Tag Archives: Food self-sufficiency

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Resilience, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming, Urban agriculture

The rise of the dachniks

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This article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 26th May, 2012

The rise of the dachniks

Last time I began telling the story of Angelo Eliades and his permaculture food forest in his suburban backyard in Preston, Melbourne. In response to that column, a friend sent me a link to some research that was carried out a few years back into the scale and productivity of agro-foresty and bio-intensive small-scale production in Russia. This research formed the substance of a PhD thesis submitted by Leonid Sharashkin in May 2008 at the University of Missouri.

This column will be in parenthesis to Angelo’s story, which after all, has a lot to do with the yields achievable in small-scale food forests. Next time I’ll return to his story proper.

If you’re really keen on the Russian research, you can download the full thesis – a mere 248 pages of text and tables – via ‘soilandhealth.org’. Here’s the (very) short version: Russia is a nation of small-scale gardeners, or dachniks; and they are very, very good at it. Some 35 million households, two-thirds of the country, grow a fairly significant portion of their food on a dacha, a small-scale garden plot with an average size of 600m2, belonging to urban dwellers, either privately or in a co-operative form.

The tens of millions of current-day dachniks are following in the footsteps of a centuries-old tradition of small-scale, self-reliant agrarian communities. As Sharashkin notes, this means that these practices did not suddenly re-emerge en masse in response to the economic collapse in the post-Soviet Russia of the early 1990s, but rather have deep historical and cultural roots that go well beyond the food production and economic dimensions.

Small'scale intensive production in Russia
Small-scale intensive production in Russia

Yet the productivity of the dachniks is impressive. Sharashkin reports that in 2004, they accounted for (conservatively) 51% of total agricultural output by value, around $US14 billion, or 2.3% of Russia’s GDP; a larger contribution than steel manufacturing or electricity generation. And when the focus shifts to staple food crops, as opposed to commercial crops for export, the figures are truly remarkable. Over 90% of Russia’s potatoes, over 80% of its vegetables and fruit, and over 50% of its meat and milk, are produced on small plots, with little or no machinery and minimal energy inputs.

And all this is achieved on a mere 2.9% of the country’s agricultural land, compared to commercial agriculture, which requires the other 97.1% of the agricultural land to produce 49% of total output.

Such extraordinary productivity is explained by two principal reasons. First, the care and attention that comes with labour-intensive gardening for self-provisioning. Secondly, the embrace of polycultures and perennial species, rather than single crop monocultures, characteristic of agro-forestry: plantings that ‘are intentional, intensive, integrated and interactive.’

And beyond their food yields, these spaces also generate a social yield. They are places ‘where a family comes together’ and where they ‘celebrate special occasions’. Dachniks watch over each others’ plots, and they share seeds as well as gardening experiences and tips.

As Prime Minister Gillard boasts of Australia’s potential to be the ‘foodbowl of Asia’, others look to the parlous state of the Murray-Darling basin, the impacts of the coal-seam gas industry on water tables and fertile soils, the growing reality of climate change and the looming shadow of peak oil, and wonder whether we shouldn’t first focus on feeding ourselves. In this debate, the dachniks of Russia have proven that ‘decentralized, small-scale food production is possible on a national scale’.

Which is why we should celebrate the growth of community gardening in this country, and in our region in particular. On Saturday, 2nd June, the Bellingen High School Community Garden will celebrate its first birthday, and everyone is welcome. There will be activities for children from 10.00 a.m., the pizza oven will be fired up for lunch, as well as live music and a photo exhibition. Come along and see what Charlie Brennan, Olivia Bernadini and their many helpers have achieved over the past year. For more details, visit the Facebook page of the Bellingen Community Gardens Association.

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advocate, Backyard Gardening, Fruit growing, Self-sufficiency, Urban agriculture

Food Forests – food for the future?

