Tag Archives: Local food

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Coffs Coast, Self-sufficiency

Self-sustaining systems for the backyard gardener

Sustainability in Korora

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 11.6.11

Meet Steve McGrane. He’s the newly appointed Coordinator of the soon-to-be-inaugurated first-ever Coffs Regional Community Garden, to be constructed on 5000m2 at the Combine Street reserve.

Steve McGrane in his backyard garden in Korora
Steve McGrane in his backyard garden in Korora

Steve brings a wealth of horticultural experience and knowledge to this position, as well as a fierce passion for the principles of organic gardening and sustainable living. And not just the principles: Steve is a man who ‘walks the talk’, as anyone fortunate enough to visit his small (600m2) suburban property in Korora can attest.

He moved to the Coffs area in 2007, after working as a horticulturalist in Sydney and being involved at the community level with groups such as Permaculture North. His first intention was to set up a demonstration broadacre farm, but then it occurred to him that ‘actually it’s the domestic situation which is creating a lot of the waste [in our food system], and which is not really effective and sustainable in the way that we manage our resources.’

That realisation was the germ of inspiration for a seven-year project to demonstrate just what can be achieved, right here and now, in a 300m2 backyard, in terms of sustainable food production and biodiversity. And what Steve has achieved, largely with his own time, effort, skills and resources, plus some help from his neighbours, is quite remarkable.

When Steve talks about ‘sustainable food production’, what he means is a system that, after a period of time, doesn’t depend on purchased external inputs, i.e. it can sustain itself. His project isn’t about achieving self-sufficiency, which he sees as unrealistic and even undesirable. Rather, the aim is that after seven years, ‘the inputs which are producing the food here [will] be totally self-sustainable’, including ‘the water, the fertilisers, the mulch, and everything else’.

So how has he gone about achieving this goal? By applying permaculture and biodynamic methods ‘to prepare what was basically clay and shale soil’; and by researching what could be grown, with the aim of getting a ‘broad range of species’, especially those that would largely take care of themselves.

The starting point was to plant a lot of pioneer and support species, like acacias (Sally Wattles) and bamboo, alongside a large number of fruit trees. At first the ratio of support species to fruit trees was 90%-10%, and Steve’s aim is ‘through evolutional successioning’ to reverse that entirely over a fifteen-year period. Currently, after four years, the ratio is 60-40, support-fruit trees.

The pioneer plants have two main purposes: to fix nitrogen and improve the soil; and also as ‘sacrificial plants’ to produce mulch, via the ‘chop and drop’ method. Both purposes complement each other:

When you cut acacias and you trim the canopy, you also trim the roots, and that releases the nitrogen…Otherwise nitrogen’s not released until the plant is actually killed, and the nodules are broken open. So [this] is a way of releasing nitrogen as you go.

At the ground level, Steve’s put in other pioneers, like comfrey and vettava grass, which he uses as a border for his mandala vegie gardens.

Vettava grass is ‘used as a fodder in India for cattle’, says Steve, ‘because it’s very high in proteins, and it makes a very good mulch. It breaks down into straw, and that’s what I’m talking about in terms of not having to bring in inputs. So all I do is chop and drop it into the soil. It’s got nitrogen as well, and a high mineral uptake.’

The comfrey serves a similar purpose, and is also highly recommended for making a compost tea, together with a bit of seaweed, and the odd biodynamic prep. Another good ‘chop and drop’ is pidgeon pea, which also yields a crop of lentils. Other food-and-pioneer plants are sweet potatoes, which as a ‘ground cover [creates] a habitat for the microbes and bacteria to do their work’; and mint, which also deters pests.

The result of these years of soil preparation? ‘I now have six inches of soil’, says Steve, ‘which I didn’t have before.’

Talking of food, Steve has Decassis and Cavendish bananas, apples, peaches, pears, citrus, pawpaw, nectarines, almonds, macadamia, a dwarf pecan, hill gooseberry, South American cherry, passionfruit vines, and many other species. And that’s before we get to the vegies…

Steve’s new projects for his garden are the native bees, and aquaponics, which we’ll discuss in future columns.

