We are not just growing food. We are growing people.
Producer Story: Conscious Ground, Myocum, NSW.
A visit to Conscious Ground - and why we think May and Richard are doing some of the most important work in our region.
I have visited a lot of farms since taking over Clarence Valley Organics. I have stood in a lot of paddocks, walked through a lot of growing beds, heard a lot of producers talk about why they do what they do. It is always meaningful. But I left Conscious Ground feeling something I do not always feel after a farm visit.
I left feeling genuinely nourished. Not just by the food - though the food was extraordinary - but by the people, the place, the intention behind every single thing growing there. This is a farm that is doing something different, and I want to try to explain what that is.
Conscious Ground sits on Myocum Road in the Byron Bay hinterland, about as beautiful a piece of country as you will find in this region. May and Richard have been farming here for several years now, and in that time they have been quietly doing the kind of work that does not make a lot of noise but changes everything underneath.
When they arrived, the land needed tending. They began the slow, patient work of regeneration - rotational grazing, removing invasive species, planting natives, restoring creek banks and habitat corridors.
Today, over 120 nest boxes and hollows dot the property, installed in partnership with Wildbnb - and May and Richard are tracking exactly who is moving in. Night cameras positioned across the farm record the wildlife taking up residence, building a living picture of an ecosystem coming back to life. It is not just regenerative farming. It is citizen ecology, happening quietly alongside every harvest.
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Conscious Ground is certified organic - SXC Certification No. 25227 - and operates under biodynamic and regenerative principles. But these are not just labels. They are the practical expression of a philosophy that runs through every decision made on this farm, from which seeds go into the ground to how the team eats at the end of the morning.
The land is not a resource to be used. It is a relationship to be tended.
Which brings me to the lunch.
I was honoured to sit down with May, Richard, the Conscious Ground team and their volunteers for the midday meal that happens every single day on this farm. It is prepared by their chefs using whatever is ready in the garden that morning - vegetables, herbs, fruit, their own meat, broths made from bones and garden scraps, ferments that have been quietly doing their work in the corner of the kitchen for weeks or months.
I ate things I could not always name. I drank a tea brewed from plants growing twenty metres away. I had a broth that tasted like someone had distilled the entire concept of nourishment into a cup. Everything on the table had been grown or made on the property. Nothing was wasted. Everything was intentional.
This daily lunch is not a perk or a nice touch.
For May and Richard it is the whole point. They believe that the people who grow your food should experience what they are creating. That when farmers eat from the same soil they tend, something in the relationship between producer and produce becomes honest and whole. It is one of the most quietly radical things I have seen on a farm. It reminds me of my many years working in restaurants, there was always a “staff lunch” before service, and it was a sacred time. No matter how frantic or busy the next service was, or what we were in the middle of doing, we would always sit together and share a meal, have gratitude for that produce and the team that created it.
The team eats together.
The volunteers eat together.
Everyone sits at the same table and eats food that came from the ground beneath their feet that morning.
If that sounds simple, it is. And that simplicity is the point.
May's Vietnamese heritage runs through Conscious Ground like a root system - not always visible on the surface, but fundamental to what holds everything together.
Alongside the seasonal vegetables and certified organic fruits, she grows plants that carry centuries of meaning: betel leaf, green papaya, and longans. These are not novelties or curiosities added to a produce list to make it interesting. They are food and medicine, and in the traditions May draws from, those two things are rarely separated.
A little education - food as medicine
The plants May grows with intention:
Betel leaf (la lot) has been used across Southeast Asian and Ayurvedic traditions for thousands of years. Peppery and deeply aromatic, it is valued for its warming properties, digestive support and antimicrobial qualities. In Vietnamese cooking it is most famously used to wrap seasoned beef for grilling, but it has long been eaten as medicine as much as food.
Longan (long nhan, or dragon eye) has been prescribed in traditional Chinese and Vietnamese medicine for centuries to calm the nervous system, support sleep and nourish the blood. Fresh longan bears almost no resemblance to the tinned version - translucent, floral and gently sweet, it is one of the most beautiful fruits you can eat in season.
Green papaya is rich in papain, a digestive enzyme that has been used across Southeast Asian traditional medicine to support gut health, reduce inflammation and aid recovery. May grows it as both a culinary staple and a medicinal plant - a distinction that barely exists in the traditions she honours.
Lemonade fruit is a natural hybrid between a mandarin and a lemon, milder and sweeter than either parent, although its not a native vietnamese fruit. High in vitamin C and antioxidants for immune support and digestion. It is also simply one of the most unusual and delicious citrus fruits you will find in the Northern Rivers.
