Committee Members

Dianne Haggerty

Dianne Haggerty

Dianne, with her husband Ian, are world renowned for their approach to regenerative agriculture by working with native pastures for their livestock which complements their biological cropping program of over 13,000ha.

Di is regularly traveling nationally and internationally to share her knowledge and experience with the Natural Intelligence Farming approach to regenerative agriculture. The Haggarty’s are on a mission to facilitate positive global change by rebuilding soils in semi-arid regions and are essential to the RegenWA network of regenerative farmers.

Stuart McAlpine

Stuart McAlpine

Stuart is a fourth-generation farmer who owns and manages a 5,000 ha farm in Buntine, Western Australia. He is a co-founder of the Liebe Group, one of Australia’s premium grower groups.

Stuart has expert knowledge in soil and regenerative agriculture practice and his efforts in natural resource management saw him honoured as a Soil Champion in the International Year of Soil 2015. As a result, he was then added to the Regional Natural Resource Management Leadership Honour Roll in 2016.

He has also been a part of the team that has seen the first "4-returns" regenerative agriculture company in Australia become listed on the ASX. He remains to be a non-executive Director of Wide Open Agriculture Ltd.

Kent Broad

Kent Broad

Having grown up in the Mid West region of WA as a farmer and pastoralist, and MLM qualifications under his belt, Kent has a long-term vision and passion to revitalise rural Australia by providing environmental, social and economic solutions. With his 35 years experience, Kent was jointly responsible for successfully developing and establishing more than 12,000 ha of biodiverse revegetation carbon projects within the Yarra Yarra Biodiversity Corridor.

Now a co-founder of Outback Carbon, for seven years Kent was a director (and Vice President for four years) of the Northern Agricultural Catchments Council (NACC), one of 56 Natural Resource Management groups across Australia. He is the current WA representative on the National Carbon working Group for NRM WA.

Nick Kelly

Nick Kelly

Nick is a broadacre minimum till cropping farmer, of Holland Track Farm in Newdegate, WA.

The Kelly family's weather resilient farming system is enhancing soil health, sequestering carbon, reducing erosion, increasing moisture retention, reducing chemical use and improving crop yields. All while sharing these learning and knowledge with other farmers Australia wide.

Tom Mitchell

Tom Mitchell

Tom farms 20 Hectares North West of Gingin with his wife, Emma and two daughters, Darcie and Grace. Tom and Emma began developing the farm in November 1999. Their enterprise is comprised of a market garden where they grow pumpkins in the summer and mixed cover crops in the winter and an orchard producing limes and three varieties of mandarin.

Since 2012 they have taken a more biological / regenerative approach to their farming. Their objective is to grow tasty, nutritious food and run a profitable business. Their farming practices aim to maximise soil carbon and biological diversity. They have introduced cover cropping and green manuring to their market garden operation and have drastically reduced the amount of cultivation. They are currently working on increasing the diversity of inter-row species in their orchard as well as increasing the organic matter levels under our trees. They have eliminated the use of all fungicides from our operation and drastically reduced the amount of pesticide use.

Monitoring plant and soil conditions are the keys to the success of their operation. Plant nutrition, soil nutrition, soil moisture are all measured with the aim of growing the healthiest plant possible.

"We farm this way because it is rewarding, enjoyable and it makes sense."

Wendy Bradshaw

Wendy Bradshaw

Wendy is a passionate environmentalist who strives to learn more about how we can all farm better with nature. Her family farm in Tambellup is where she can implement these learnings from her studies including a Bachelor of Land Management and Master’s in Education. She and has worked at Greening Australia for a decade as well as working with South Coast NRM for four years. Wendy is connected with her local grower group, the Gillamii Centre and uses her own environmental consultancy business to focus on restoring biodiversity and soil health on farms.

“I see our biggest and vital challenge is understanding and profitably implementing the transition from conventional to biological agriculture.”

Ronnie Duncan

Ronnie Duncan

Ronnie has over thirty years experience working in creative communications and is a co-founder and Chairman of Meerkats. He's passionate about encouraging a better form of capitalism and acts on this by helping companies to be purpose-led, and by focusing on sectors that can make a disproportionate difference to creating a better world.

For him, the food and agriculture sector offers a great opportunity to do this, as what we consciously choose to eat is one of our most powerful acts - although he recognises that both he and his family depend on good farmers since his own veggies patch is currently unpredictable.

Jamie Bowyer

Jamie Bowyer

Jamie has worked in government in the agriculture space for 32 years. Most of that time has been in various roles in research, development, and extension of sustainable agriculture practices.

"I am very keen to work with farmers and other stakeholders to explore the opportunities regenerative agriculture offers for improving the social, environmental and economic outcomes of agriculture in Western Australia."

Jamie has a wide range of skill sets, including stakeholder engagement, extension, evaluation and project management, and experience that he hopes will be useful to the regenerative agriculture community

Mitchell East

Mitchell East

Mitchell East is a third-generation farmer from the Southern Forests region of Manjimup, farming passionfruit, avocados, sheep and cattle.

With his partner Jennifer they have a keen interest in regenerative farming and have taken a new approach to their passionfruit crop, by building a processing facility on farm they have been able to utilize 100% of their crop and utilize other farmer’s fruits for value adding purposes. This approach to waste has opened up many of opportunities to work closely with other farmers and to create a value for them out of a resource that has historically been underutilized.

Over the past 8 years Mitchell has developed a keen interest in regional community development and has sat on a number of local, state and federal boards to help share his voice from a ground up approach. This has given him strong board experience and the opportunity to talk to industry decision makers and politicians and his experience as a young farmer. Mitchell is a keen advocate to get young farmers involved in the industry and to share his experience about regenerative farming.