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A food forest in Preston

A version of this article appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 5.5.12

Recently I’ve been travelling to Melbourne a fair bit, as part of a team working on a research project funded by the Federal Government’s National Climate Change A­daptation Research Facility. NCCARF, as it’s known, is funding dozens of research projects over a wide range of social, environmental and economic fields, many of which will be discussed at its annual ‘Adaptation in Action’ Conference to be held in Melbourne from 26-28 June this year.

NCCARF is currently funding three food security projects, examining, respectively, the impacts of climate change for risk management and the preparedness of food industry leaders; creating a climate for food security in terms of business, people and landscapes in food production; and urban food security, urban resilience and climate change.

It’s the last one I’ve been involved with, and in a nutshell the aim is to better understand how urban and peri-urban agriculture can help meet the challenges of climate change and food security, and build more resilient towns and cities in Australia. Two case study areas have been chosen for this research, Melbourne and the Gold Coast, hence my recent travels.

I’ve met and interviewed  over 30 people from different walks of life, from local government planners, to health and nutrition professionals, community gardeners, market gardeners, backyard gardeners and food security advocates. I’ve been left with lots of impressions, not the least of which is that there’s an extraordinary  amount of activity and enthusiasm for urban agriculture and local food in Melbourne.

I’ve also been struck by the disconnect between this level of activity and enthusiasm, and the low value that the State government (both the current Victorian government and the previous one) has placed on prime agricultural land close to the city. According to the Planning Institute of Australia, on current trends regarding the constant expansion of Melbourne’s Urban Growth Boundary, 25,000 hectares of quality farmland will be lost to residential development by 2020. Doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s coal-seam gas or new McMansions, it seems pretty clear that food growing rates way down the list of priorities of State government planners and political leaders.

Many people, myself included, are firmly of the opinion that we – and most certainly our children – will rue these choices to chase the short-term buck over long-term sustainability and resilience.

The Melbourne urban food and agriculture movement, which seems to be geographically concentrated in an arc of suburbs heading north and north-west of the city, such as Fitzroy, Clifton Hill, Brunswick, Northcote, Thornbury, Coburg and Preston, is full of people and groups who see some sort of breakdown in the ‘Big Food’ system as likely. Here, and over the next few weeks, I’m going to introduce you to one of them: Angelo Eliades.

Angelo is a life-long resident of Preston, and has been a keen organic gardener since 2002. A few years ago Angelo taught himself the principles of permaculture – he subsequently did his PDC with Bill Mollison – and decided to put them into practice by taking three months off work and transforming his small suburban backyard into a permaculture food forest.

Angelo Eliades in his garden in Preston, Melbourne
Angelo Eliades in his garden in Preston, Melbourne

He was motivated to do this, he said, by the ‘scepticism towards permaculture’ he saw amongst horticulturalists. ‘There was just too much doubt, too much dissenting opinion, about whether it can really work’, he told me. ‘So I said, enough’s enough, it’s time to call their bluff, and build something that shows it really does work.’

And that’s what Angelo did with his backyard food forest. But Angelo is no starry-eyed idealist, he’s a working scientist. Which is what makes him, and his project, so unique. He set out quite explicitly to use his backyard as an experiment, to rigourously document everything he did, and all his yields, in order to establish that bio-intensive gardening of this sort can indeed be highly productive.

‘I have no time or space for wild speculation’, he said. ‘For me, my food forest was really to prove that the concept worked. As a scientist, if something’s scientific, that means it’s repeatable.’

In the next few columns, we’ll look at how he did it, what he’s achieved, and what his plans are for the future.

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advocate, Backyard Gardening, Community gardening, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming

Our shrinking trust horizon

The ‘trust horizon’, and what it means for the future

A version of this article appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on 11th February 2012

“Politicians typically make a bad situation worse, as quickly as possible. The [economic and political] systems that we have established have become sclerotic and unresponsive. Hostage to vested interests. They have no ability to adapt quickly to provide for changes that happen very rapidly… So I don’t look for solutions from there….There aren’t really any mechanisms for these large bureaucratic institutions to offer anything that will help…­­­What they’re far more likely to do is suck resources to maintain the centre, like a body that’s hypothermic, cuts off circulation to the fingers and toes to preserve the temperature of the core…Unfortunately for us, we’re the fingers and toes, we have to look after ourselves, nothing is coming from the top down.”

