Tag Archives: Melbourne

Backyard Gardening, Collaborative cultures and networks, Democratic food systems, Uncategorized

In the era of Trump

More than a year has passed since I last wrote here. What a year, professionally and in terms of global politics.

Cardinia Food Circles, courtesy of Kirsty Moegerlein

Professional milestones

  • 21 January 2016: Sustain: The Australian Food Network becomes incorporated as a company limited by guarantee
  • March 2016: Sustain secures funding from the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation for three years, effectively covering my role as Executive Director for 2 days a week
  • April 2016: Sustain secures funding from the Myer Foundation for capacity building, supporting a) the establishment of an Australian Food Systems Directory b) the holding of an inaugural Urban Agriculture Forum c) the holding of the 21st Symposium of Australian Gastronomy d) the recruitment of a part-time comms officer and e) governance training for our Board and myself
  • May 2016: We complete the Food Hub Feasibility Study for Wangaratta, the second such study after the 2015 Bendigo Food Hub Feasibility Study
  • June 2016: Study trip to Canada to attend the Canadian Food Hubs Conference and meet with food organisations in Quebec
  • June-July 2016: Preparation for the inaugural Australian Community Food Hubs conference and tour
  • August 8-18 2016: Community Food Hubs conference and tour successfully conducted with 170 attending the two-day Bendigo event and a further 800+ attending events around the country
  • September 2016: Planning begins for the national Urban Agriculture Forum and the Symposium of Australian Gastronomy
  • October 2016: Contract signed for a multi-year food system re-design project: Cardinia Food Circles.  The first and most ambitious project of its type attempted so far as we know.
  • November 2016: The Urban Agriculture Forum takes place in Melbourne with 150 attendees, followed by events in Bendigo, Adelaide and Sydney. Cardinia Food Circles project gets underway
  • December 2016: 21st Symposium of Australian Gastronomy takes place in Melbourne, with 140 attendees, over four days of debates and feasting. The background mapping of the Cardinia Food System takes place
  • January 2017: We pause a little for breath…Discussions begin for the Alphington Community Food Hub
  • February 2017: The Australian Food Systems Directory is launched. The Bendigo Local Food Economy pilot report is launched.
  • March 2017: The Sustain / VLGA food governance position paper is finalised, articulating  the role of local government across health and wellbeing, planning, and economic development
  • April 2017: The Cardinia Food Systems profiling workshops are held in Koo Wee Rup, Pakenham and Gembrook, generating debate and passion about the current state and future possibilities of Cardinia’s food system. The Food Hub Feasibility Study for the Wyndham Food Hub is finalised and delivered to the City of Wyndham
Koo Wee Rup food system profile, courtesy of Kirsty Moegerlein

And so much more still to come! Not mentioned above of course is the launch in 2016 of Australia’s first Bachelor of Food Studies at William Angliss Institute, and in 2017 of the first Master of Food Systems and Gastronomy at the same place.

Global politics

The geopolitical tremor came first in June with the Brexit vote, with a slim majority of UK voters taking the historic decision to leave the EU. This rising tide of nationalism crested in November 2016 with the previously unthinkable election of the ultra-narcissist Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, on an openly racist platform of America-first nationalism and xenophobia directed against Muslims, Mexicans, Chinese and non-Americans in general.

Trump’s first 100 days in office have been characterised by gaffes, mis-steps, broken promises and in recent weeks increasingly brazen saber-rattling and uber-militarism. In early April, a volley of cruise missiles was fired at Syria in supposed retaliation for a chemical weapons attack allegedly perpetrated by Bashar Al-Assad against civilians in a rebel-held zone. A week later the US military command in Afghanistan decided to drop the MOAB – Mother of All Bombs – the largest non-nuclear device ever exploded.

MOAB Bomb dropped on Afghanistan, 14 April 2017

At the same time Trump has effectively put the North Korean regime on notice that it’s next, and can expect a pre-emptive strike in the near future. North Korea has responded by threatening the US with annihilation. I can only imagine what it must be like for the residents of Seoul at this time, who will be first in the firing line should Trump carry through with his threats.

