A big thank you is due to the Local Organising Committee for the Melbourne Conference –Jagjit Plahe, Christine Parker, Ruth Beilin and Gyorgy Scrinis, Sunil Ponnamperuma, Carly Brunswick and Nikki Reichelt.

An especially big thank you to Jennifer Clapp and Sarojeni Rengam for travelling from afar and generously engaging with the network as keynote and plenary speakers. Kudos too, to those involved in organizing and hosting the fieldtrips, and the practitioners who joined us for the first time this year.

Food – As you know there is absolutely no pressure to provide top notch, fair, sustainable, local, dietary and culturally appropriate, cruelty free food at Agrifood conferences – none at all! Still, there was collective relief regarding the positive feedback of the delicious vegetarian food provided by the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre. Follow the link if you would like to learn more about this amazing organisation. They have also produced a video called Hot Potato which you can watch on You Tube.

Congratulations to Shona Hawkes, who was awarded the David Burch Prize for 2013. Indeed, congratulations are due to all the postgrads presenting – the quality of papers was really impressive, with many also receiving an honorary mention.

Next year’s conference planning is already underway, thanks to Bill Pritchard and Elspeth Probyn. The 2014 Agri-Food Research Network Conference will be held at the University of Sydney, from Monday 24-Wednesday 26 November. We are aware that these dates overlap with those for the 2014 TASA Conference in Adelaide, however because of the difficulties of scheduling in this busy time of the year, decided these were the best dates for the conference. Please also note that the fieldtrip will also be scheduled on the Sunday before or the Thursday after the conference.

AFRN web master: Emily Cheah has kindly offered to serve as webmaster for our AFRN website – thanks so much to Stephen Davey as the outgoing webmaster.

Collective photo stash: Please check out our Flickr account to look at photos from previous years. I would also be mega-grateful (no first borns but I could throw in a chicken) if those taking photos on the fieldtrips and at the conference this year could log into the Flickr account and add their pictures.