Nicole Foss, speaking with Italian interviewers in January 2012.  

Nicole speaks of the diminishing ‘trust horizon’: how large, centralised political institutions that have evolved over the last few hundred years are losing, and will continue to lose, their legitimacy; and with it, the ability to impose norms and rules that most people will accept. “The response these institutions typically have”, says Nicole, is “surveillance, coercion and repression”. Recent police actions towards the Occupy movement in the United States would seem to confirm this assessment.

The solutions Nicole proposes to the converging financial and energy crises – and she stresses that these are not solutions to maintain “business as usual”, which is “no longer possible”  – are grassroots, “from the bottom up”. The starting point is the recognition that the large centralised systems on which we have come to depend will, over time, begin to fail to “deliver the goods and services that we have come to rely on”.

Grassroots initatives, on the other hand, will work, according to Nicole, because they are based within the ‘trust horizon’.  “Where trust still exists”, says Nicole, “systems working within it can operate really quite well. The critical thing is that they’re small, they’re not bureaucratic, they’re responsive, they make the best use of very small amounts of resources, because there’s no enormous administrative overhead…It is amazing what can be done at a very small scale.”

Hearing this, I’m reminded of the concept of ‘square foot gardening’, popularised by Mel Bartholemew, who claims that his raised bed intensive method achieves the same yields as conventional gardening, but at half the cost, a fifth of the space, a tenth of the water, five per cent of the seeds, and two per cent of the work. Such claims might appear exaggerated, but there are impressive examples of substantial food production in small spaces with less inputs. And just last week, we learned that backyard chooks are producing as much as 12 per cent of the nation’s total egg production, according to the Australian Egg Corporation.

The Square Foot Garden
The Square Foot Garden

But there’s no time to lose in building local economies and social systems: “The key point is, we have to do it right now, because we don’t have a lot of time before we start to see centralised systems failing to deliver what they have delivered in the past.”

What’s the glue underpinning the newly configured trust horizons? Relationships and community. “It’s the strongest approach”, says Nicole. “We do need to do things at an individual level, because if we are on a solid foundation ourselves, we can help others. But we must build community: relationships of trust are the foundation of society.”

“So we need to know, and work with, our neighbours”, Nicole continues. “ We need connections, family and community, so that we’re less dependent on money. In many parts of the world where people have little or no money, their societies function entirely on barter and gifts, working together, exchange of skills – this works as a model, at a small scale. It’s this kind of structure that we need to rebuild.”

Nicole Foss will be speaking at the Cavanbah Centre, this coming Saturday, 11th February, from 12 pm to 2.30 pm. Gold coin entry, light lunch for $5.

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advocate, Aquaponics, Backyard Gardening, Coffs Coast, Self-sufficiency

Backyard Aquaponics

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on 12.11.10.

Aquaponics in Coffs Harbour

Last weekend I was at the Sustainable Living Festival at the Coffs Harbour Botanical Gardens. I was there with Kirsten Larsen, Research Manager of the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL), which is run out of Melbourne University.

VEIL have produced some quality research over recent years around food-sensitive urban planning and design, and food supply scenarios assuming certain policy settings and priorities, e.g. ‘business-as-usual’ vs. local and government adaptations taking changed circumstances into account.

In its submission to the Federal Government on the proposed National Food Plan, VEIL stated that ‘substantial, unavoidable and imminent changes in our food supply systems require fundamental shifts in how we manage land and resources for food production and other critical needs’. The combination of a series of key drivers, including increasing constraints in the availability of oil and fresh water, climate instability, soil degradation, and the ongoing loss of farmers and good farmland, led VEIL to conclude that ‘our existing systems of food production and distribution [are] increasingly brittle’.

All of which means, as Kirsten pointed out last weekend, that we are entering a period of probably large volatility, in which there is no guarantee that the future will look like the past or the present.