If you would like to visit Steve’s garden in Korora, please put your name down for a tour with the Coffs Coast Ambassador programme, 6648 4676. For those interested in finding out more about the Coffs Regional Community Garden, please visit www.coffscommunitygardens.org.au, or contact Adam Curlis on 0424 989 979.

advocate, Local and regional food economies, New market mechanisms

Local Food = Jobs + Health + Sustainability

The Economics of Food Localisation

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 28.5.11

Local food and food sovereignty advocates identify many social and environmental reasons as to why the shift to local food systems is necessary and urgent.

And as I discussed a few weeks ago, this message is increasingly being heard and understood in government and policy circles, if the outcomes of Australia’s first-ever National Sustainable Food Summit are a reliable indicator.

The economic benefits of food localisation are also substantial, but there is little research on this area in Australia. Thankfully, this gap is now being filled by the pioneering work undertaken in the United States by Michael Shuman and his colleagues at BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.

Shuman, who visited Bellingen and Coffs Harbour in 2009 as part of a speaking tour of Australia, recently co-authored a report titled, ‘The 25% Shift: The Benefits of Food Localisation for Northeast Ohio & How to Realize Them.’[1]

Michael Shuman
Michael Shuman

As the title suggests, the centrepiece of the report was an economic impact modelling exercise. The authors examined the flow-on effect of all the economic actors – households, restaurants, grocery stores, wholesalers and distributors, and food manufacturers – of the 16 counties of the Northeast Ohio region (population, 4.14 million) increasing by a quarter the percentage of their food needs with produce sourced in the region itself.

This part of the US is economically depressed, with unemployment in excess of 10%, and major centres like Cleveland losing up to half their population since the 1950s, in the wake of the downscaling of the automobile and other heavy manufacturing industries.

At the same time, the local food movement is flourishing, with hundreds of established community gardens and urban farms in Cleveland and its surrounding towns, and dozens of new ones appearing each year; a ‘diversity of agricultural systems’, including ‘robust and cohesive farming communities’ such as the Amish and the Mennonites; innovative models such as farmer-consumer co-operatives; and ‘a rich history of businesses that support [these] farms through local purchasing and investment’.  The authors highlight many examples which reveal ‘the wholesale, restaurant and institutional buying power for local foods’.

So what did the study find? The conclusions were startling, showing that the 25% shift could:

  • ‘create 27,664 new jobs’, slashing the unemployment rate by an eighth;
  • ‘increase gross regional output by $4.2 billion’ and local and state revenues by $126 million;
  • ‘significantly improve air and water quality, lower the region’s carbon footprint, attract tourists, boost local entrepreneurship, and enhance civic pride’; and
  • ‘increase the food security of hundreds of thousands of people and reduce near-epidemic levels of obesity and type-II diabetes.’

Given its well-deserved reputation as a pioneer in local food, and given the thousands of dedicated individuals and businesses already working in the sector, one could be forgiven for thinking that the 25% shift would happen just by sheer momentum. But the authors highlight several weaknesses and barriers, including extensive poverty, significant numbers of food deserts, infrastructure gaps in wholesale, distribution and processing, a sceptical public, a lack of financial support for existing initiatives, and supply constraints.

Shuman and his colleagues are not fazed by the challenges, and offer 50 recommendations for how they can be overcome. These include innovative financing initiatives such as ‘revolving loan funds, municipal food bonds and a local stock market’; the creation of local business alliances to ‘facilitate peer learning and joint procurement co-operatives’; and the ‘deployment of a network of food-business incubators and ‘food hubs’ to ‘support a new generation of local food entrepreneurs.

 

This excellent study covers much more ground than I have described here; and anyone with a keen interest in this area should spend some time reading it.

[1] The full report is available for download at the following address: http://www.neofoodweb.org/sites/default/files/resources/the25shift-foodlocalizationintheNEOregion.pdf

advocate, Coffs Coast, Collaborative cultures and networks, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies, Retailers

The Happy Frog

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 14.5.11

This is the second of a two-part interview with Kim Towner, owner and manager of Tangellos and Happy Frog, and Coordinator of the Sunday Harbourside Markets.

