Brand Tas

When she started Farm Gate Market in Hobart, Madi Seeber-Peattie thought it would be an event-management job. That was only half true.

“The other half of the job was re-educating a community that had lost touch with eating seasonally (why are there no raspberries in the middle of winter?) and re-invigorating an agricultural industry that had long since lost all of its small-scale farmers.”

Madi protects the provenance of the food, so everything at the market is strictly Tasmanian and only the producer can sell it.

“A high proportion of farmers’ markets compromise these guidelines for the sake of volume,” she says, “but compromising our integrity I realised early on would do nothing to achieve the things I set out to achieve.”

For Madi, Farm Gate Market is a microcosm of Tasmania and Tasmanian enterprise. It might be easier and more profitable, in the short term, to say yes to everything. But the harder way is the better way. The market's success, she says, “needs to be balanced with the fact that it’s these natural assets and non-saturation that makes Tasmania what it is, so any economic activity needs to be in synergy with this.”