Meanwhile the rhetoric against Russia and Iran has ramped up considerably, and the US has them in its sights also. France is on the brink of electing the openly fascist National Front, as the forces of fear, xenophobia, racism and nationalism seem to be in the ascendancy.

The danger of war – and hugely destructive, nuclear war – feels very great indeed. I retain my optimism and belief that we are also on the cusp of some wonderful, transformative changes, but there are days when my optimism is sorely tested.

Still, this is the sort of thing that keeps me feeling hopeful:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Small-scale farming

Richard Thomas, Worm Lover

Richard Thomas / Worm Lover

 

Last time I wrote about a new revolution underway in food production: rooftop farming.

This movement is certainly gaining momentum in the United States. More than 350 roofs in Chicago are wholly or partially covered with vegetation, including a 1860m2 at the Chicago Botanic Garden, with capacity to provide 10,000 servings of fresh vegetables annually.

There is the capacity – and the intention – to expand this rooftop farm to cover 3 acres under cultivation, which would mean that it overtook Brooklyn Grange in New York, currently the largest rooftop farm in the US at 2.5 acres over two roofs in New York City.

As well as the volume and variety of food grown, this type of farming serves a social purpose, with several of the farmers being under-employed ex-offenders; and an environmental benefit, reducing the heat island effect of large city buildings.

In Australia, rooftop farming is very much in its infancy. But it’s begun. Earlier this year, Australia’s first rooftop worm farm was launched on the top of Curtin House, at 252 Swanston St, in the centre of Melbourne.

Rooftop Farm at Mesa Verde, Curtain House, Swanston St, Melb, under construction in 2013
Rooftop Farm at Mesa Verde, Curtain House, Swanston St, Melb, under construction in 2013

 

Made possible by the dedication and commitment of ‘Worm Lover’ Richard Thomas, and the vision and financial backing of the building’s owners, the Mesa Verde restaurant on the 7th floor of 252 Swanston St now has half a dozen specially-made (in New Zealand) ‘Hungry Bins’, with thousands of worms, processing dozens of kilos per week of organic vegetable waste and coffee grounds from the kitchen.

 

Mesa Verde Construction Phase
Mesa Verde Construction Phase

And turning it all into the highest quality worm castings and worm wee, which is then used to fertilise the 30m2 of raised wicking beds that now occupy about an eighth of the building’s roof. Those beds also include many meters of trellising, to permit the growing of beans, peas, cucumbers and other climbing crops.

 

“Just about anything will grow in this stuff, that’s the beauty of it”, says Richard.

And with the beauty of a closed-loop, zero-waste system, the 30 different varieties of herbs and veggies then go back to the kitchen to appear on customer’s plates.

The project was two years from concept design to implementation and required an investment well in excess of $150,000, which included the fitting of 10 tons of reinforced steel columns in order to reinforce the weight-bearing load of the roof by 30-40 tons, to cope with the extra weight of the wicking beds and the soil.

Mesa Verde Construction Phase
Mesa Verde Construction Phase

 

Funds permitting, the aim is to triple the growing area of the rooftop over the next few years. Rooftop farming in Australia, where, unlike America, buildings were not designed to bear the extra weight load of snow falls, is a complex matter that will require significant investment.

 

Mesa Verde reinforced steel columns to support rooftop farm
Mesa Verde reinforced steel columns to support rooftop farm

 

“These guys are visionaries”, Richard says of the owners of Curtin House. “They bought this building when Swanston St was a desert, when the building was derelict, and they saw the potential. They’ve pumped millions into it over the years – it’s the first vertical laneway, the first rooftop cinema. They’re pioneers, which is why they’ve invested in this project, despite the cost and the challenges.”

“In ten years’ time, when everyone’s doing this, they’ll be able to say they were the first. There’s also the food for the restaurant, the amenity for the staff, and the publicity, it’s already attracting a lot of attention in the building”, Richard told us.

It certainly is an impressive sight – one to add on your list of places to see and things to do when you’re next in Melbourne.

 

 

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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