Happy Frog was born two years ago, because Kim felt that Coffs Harbour was lacking a place ‘where you can go and buy the local fruit and veg all the time’, and help build a culture of sustainability – both social and environmental.

Kim chose the Frog because ‘it’s a measure of environmental health. I wanted to get everybody here, not just the vegetarians. I thought, let’s replace two meals a week with vego stuff, and let’s not have bottled water, let’s just look at those two things. And see what we can do differently.’

Happy Frog, Coffs Harbour
Happy Frog, Coffs Harbour

She gets as much local produce as she can, but not as much as she would like. At first, she bought largely direct from growers, but eventually logistical difficulties meant she had to rely on the services of a local wholesaler: Phil at A & D down at the Jetty. She speaks very highly of him – ‘he’s honest and fair and passionate’ – as do other businesses that preference good quality, fresh and reliable local produce.

The business has been very successful since opening – ‘people latched on to it really quickly, [they] heard about it through word of mouth’ – but Kim feels it’s still ‘really difficult to get people to buy here, and not buy in the supermarket’, even though the produce compares well on price.

‘I remember when we’d opened a few months’, she says, ‘and Woolies were offering a huge discount – 30 cents a litre on petrol – if you spent $300. I went and looked at their tomatoes and cucumbers, and worked out that if you bought tomatoes and cucumbers here, which were both local and beautiful – you would have saved $8, just on that one purchase of a kilo each of those two items. That [just] blew me away.’

The most profitable part of Happy Frog is the café. Thursday is always a busy day, because of the city centre growers’ market; Kim says other local businesses should ‘stop whingeing’ about it and look at their turnover on a Thursday.

One recent popular option has been a take-away dinner offer of $25 for four people, which is excellent value if you have tasted the many salads, lasagnes, lentil patties and kofta balls the café offers. The menu for the week is sent out each Monday to her growing email list of 150 people.

Kim and her team are now looking to expand on this by moving into catering: ‘We do party salads in bulk, and also funerals, and from that we do lots of meetings. This is a growing part of our business. It introduces a lot of people to the taste, and to the vegetarian thing.’

Kim is full of ideas for the future, both for Happy Frog and the region. There’s local value-adding: ‘We’ve just started our own dukkhas, semi-dried tomatoes, and I want to do jams, and relishes, and salad dressings.’ She also wants to ‘get in to school canteens…at Toormina High School – I’d love to do a Jamie Oliver-type thing, we could do some really good stuff, with the crew we’ve got.’

Her ‘favourite vision’ is to create a ‘shopping centre with a difference – a blend of shopping centre and markets. So that you had everything there – great big kitchens that made pasta, and bread, and jams, and you had a nursery, and a healing section where you got your hair cut, a massage – and you open the whole front of it up, with glass – and you played live music every day, and you had a kids’ playground there. And you had hand-made shoes, and clothing, and it was all there so people good see it. I reckon that would go so off – it would be like, this is how can you do it, a community shopping centre, but modern, and cool and funky.’

Her other big dream is ‘to see a hemp and bamboo industry [for Coffs Harbour’.

These plants grow abundantly, ‘they make beautiful fabric and great sustainable products. Coffs Harbour for ever has been flogging this tourism thing. I’ve got nothing against tourists – but it goes up and down, and changes. But let’s have something that’s really sustainable, for the long term….We could come up with some great name for hemp clothing that was made here, and exported to the damn world!’

These dreams will probably be for someone else to bring to reality, because there’s only so much one person – even one as energetic and visionary as Kim Towner – can do. But she and her team are living proof that the future here can be very bright indeed.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Farmers Markets, Local and regional food economies

Pragmatic Idealism

Kim Towner – the ‘pragmatic idealist’

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 30.4.11

This is the first of a two-part series on Kim Towner, owner and manager of Tangellos and Happy Frog in the Coffs Harbour CBD, and is also the coordinator of the Harbourside Sunday market. The story of Happy Frog and Kim’s thoughts on the future will be in the next column.

