Andrew Campbell grew up on a family farm north of Cavendish in western Victoria, on the south-western edge of the Grampians.
After studying forestry at Creswick and the University of Melbourne, Andrew worked in farm trees extension at Stawell, Bendigo and Shepparton, before being seconded to the Garden State Committee from 1984-88 to manage the Potter Farmland Plan project– the largest environmental philanthropic investment in Australia to that time.
The Potter Farmland Plan was a high profile, influential initiative, helping to inform the 1988 joint proposal by the National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) and the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) to then Prime Minister Bob Hawke for a national program of community-driven land restoration, based on whole farm planning and catchment planning (which subsequently became the National Landcare Program). Andrew Campbell worked closely on that proposal with Jane Elix from ACF and Philip Eliason from NFF, and was appointed as Australia’s first National Landcare Facilitator in 1989.
From 1989 to 1992, Andrew Campbell undertook almost 200 field trips to all parts of Australia, sharing knowledge among emerging landcare groups and nascent landcare programs in all jurisdictions. With Nan Oates, in 1992 he hosted the first national workshop for landcare facilitators and coordinators in Hamilton and on his farm. In 1994, his book Landcare: communities shaping the land and the future, provided the first national portrait of the rapidly growing landcare movement in Australia.
Andrew went on to a series of influential leadership roles in natural resource management at the interface between science and policy, leading the BushCare program for Environment Australia, then as CEO of Land & Water Australia, head of environmental science at Charles Darwin University, and CEO of the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). At ACIAR, Andrew co-edited a 2022 book on international landcare: Building Global Sustainability through local self-reliance: lessons from landcare.
Andrew was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (FTSE) in 2018. He is also a Board Director of AgriFutures Australia, an Honorary Professor in the ANU Fenner School, and Principal Fellow in the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne. He is a former board member of the Peter Cullen Water and Environment Trust, and the Future Farm Industries CRC, and a former President of the Australian Council for Environmental Deans and Directors. He was the inaugural Chair of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research network (TERN) from 2010-17.
Since the death of the Hon Joan Kirner in 2015, Andrew Campbell has been Patron of Landcare Victoria Inc. He is still involved with his family farm in western Victoria and the Mooralla Landcare Group, where his family has been farming since the 1860s.
