Growing a connected food system on Bundjalung Country 

Roots and Rivers Collective is a Northern Rivers permaculture and food security network — growing a connected food system on Bundjalung Country through shared equipment, land matching, skill shares and demonstration sites.

The Northern Rivers grows better together

Growing a connected food system on Bundjalung Country. Roots and Rivers Collective links growers, farmers, landholders, community gardens and families across the region — so that land, tools, skills and knowledge can find their way to each other.

A regional switchboard for food and land

The Northern Rivers has no shortage of good soil, good rain or good people. What it has lacked is connection — a way for the grower with skills but no land to find the landholder with paddocks going to seed; for a community garden to borrow equipment it could never afford to buy; for hard-won local knowledge to travel further than the fence line.

Roots and Rivers Collective exists to close those gaps. We're a network and an online platform linking the people already doing this work, from Tweed to Kyogle to Ballina — and we're building the practical infrastructure that lets them do more of it.

We move at the pace of community

We are not primarily a land management organisation. We're a community organisation that uses land as its anchor.

That distinction matters. It means we don't chase scale for its own sake, and we don't arrive somewhere with a plan already finished. Lasting change happens at human speed, through human relationships, grounded in a particular place — and the work only holds if the people doing it actually want to be there.

By the numbers

62 community groups connected

6 Northern Rivers local government areas

20+ active conversations between growers

1 shared equipment library, on the way

What we offer

Shared Equipment Library Community-scale machinery you'd never buy alone — available to members at low cost.

Land Connect Matching landholders with growers who are ready to put good land to work.

Demonstration Sites Long-term partnerships turning underused land into working, public examples of what's possible.

Events and Workshops Skill shares, working bees, planting days and gatherings across the region.

Offerings and Exchange Surplus produce, spare seedlings, tools, seeds and requests — circulating instead of going to waste.

Community Groups Directory Every food and land group in the region, in one place. Find your people.

There's a place for you in this

Whether you run a thousand-acre property or a balcony, whether you've farmed here for forty years or planted your first bed last spring — the network works because people show up. Membership is open to anyone in the Northern Rivers who wants to grow food, share what they know, or help others do the same.

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