Kim Towner, proprietor of the Happy Frog, Coffs Harbour, NSW
Kim Towner, proprietor of the Happy Frog, Coffs Harbour, NSW

Kim Towner, in her own words, has ‘been to corporate scum and dirty hippy, and lots of things in between’. She’s a great asset to the city, and is exactly the sort of enterprising individual we need if we’re going to meet the challenge of building a sustainable and resilient food system.

Kim has always been a strong believer in supporting local farmers and growers: ‘I’ve always enjoyed shopping that way, going to the markets, knowing the peoples’ names whom I’m buying from’, she says. With Tangellos, she was able to put those values into practice, and combine it with a business savvy that has seen the juice and coffee bar more than double its turnover in only a few years.

As she got to know the stallholders at the central growers’ market, she heard that were unhappy about the then Sunday market, because they felt they couldn’t compete ‘against all the seconds coming out of Brisbane’. Kim, being the energetic person she is, decided to do something about it – she started her own market at the Harbourside.

‘I wanted to make it more than just a growers’ market’, she said. So ‘it has growers’ stalls, live music, a wine producer, an olive stall – and most produce there is grown or made on the mid-north Coast, or with connections to here’, with strict rules about no re-selling and no imports.

And once again, she did it well, with perhaps a dash of luck thrown in – fortune favours the brave: ‘There’s been very few days when it hasn’t felt really good. A Koori elder said to me that it was an old trading ground, “You dream them markets did ya?” The tribes from the north and the south and the west used to meet there. And the currents meet there too, which is why it’s so good for fishing’, Kim adds.

Reflecting on her experience with the market, Kim says that ‘there’s two levels of growers that I’ve found. You’ve got your bigger high-end growers, who just want to ship everything off to the [Brisbane or Sydney] market – they don’t want to come to the market. And other level of grower is very small – and they have to hold down a full-time job, as well as grow, and they can’t come to the market either.’

‘So the ones who come to the markets are the in-betweeners – they’ve got a small farm, they make their living out of it, but they’re not huge – Chris who does my fruit & veg, he’s like that, he’s grows tomatoes and herbs and he’s got a bit of a job. They’re the sort of people who can do markets. And often sell their produce locally.’

‘We’ve tried to accommodate these different levels, and the best we’ve come up with is this lady, who goes around and gets what she can from the different growers, and even then she struggles – with a local mushroom grower here will only deal with the wholesaler. So we can get local mushrooms, but only through the wholesaler. And there’s something to be said for that.’

Always looking to improve, Kim’s next goal for the market is to add workshops to the experience – ‘arts and crafts, yoga and so on – I think it’s an opportunity to create something really different, a combination of a market and an event, and tie in to local activities like the buskers or whatever’s going on.’ Watch this space!

Ecological constraints, Growth paradigm

Roger Baker : Is Capitalism in Deep Trouble?

2 Comments

This well-written post poses a question that in my view will increasingly come to dominate political discourse in the coming years: in the face of growing constraints on cheaply-available energy, is GDP expansion as we have known it effectively over?

Which in turn raises a second, fundamentally important question: If ‘growth’, measured in quantitative terms, is coming to an end, how can we reconfigure our social measures of ‘progress’ in order to ameliorate the suffering that would otherwise come with a more or less permanent ‘depression’?

Roger Baker’s concluding paragraphs point to the urgency of the task ahead. The final paragraph shows why the People’s Food Plan, and the principles of food sovereignty, provide a sensible and prudent foundation for building resilience in highly uncertain times.

Nobody can accurately predict how long the current situation can be maintained but, given the facts of the matter, we can see that there is certainly going to be a global economic crisis. Only the timing, which is based on investor psychology and the Federal Reserve’s ability to keep the game going, is uncertain.

To sum up the situation we face, the scientists are warning us that even at best, a well-managed global economy can only avoid a severe environmental crisis for perhaps three more decades, because of the fundamental limits of nature. However, the chances of our poorly managed system of global capitalism lasting even that long are slight. Given the time typically needed to recover from a severe economic crisis like the Great Depression, this suggests that a severe global economic crisis or collapse must put an end to capitalism as we know it in the not very distant future.