Conscious Ground maintains a living seed bank for exactly this reason. The wisdom codes within the seeds, as May describes it, are passed down alongside the seeds themselves - a quiet act of sovereignty and remembrance in a food system that has forgotten most of what it once knew. May also deeply respects Indigenous wisdom and practices, actively seeking to learn from and support the Traditional Custodians of the land on which Conscious Ground grows.
Walking through the orchard at Conscious Ground, May paused at the grapefruit trees and said something I will not forget. Most people, she explained, peel away the white pith and throw it away. But the pith is where much of the real medicine lives.
This is ancient knowledge that modern nutrition science is only now beginning to catch up with.
The white spongy layer between the skin and the flesh is concentrated with bioflavonoids - particularly compounds called naringin and naringenin - that have been understood in traditional food cultures for centuries as deeply supportive of the body. These are the same compounds responsible for grapefruit's distinctive bitter edge, and in many traditional systems of medicine, bitterness in food is understood as a signal. It means the plant is offering something. It means slow down and pay attention.
What the pith offers is significant. It is rich in soluble fibre and pectin, which feed the beneficial bacteria in the gut and support healthy digestion. Its bioflavonoids support cardiovascular health by strengthening blood vessel walls and reducing inflammation. It carries more vitamin C than the flesh alone. And as an antioxidant, it helps protect the body at a cellular level from the kind of oxidative stress that underlies so much chronic illness.
May's approach is simple and it mirrors the wisdom of almost every traditional food culture that has grown citrus: eat the whole fruit. Do not engineer it. Do not extract the part you want and discard the rest. The fruit knows what it is doing. The bitterness is not a flaw to be removed - it is information.
When we peel a grapefruit and discard the pith, we are making a very modern decision that would have made no sense to the people who first grew and ate this fruit. May grows grapefruit at Conscious Ground because she understands it as a whole food with a whole purpose - and she shares that understanding with everyone who visits the farm, shops at her market stall, or simply takes the time to ask.
Eat the pith. Chew slowly. Trust the bitter.
We share this not as a health claim but in the spirit of the education May offers every week at the Byron Farmers Market and at Conscious Ground - because understanding why a food is good for you makes you more likely to actually eat it.
About eighteen months ago, Richard had a stroke.
I share this with care, and because it is part of the story - perhaps the most important part. When something like that happens, you find out very quickly what you are actually standing on. For Richard and May, what they were standing on was the farm. The food. The knowledge they had spent years cultivating together.
Richard has had to relearn things most of us take completely for granted. He has done it with a determination that is both humbling and deeply moving. May applied everything she knows about food as medicine - what nourishes the nervous system, what the brain needs to repair and rebuild, what the body asks for in recovery.
The garden that they had tended so carefully became part of what tended him back.
I met Richard on my visit and I want to say this simply: he is vibrant, warm, present and full of life. He is curious. Extremely intelligent and he speaks with the kind of clarity that comes from someone who has been to a difficult place and is finding his way through it with intention and love. Deeply grounded. The farm is as alive in him as it is in the soil.
Conscious Ground sells at the Byron Farmers Market every Thursday morning at Butler Street Reserve, and this is where May does some of her most important work - talking to people face to face about the plants, how to use them, what they mean, why they matter. She is an educator as much as a farmer, and the market stall is her classroom.
Santos Organics in the Byron Shire stocks their produce in store. And now, for the first time, Conscious Ground produce is available through CVO - arriving in Yamba and Richmond and Clarence Valley each week.
We make the trip to collect this produce ourselves.
It’s a trip and we make it gladly, because we believe that what May and Richard are growing deserves to be in the Clarence Valley and in your kitchen. The story behind the food is part of what you are buying, and we want you to know it.
There is a line on the Conscious Ground website that has stayed with me since I first read it, long before I visited the farm. It is the line they have chosen to define what they do above everything else.
We are not just growing food. We are growing people.
Sitting at that lunch table, eating food that came from living soil tended with love and ancient knowledge, watching May move through her kitchen and her garden with the kind of ease that only comes from deep belonging - I understood exactly what they mean.
We are so proud to be bringing their produce to you.
With Love,
Bree and the CVO team.
You can follow May and Richard's story at consciousground.com and on Instagram at @consciousground.
Their produce is available now in the CVO store and will continue to evolve with the season. CVO orders close each Sunday at 9pm.