During January Regional Voices will feature 4 great stories we covered in 2017.

In March we spoke with Simone Kain, who had recently won the South Australian RIRDC Rural Women’s Award for her work teaching kids – and grown ups – about Australian agriculture through her George the Farmer stories.

Rachel Power owns Waterfalls Café in Mt Field National Park, just over an hour's drive from Hobart, and won Tasmania’s 2017 Innovator of the Year award for her innovative approach to marketing the café and the attractions of the area. Her work has helped to see park visitation grow by almost 90%, and has also opened up employment opportunities for a community facing a troubling unemployment rate - from a staff of 1, Rachel's team will be 30 strong this season.

Cotton grower James Barlow, a young farmer by farm industry standards, has embraced innovative technology through irrigated cropping. Today he irrigates 1,600 acres all from his smart device which not only saves on water but labour as well.

Simone has become a leading spokesperson for innovation in regional Australia. She developed the phone app, 365 Cups, from her home in Wagga Wagga, NSW, which now has 45,000 users across Australia and New Zealand, and has also developed a co-working space in the regional city.

This week we chat with Tim Pannell, who is quite literally a mover and shaker in Australia’s agricultural industry. When Tim invented the “Reefinator,” it addressed a major challenge for producers in Western Australia – areas on properties that couldn’t be farmed because of hard, rocky land. The Reefinator is machine that makes it cost effective and easy to convert that rock into arable land, and are now all over Australia.

This week, we talk bushfire safety with Anglesea Primary School principal, Pamela Sandlant. Together with the local fire service and the community, the school developed the award-winning “Survive & Thrive” program, which teaches children how to be bushfire aware and understand bushfire safety. Better still, the students then teach what they’ve learnt to visiting schools and the broader community with their presentations.

With Christmas just around the corner, Australians are gearing up to buy and eat a huge amount of seafood. Kendi Burness-Cowan talked to Andrew Puglisi from Kinkawooka Shellfish on the Eyre Peninsula about safely producing, transporting, choosing and cooking seafood. Kinkawooka specialises in mussel production and Andrew shares his tips for getting the best product and his favourite recipe.

Fleur McDonald is one of Australia’s best known authors, and is particularly well loved by readers in rural and regional Australia, who enjoy the authentic regional settings of her stories. 

This week Fleur tells Kendi Burness-Cowan her fascinating tale of shadowing the Queensland Police Major & Organised Crime Squad (Rural).  

In the country, we tend to think we’re relatively safe from crime, but as Fleur found, this isn’t always the case.  

In this great interview she talks everything from stock theft to laser beams to cyber crime – and tells us about her plans for her beloved character Detective Dave Burrows.

This week we’re joined by Dr Randall Greenberg, the Chief Medical Officer of the Royal Flying Doctor Service’s South Eastern section. He shares some of the cases he’s seen and how keeping his own team safe is his first priority, as they deal with everything from remote airstrips to wayward kangaroos. He also talks about how keeping safe in this huge country of ours takes a bit of planning and a bit of common sense, especially when you realise that if you do get into trouble, medical care could be several hours away.

Charles Armstrong, farmer and Chair of Farmsafe Australia, talks to Regional Voices about quadbike hazards on farms and why he's advocating that safety needs to come before convenience.

Charles has been directly impacted by an on-farm accident. In the early 1990s, the son of a good friend died in an on-farm motorcycle accident.

With 250,000-300,000 quad bikes currently on farms all around Australia, Charles notes that there have been no recorded fatalities with quad bikes fitted with truss devices, while there is around 10 to 15 quad bike fatalities a year and often children are involved.