Local economies centered around local agriculture and local production of the goods needed for survival are likely to be an important part of our future. We cannot start planning soon enough.

Roger Baker : Is Capitalism in Deep Trouble?.

advocate, Chefs and restaurants, Local and regional food economies

Why chefs love local and seasonal produce

GOING LOCAL – FROM LAKE COMO TO COFFS JETTY

Nick Rose

First published in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 1.1.11

When he first arrived in Coffs Harbour five years ago with his family to open Fiasco’s Restaurant and Bar, Stefano Mazzina found himself in an unfamiliar landscape. Unlike his native Lake Como in Northern Italy (north of Milan, near the Switzerland-Italian border), everything in the food and agricultural business seemed large-scale and anonymous.

Stefano Mazzina, Proprietor of Fiasco Restaurant, Coffs Harbour
Stefano Mazzina, Proprietor of Fiasco Restaurant, Coffs Harbour

This was a big change from Lake Como, where the majority of produce was local, small-scale and specialist to that region, both for the restaurants and for householders. Stefano fondly remembers a strong local cheese-making tradition from his childhood, which is still continuing today:

“Everybody had a couple of cows…and they used to bring their milk into this house where they made cheeses…your repayment for bringing in the milk, was cheese and butter – you never saw money [changing hands]. So this tradition of [local produce], that’s where I’m coming from”, he says.

Stefano also noticed a big difference in the way people related to, and understood, food, when he came to Australia. Unlike in Italy, he says, “there is not the [same] understanding of food [yet], especially in terms of vegetables.”

“People see vegetables in terms of people being meat eaters, or vegetarians, but there is not a fusion of looking at food in general”, he continues. “[For example], some of my chefs here didn’t want to try lentils, but I said, in Italy we eat everything – everything is dictated by the weather, the terrain, and the [culture of the] region. The menus vary with the seasons – they follow the seasons, what’s around – [local produce] is cheaper, it lasts longer, it has a better flavour – it just makes sense.”

He is now working hard to bring this tradition of incorporating local, seasonal produce into his menus at Fiasco. His main supplier, Phil [A & D Fruit and Vegetables] has a good percentage of local produce on his list. “That’s lettuce, mushrooms, strawberries, blueberries, cherry tomatoes, oranges, limes – soon there’s going to be zucchini, green beans, parsley, coriander, basil, – it’s good produce”, says Stefano.

There are many advantages, Stefano says, in having a menu oriented towards local, seasonal produce:

“Having more local produce makes the life a lot easier for a chef, because he’s got more to get inspired by – rather than just buying the same things – there’s no variety [in doing that]. With local produce, you don’t have to have a single menu that runs all year…you can use the seasons, and use the growers’ input, to [craft] the menu and make it more interesting and sustainable.”

In addition, because the produce is fresher, its quality and taste is better. Lower food miles means far less pollution than vegetables from the big central markets. And buying local stimulates the local economy:

“The money stays in town – [and] it comes around. The farmers knows I’m buying from them, and I keep them in business, and maybe one day they’ll come to my restaurant!”

If possible, Stefano would like to encourage more local growers to produce food especially (though not exclusively) for his restaurant. He experimented with this recently, when he provided a local grower with some purple carrot seeds.

With so much dairy in the region, Stefano believes that there is a real lack of value-adding to dairy produce, and especially cheese.

“If I could buy local cheeses, I wouldn’t buy other cheeses. We make ricotta here, from goat’s milk, I know some basic cheese-making techniques…but I’m not a cheese maker, you need an expert for that”, he says.

“In Italy, we used to make a lot of fresh and soft cheeses locally, the blue cheeses – caprini, buffalo mozzarella – [but] you need someone who has the knowledge to do it…”

So here’s a challenge for the Coffs Coast – any budding local cheese-makers out there? And if not, how can we support the establishment of a cheese-making tradition?