Those listening to Kirsten certainly took this message to heart, and many were motivated, like thousands more around the country and around the world, to start taking matters into their own hands.

As I’ve written previously in this column, the coordinator of the new Coffs Harbour Community Garden at Combine Street, Steve McGrane, is a pioneer in showing what can be achieved in a small urban setting.

Steve’s latest project is aquaponics: the combination of small-scale (i.e. back-yard) aquaculture with the hydroponic growing of vegetables.  His system involves three ponds, each raised above the other, connected by halved lengths of long-lasting PVC pipe in which the vegies grow on a base on gravel, drawing their nutrients from the fish waste. Depending on the numbers of fish, plant growth can be remarkable: ‘as much as seven times faster than vegies grown in ordinary soil’, according to Steve.

Aquaponics 1

The water flow, whose purpose is also to return adequate amounts of dissolved oxygen to the fish, is regulated by a 20-watt pump, powered from a 40-watt solar panel, with four lithium batteries of 4 watts each. Running at lower rates of intensity, these can last for as long as 40 years. The entire micro-energy system cost $500 to set up.

Steve solar system

The system runs with special software that controls the maximum input and output of each battery, to prevent overheating.  The time the pump runs is determined according to the amount of sunlight: on cloudier days, the fish are less active, and so there will be less need for oxygen. On average, the pump runs for 10 mins every 20-30 minutes, leaving 15 minutes for the trays to empty.

aquaponics 2

Steve’s largest pond is 1500 litres, and over the summer he plans to stock it with up to 30 silver perch fingerlings, which will take approximately 12 months to reach an edible size of 500 grams. He’s also looking at installing a slightly larger system, in which he can raise up to 100 fish per year. About half of the total water surface area of the large pond, where the fish are raised, needs to be covered with plants such as water lillies, to return oxygen to the water.

aquaponics 3

Like conventional aquaculture, Steve’s fish depend on fish-meal, though he’s also looking at home-grown sources of protein like meal worms and comfrey. The fish may  not grow as fast, but that’s not the point. For Steve,  being sustainable means greater self-reliance:

“I’m all about not leaving your block to eat, having your food at your back door.”

Coffs Coast, Community gardening, Corporate control of food, Cost-price squeeze, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Food sovereignty, Global hunger, Growth paradigm, Local and regional food economies, National Food Plan, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming, Uncategorized

Interview: Nick Rose

Thanks to Juliette Anich for the opportunity to create this portrait. Being able to explain at length my motivations is a rare opportunity and much appreciated.

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Coffs Coast, Self-sufficiency

Native bees and food security in Korora

A native bee hive in every garden…

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 6.8.11

There is in many people’s minds a link between, on the one hand, food security, and, on the other, sustainable, resilient and fair food systems: building greater levels of self-sufficiency amongst growing numbers of people. In other words, raising our individual and collective capacities to meet at least some of our own food needs, and so reducing our levels of dependence on external market actors and systems.

A few weeks ago I profiled Steve McGrane, newly appointed coordinator of the 5000m2 Coffs Harbour Community Garden in Combine Street. His vision is of a growing network of thriving, diverse and self-sustaining food gardens across Coffs Harbour’s suburbs, and he’s putting this vision into practice with his own garden in Korora.

Steve doesn’t do it all alone. He’s working closely with his neighbours, and a small army of tiny helpers, in the form of a hive of native bees.

The bees’ main job is not to produce honey. It’s to pollinate the many species in Steve’s expanding fruit and nut orchard. As Steve explains, the bees only have a range of about 500 metres, and ‘the further they have to fly, the greater the amount of energy they use, so the more food you can provide locally [for them], the better.’

Because of their small size, relative to the European honey bee, native bees have a high commercial value in pollinating fruit and vegetable species with small flowers, such as tomatoes and blueberries. And they’re actually much more efficient and productive workers than the European bee, which, says Steve, ‘pollinate only about 30% of plants’, compared to a pollination rate of around 70-80% for the native bee.

