley what was possible to do the things that they're doing and produce very palatable foods from the native species.
"If we can show that there is value in Noongar knowledge about food production and land management, then that's a message that's worth putting up as an alternative," Mr McGuire said.
"The scale that you would need to do it at to make it commercially viable is a capacity-building aspect, but we wanted to show him that as cultural and spiritual owners, on our land, part of the healing process can be this highly productive, nutritional and profitable aspect of food production.
"There are over 2000 species of acacias alone that produce edible wattle seeds but globally, there are only 14 of those species that are being utilised in the bush food and medicines industry, four of them are Western Australian and two are from the South West."
Mr Beazley said it was an added value when the access to native foods were a product of the First Nations people.
"We need to have a particular concern of whether the product is genuinely being produced from an outfit like what Oral has here in Beverley, because it's really the genuine article that has that spiritual input," he said.
"That's very much a minority perspective which needs to change and it can change, provided there are enough people producing like Oral is trying to do."
