Behind the mic with Elizabeth Brennan: Meet the emcees of evokeAG. 2025
Introducing Elizabeth Brennan, one of the brilliant hosts gearing up to infuse evokeAG. 2025 with enthusiasm and fresh perspectives. Have you ever thought about what it takes to keep the energy flowing at evokeAG.? In this Q&A series, we’re catching up with the four emcees who will bring the excitement to evokeAG. 2025, on February 18-19 in Brisbane, Queensland. They’ll reveal their behind-the-scenes experiences and highlight what they enjoy most about the event, offering an insider’s view of the action.
Liz Brennan has more than a few achievements under her belt: agdots Co-Founder; a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (GAICD); Fellow and Associate of the Australian Rural Leadership Foundation (FARLF); and she’s a Counciller with the National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) Young Farmers’ Council.
She’s also a leader and consultant with experience in community and leadership development across Australia and Papua New Guinea (PNG) – and she holds a Bachelor of Business and a Master of Food Security.
And now? She’s one of the emcees set to bring evokeAG. 2025 to life.
Q. Why me and why now?
I grew up on a pretty typical WA Wheatbelt farm in the heart of Noongar Country – cereal crops as far as the eye could see, sun-kissed horizons pocked with stands of majestic eucalypts.
I grew up knowing that we along with so many other dryland agricultural farms, were some of the best in the world; we could grow nutritious food for the world with less than 400mm of annual rainfall – and sometimes even less.
It was an idyllic childhood, and it was growing up on a farm, knowing that my family was potentially feeding other hundreds of families on the other side of the world that got me interested in agriculture; that got me curious about our food systems. And how food connects us all.
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Track forward a couple decades to me finding myself a lot further from the farm than I’d ever anticipated. In 2009, I walked the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea and fell in love with a country, whilst only 3.7km from Australian shores, was so in so many ways so far from my home Country.
Elizabeth Brennan at evokeᴬᴳ⋅ in Adelaide, South Australia.
Not barely six months later I relocated to PNG for two years as an Australian volunteer. It was here that my belief about us Aussie farmers, in our relatively prosperous nation, being some of the best farmers in the world, was turned on its head.
It was living in a developing nation faced by some significant development challenges, that I was really challenged by what it meant to be a food secure nation – and world.
Both nations, merely a stone’s throw apart, have such different food systems and were food secure or food insecure in different ways. Which nation’s food system was ‘right’?
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It is this desire to unpack one of Australia’s, PNG’s and the world’s most pressing wicked problems that drives me – grappling with the enormity of the systemic issue, whilst making meaningful, grassroots change.
And it is the same provocation at the heart of evokeAG. – how can we use an increasingly diverse agtech ecosystem to encompass not just specific but systemic challenges?
I’m keen to ask questions that create a ‘healthy tension’ that has us balance between being solutions-focused and really grappling with the problem – especially the wicked ones.
Q. The Common Ground we must make, and why it’s urgent…
Years ago, I was asked to lead an ag research program for the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR).
It was the first of its kind – it sought to bring together five otherwise disparate ag research projects to form part of a multidisciplinary ‘research for development’ program, focused on food security.
I was asked not because I’m a world class scientist like many of my colleagues in the program, but because I’m a translator – I can connect dots, find common ground.
Yes, I can speak PNG’s universal language, Tok Pisin, but I was asked because I can translate across cultures, across disciplines, across hierarchies, across geopolitics – to hold space for healthy tension, to meaningfully grapple, to find commonality in conflict.
Some of my most proud moments are working with hyper-intelligent soil scientists whose highly-cited life’s work single-mindedly centres on nematodes and having them find ways to collaborate with social scientists whose more human- and farmer-centred work they may have previously written off as intangible. Tension has the potential to polarise and divide.
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Current geopolitics is no truer example of this. But how can use tension in a healthy way, to grapple with wicked problems?
We need those with deep knowledge and passionate conviction to solve wicked problems, but if we’re righteous and unable to hear others’ who are equally but differently knowledgeable and passionate, we stalemate. And we cannot afford to do that with the current state of the world.
We need strong views, but they need to be softly held.
A question that I often wonder and will be pondering in the lead up to evokeAG. is, if diversity of thought leads to innovation, can we really say that the Australian ag industry is open to views that oppose or challenge our own?
Q. The most compelling thread to me is…and why I think this conversation is so important right now…
It was living in PNG that had me question what it was to be food secure. Yes, there are complex social challenges facing many in PNG, but living in a remote PNG village showed me that we had much to learn from people outside our echo chamber – outside the rhetoric of what we tell ourselves as some of the best farmers in the world.
Australian farmers might produce enough food to feed three times our national population, but that doesn’t mean we are necessarily food secure.
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I now live in Kununurra, one of the most remote communities in Australia. We are a nett food producing region, yet almost one third (31%) of Indigenous people living in remote areas like the East Kimberley are food insecure, compared to the national average of 4%.
evokeAG 2025 emcees Oli Le Lievre, Liz Brennan, Tim Hunt, and Saron Berhane.
Regionally, nationally and globally, we produce enough food to feed the world – that’s not the problem. Our food systems aren’t working. And it’s not just humanity that is suffering.
How do find that balance between feeding the world and the world feeding us?
As those involved in agriculture, when are we willing to sacrifice ag productivity for environmental outcomes? Who’s going to carry this sacrifice – and who will lead? When there is no economic imperative, what’s the ROI on ‘doing good’?
Q. I want evoke 2025 delegates to….
The excitement and possibility of agtech brought us together in the very first evokeAG in 2019 and it has sustained us, each year showcasing the brightest new ideas, inventions and innovations.
But we’re now at the stage where we’re going deeper – asking not just ‘what?’ but ‘what so?’
It is fitting that these rumblings and wonderings have arisen, because the event and our collective thinking has matured.
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We now have a moment in time to coalesce all the excitement and innovation of agtech to date, to broaden our focus from not just specific but also systemic challenges.
Just imagine… Living like the world depended on us? How we live, farm, eat, exist, vote. Well, newsflash, it does!
Loved yarning w/ @svnoles for @agtechsowhat about how my social justice bent and systems brain has shaped my career.
Feat. @ARLFNews @WideOpenAg @ACIARAustralia https://t.co/UogciC0FAG
— Elizabeth Brennan (@amoeaba) April 21, 2022
We now have the ‘healthy tension’ of deep knowledge and passionate conviction of a diverse agtech ecosystem to grapple with the big, meaty, wicked issues.
I want evokeAG. delegates to walk away realising that we’re critical to asking the industry the questions we’ve been too afraid to grapple with.
We can’t be distracted by shiny new agtech that undeniably solves a specific issue, whilst bigger, hairier, systemic issues get relegated to ‘someone else’ – to government, to the regulator, to the markets, to the consumer, to the banks.
Will we be brave enough to sit with the discomfort of healthy tension, to really listen to deep knowledge and passionate conviction that challenges us. Finding common ground will be a powerful next step.