Native bee hives, Steve McGrane's garden, Korora, mid-north coast NSW
Native bee hives, Steve McGrane’s garden, Korora, mid-north coast NSW

While the native bee has not, so far as Steve is aware, suffered the colony collapse disorder that is decimating many populations of European bees, it is under threat from its larger cousin. Steve explains why:

“European bees are very messy in the way they obtain the pollen – they buzz and they just destroy the flower. Whereas when the native bee comes along, it’s very delicate, and there’s no pollen left for it, so they’re actually killing the food sources of the native bees.”

European bees can also out-compete native bees for food because they can tolerate much lower temperatures. In our region, they remain active for most of the year, whereas native bees go dormant during the colder months.

But with European bee populations in decline, native bees may well have an increasingly vital role to play in ensuring our future food security. All the more reason for backyard gardeners to take the plunge and get a hive, in Steve’s view.

And while their main job may be pollination, they do, as Aboriginal people have long known, provide small amounts of delicious ‘sugar bag’ honey. This honey, because of its comparative scarcity, can retail for as much as $100 a kilo. Steve and his neighbour Peter are prototyping a way of extracting the honey in small plastic containers. This avoids the need to split open the whole hive, which can be a very messy process.

Native Bee Hive Honey Container
Native Bee Hive Honey Container

If keeping native bees takes your fancy, the cost is a reasonable $450-$500 for a hive, and ‘it takes zilch knowledge’, says Steve. The most important thing is to have a diversity of flowering plants in close proximity, so your bees have a reliable food supply.

advocate, Bellinger Valley, Collaborative cultures and networks, Food sovereignty, Permablitzes, Self-sufficiency

Making the suburbs edible – one backyard, one school, at a time

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Bellingen Primary School Permablitz, 2010
Bellingen Primary School Permablitz, 2010

Permablitz – what’s it all about?

Nick Rose

This article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 20.11.10

First there was ‘guerrilla gardening’. In the dead of night, hard core local food activists would surreptitiously sow brassicas, leafy greens and even the odd citrus tree on urban nature strips.

Now there’s ‘backyard blitzes’ or, more commonly, ‘permablitzes’. So what is it with all these psuedo-military metaphors to describe new variants on the gentle art of gardening for food?

According to the www.permablitz.net, a permablitz is “an informal gathering involving a day on which a group of people come together to achieve the following:

  • create or add to edible gardens where someone lives
  • share skills related to permaculture and sustainable living
  • build community networks
  • have fun.”

Permablitzes are the inspiration of Melbourne-based permaculture designer Dan Palmer and a South American community group. Since their beginning in 2006, over 100 permablitzes have been held throughout Melbourne, and now the movement is spreading across the rest of Australia.

Permablitzes are typically held in a private household, and indeed half a dozen permablitzes took place in people’s homes in and around Bellingen over the last 12 months.

The Coffs Coast Local Food Alliance however decided to expand the concept by working directly with local schools, using the design and labour-sharing that a permablitz offers to help schools construct a school garden or improve and expand upon an existing one.

And so the first LFA Permablitz was held last month at the Bellingen Public Primary School. Thirty-five enthusiastic volunteers – students, parents, teachers, and the principal, as well as friends and supporters – turned out to transform the bare lawn at the school’s entrance on William Street into a food oasis. The day was a fantastic success, and it was a sheer joy to be there and just experience how much a group of people working together to a shared goal based on an excellent design can achieve.

Boys with barrow, Bello Public Permablitz Oct 2010
Boys with barrow, Bello Public Permablitz Oct 2010

Relieving school Principal Elizabeth Mulligan spoke movingly of the ‘huge community spirit’ she witnessed on the day. “It’s just so good to see parents here with their children, also community members, with no attachment really to the school, but who have come to find out about permablitz”, she said. “And then people from organisations who are here to help us to learn about the whole procedure, and how it can be useful and good for us.”

The design was prepared by long-time permaculturalist, land-carer and market gardener Charlie Brennan, together with his son Bede, a former student of the primary school. Charlie celebrates the emergence of permablitz as a new wave of permaculture community activism.

