About

TransitionAg - catalysing systems change in agriculture and land management

TransitionAg is a project dedicated to the long-term viability of agriculture and agricultural communities, and aims to support this by enabling transition to regenerative, ecological and resilient agriculture through systems change. Systems change in agriculture involves farmer transitions and capability, sector capacity, and shifts in discourse and narratives. Ultimately the long term viability, resilience, and adaptiveness of agriculture, our landscapes, and communities in the face of a challenging climate, economic disruption, and a compromised environment calls for a new vision -- a vision of how agriculture can not just be a contributor but also lead the way in stewarding just, equitable, and regenerative futures.

TransitionAg began as a business experiment as part of Michelle Miller's PhD, Designing Regenerative Transitions. As an experiment, Michelle took a Lean Startup approach to identifying and iterating a business value proposition. This included participating in the 2020 WildIdea Incubator sponsored by Odonata. TransitionAg was originally conceptualised as direct support for farmers through a consortia of advisors, business short courses, and resources. 

Through the process of testing value propositions, Michelle found that having TransitionAg as an entity enabled her to collaborate with a diverse range of other groups, organisations, and projects looking to create the capacity for change in agriculture (food, fibre, fuel) and land management. This created a path to contributing to systems change in agriculture, which is the goal of her research and work. This led to reframing TransitionAg as a systems change catalyst.

Michelle ran TransitionAg as a business for three years, and then converted it to a project upon taking a role at CSIRO. She is continuing to find opportunities to progress the portfolio of work and line of research initiated during her PhD and with TransitionAg through her work at CSIRO.

Design for Transitions

Design for Transitions, or Transition Design, is a discipline that seeks to help achieve just, equitable, viable, and regenerative futures by intentionally catalysing systems change. The question of Michelle's PhD research was: What does design for transitions look like in practice? TransitionAg and subsequent projects are part of putting design for transitions into practice.

Michelle is currently a Research Scientist at CSIRO, working in Design for Sustainability Transitions with the Net Zero Mission. She has 20 years of experience supporting collaborative teams and groups to apply design-based approaches in the context of transitions, regional capacity building, strategy, services, products, entrepreneurship, and social innovation. Her work focuses on building capacity, capability, and agency across agriculture, industry, and regional areas to accelerate systemic change. 

Through initiatives paired with action research she seeks to help build the knowledge and practice base for accelerating transitions. This may include facilitating transdisciplinary and participatory processes, enabling farm and landscape management change, (re)imagining and planning for regional futures, re-designing systems and supply chains, building innovation ecosystems, developing innovations that can amplify pathways to sustainability, and creating the conditions for transition through policy.

Prior to CSIRO she worked for The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, Second Road, her own consulting business (MMBD), Suncorp, and Pacific Market International (Seattle). In her work she has been involved in a range of industries, for instance agriculture, infrastructure, commercial insurance, media, telecommunications, product development and manufacturing, child protection, education, international development, and unemployment. Her work has taken her into diverse contexts including all levels of government, philanthropy, commercial business (small, medium, and large), non-profit/NGOs, startups, regions, and regional communities. 

She holds a PhD in Transition Design from UTS. Her PhD research, partly documented in this website, focused on the methodology and practice of design for transitions and features a project to design for transition to regenerative approaches to agriculture. TransitionAg began as a business experiment as part of the PhD research, 'Designing Regenerative Transitions'. 

Michelle lives in Canberra with her partner Scott Middlebrook. While living in the Hunter Valley they experimented with agroecological and natural sequence farming approaches to a small market garden that could best be described as a Chaos Garden. Having moved to Canberra, they are developing a Chaos Garden fit for the backyard. Watch this space! ;)

The ideas and sentiments expressed here represent the research and perspectives of Michelle Miller, and do not represent CSIRO or any other entity with which she is affiliated.