The team - Bello Publc Permablitz, Oct 2010
The team – Bello Publc Permablitz, Oct 2010

“It’s great that permaculture has come back in again”, said Charlie. “For about 5-10 years I was really involved with permaculture here in town. We had a permaculture group, we had working bees, we had events like this – then it seemed to go quiet for a while – and now it’s back with a vengeance”, he added.

Liz Scott with students at the Bello Public Permablitz, Oct 2010
Liz Scott with students at the Bello Public Permablitz, Oct 2010

The next LFA permablitz will be held in Boambee on Saturday 4th December, at a private property. Anne, the host of this permablitz, also attended the Bellingen Primary event with her partner Tim. “We’re really keen to be involved and get some permaculture happening at our own place, so it was really good to come to the school and participate and learn, and meet other people’, Anne said.

Anne Montgomery's Permablitz, Boambee, before shot
Anne Montgomery’s Permablitz, Boambee, before shot
Anne Montgomery Permablitz, after shot
Anne Montgomery Permablitz, after shot
Anne Montgomery permablitz, the team
Anne Montgomery permablitz, the team
Anne Montgomery and daughter, enjoying the harvest
Anne Montgomery and daughter, enjoying the harvest

A short video of the permablitz at Bellingen Primary, put together by local short-doco maker Mick Parker, can be viewed at the LFA website – http://coffscoastlocalfood.ning.com/.

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Bellinger Valley, Seed saving, Self-sufficiency

Seed saving – the foundation of a democratic food system

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Preserving the Genetic Base of Tomorrow’s Food – the Bellingen Seed Savers Network

Nick Rose

First published in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 6.11.10

If a system is going to endure long periods of time, i.e. be sustainable, then it has to be able to withstand external and internal shocks, i.e. it must be resilient.

Dealing with the lack of resilience in a globalised food system structured largely around the processed products of corn and soy is one of the biggest challenges we face.

A resilient system is diverse, and that’s why diversity – and diversification – are central to the transformation of the food and agricultural system that is now underway.

One manifestation of this transformation is the recovery of the traditional farmers’ practice of seed-saving. While an estimated 1.7 billion farmers still save their seed, they’re now supported by local and national seed-saving initiatives, such as the Navdanya project in Uttrakhand, Northern India. Founded in 1984 by Dr Vandana Shiva, Navdanya has conserved over 5000 crop varieties and set up 54 community seed banks in 16 Indian states. It’s also trained over half a million farmers in seed and food sovereignty, and sustainable agriculture.

In Australia, the Byron Bay-based Seed Savers Network was founded by Michel and Jude Fanton in 1986. The SSN website lists 76 local seed saver groups around the country, including in Coffs Harbour (CROPO), and the Bellingen Seed Savers Network (BSSN).

Established in 2008, the BSSN is coordinated by Irene Wallin. Irene, herself a relative late comer to food growing, fell into the role of coordinator almost by default, when the first volunteer for the job had to pull out.

Under Irene’s guidance, the group has prospered. It now has a ‘core’ of 30-35 members, and an email list of 150 people who want to stay informed of its activities. The members come from Coffs Harbour, Dorrigo, and Valla Beach, as well as the various valleys around Bellingen.

A key moment was when a number of keen and experienced local growers and gardeners joined the group – like Peter and Beryl Judd, from Dorrigo. They were able to supply a good stock of seed to share with the other members.

The Judds hosted one of the group’s first garden visits. “It was amazing”, says Irene. “[There were] huge, long rows of everything.”

When it comes to sustainable living, the first step is simply to begin. “You’ve got to make a start”, says Irene, “and we have. Here we are, two years later, and when I think about the number of seeds that we had to share with people at the Bellingen Plant Fair this time [September 2010], we’ve made really good progress.”

The group’s main focus is to collect and share seeds. “Our main objective is to get the seeds out and moving among the community”, says Irene. “The seeds we’re focusing on are edibles, and companion plants. It’s all to do with future food security”, she adds.

The loss of diversity in edible food crops is a real concern, and a key motivation for the group.

“You can look at the catalogues of the seed companies over time, and see how the seeds have just disappeared”, says Irene. “It’s the concern about the availability of food for everybody – it’s also about finding the varieties that will grow well here, and growing them, so they will adapt to the conditions.”

The visits to members’ gardens, and the informal sharing of seeds and knowledge that takes place during them, is the cornerstone of the group, and what has made it so popular.

“The host will talk about what’s working for them, and what problems they’re having, and how they’re overcoming them”, says Irene. “We all love being in one anothers’ gardens, it’s so interesting”, says Irene.

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Bellinger Valley, Self-sufficiency

Self-sufficiency in the Bellinger Valley

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Image

Living off the bounty of the land in the Bellinger Valley

Nick Rose

First published in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 4.9.10

Fears over food price inflation are back in the news. We haven’t yet reached the convulsions of May-June 2008, when there was rioting in over thirty countries. Though the situation in Pakistan, where nearly 25% of the country’s crops have been destroyed in the ongoing floods, is extremely precarious.

This time, the sharp spike in wheat prices has not been caused by a run-up in oil futures. It’s because Russia, having lived through its hottest summer on record, has imposed a ban on wheat exports until November 2011.

As a result, prices for consumer staples like bread, beer and meat will all rise in the coming months.

These events are leading many people to see the sense in embracing older traditions of at least partial self-sufficiency: the backyard veggie plot, and keeping a few chooks for eggs.

Other reasons for this trend include well-founded concerns about food safety and quality. The recent salmonella outbreak in the US, which has led to thousands of cases of food poisoning and the recall of more than 500 million eggs, is only the latest of numerous food scandals.

Some residents of the Coffs Coast however take the embrace of self-sufficiency much further than a few herbs, lettuces and tomatoes in the summer. Nell Haydon, for instance, supplies most of her food needs, with plenty of surplus to spare for others, from her half-acre garden and citrus orchard on her property, a few minutes drive out of Bellingen.

Nell, who hails originally from the NSW Central Western town of Grenfell, was raised in the traditions of self-sufficiency, family industry and generosity. Her father was a market gardener, who died when Nell and her three siblings were still young. Nell’s mother and the children worked her father’s two acres, feeding themselves and sharing their surplus with their neighbours.

Later, when she worked in public health administration in Papua New Guinea from 1968 to 1982, Nell’s experiences with villagers who largely followed self-sufficient, traditional lifestyles, and yet enjoyed higher standards of health than many ‘richer’ people in the cities, confirmed for her that this was the path she wished to follow.

She returned to Australia with a dream of buying a small piece of land that had decent soil and a good aspect. Connections through friends drew her to Bellingen, and she paid the deposit on what is now her home on the same day that Australia won the America’s Cup in 1983.

When you walk into Nell’s garden, you can really feel the thriving abundance of 25 years’ worth of loving care of the land. Everywhere you turn something is growing, a fair amount of it self-seeded, according to Nell: chillis, butternut lettuces, potatoes, three varieties of sweet potatoes, sugarsnap peas, broccoli, cauliflowers,  Pak Choy, papaya, strawberries, Italian garlic, leeks,  Russian shallots, yarrow, hibiscus, and the exotic-looking Cape Horn cucumber, amongst much else. The orchard has various varieties of grapefruits, limes, lemons, oranges, mandarins and tangellos.

The marvel is that, apart from an initial tractor run to create the orchard, it was all done by hand. Yet now, Nell spends no more than an hour a day in her garden.

Her garden is also spreading. Since an initial visit organised by the Bellingen Local Food Network two years ago, she’s had numerous visits from the North Bank Road Community Garden and the Bellingen Seed Savers. Cultivars and cuttings from her garden are now growing in various homes throughout Bellingen and beyond.

So Nell, who is now 74, finds herself part of a growing network of Coffs Coast residents keen to embrace the ways of self-sufficiency, and she’s an inspiration for many of them. “People are happy when they come out here”, says Nell. “[That first visit in 2008] has allowed me to meet up with like-minded people. It’s broadened my life.”