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
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
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
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:
In June 2013 I was fortunate enough to be the recipient of a Churchill Fellowship, to investigate innovative models of urban agriculture in the US mid-west, Toronto, and Argentina. I remember being told that ‘you have travelled, but you have not travelled as a Churchill Fellow.” At the time, I didn’t quite appreciate what that meant. I wasn’t planning to travel until the middle of 2014, so felt pleased with the award and then put the trip to the back of my mind.
As 2013 turned into 2014, I began my planning in earnest, contacting individuals and organisations in the three regions I intended to visit. The trip began to loom larger, and soon enough it was time to board the plane from Sydney to Chicago on 18 July, 2014.
So began two of the most extraordinary two months of my life. Words cannot do justice to the warmth, generosity, passion and inspiration that I encountered every day of those two months. It was truly a privilege to witness the extent and depth of commitment amongst the individuals I met to the cause of co-creating better and fairer communities, from the soil up.
I have now submitted my final report, which is available for download on the Churchill Trust website, and which I am also making available here: Rose_Nicholas_2013_Innovative_models_of_urban_agriculture. Below, I reproduce the Executive summary, and my conclusions and recommendations.
Visiting a family in Nestor Kirchner barrio, Tucuman, standing in front of their small family huerta
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This Report describes a Churchill Fellowship to study innovative models of urban agriculture in the US Midwest, Toronto and five provinces of Argentina. The focus of the study was to explore models of urban agriculture that could generate livelihood opportunities, especially for young people; and / or enhance food security for vulnerable and low-income groups. The study involved visits to over 80 organisations and institutions across the regions visited, and interviews with more than 150 people.
Highlights
Dr Rose was impressed and inspired in every place he visited. The following are examples of outstanding innovation, passion and creativity:
Nicky milking one of her goats, VK Urban Farms, Southside Chicago
Major lessons learnt and conclusions
Urban agriculture is flourishing; and is a source of connectedness, health and well-being, innovation, creativity, sustainable livelihoods, therapeutic benefits and enhanced food security for low-income populations in both North and South America. There are many opportunities for innovative models, enterprises, practices and policies to be adopted and supported in Australia. Commitment and resourcing from state and federal governments, and from the philanthropic and private sectors, would be extremely beneficial in terms of rapidly expanding and scaling up a relatively small but highly capable urban agriculture movement in Australia. Local governments have a critical strategic role in establishing support planning and policy frameworks to enable individuals and organisations to expand the excellent work already underway in Australia’s towns and cities.
Dissemination and implementation plan
Dissemination will be via existing (e.g. Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network) and emerging (‘Fair Food Network’) Australia-wide networks; through speaking engagements at food forums and related events; and through publications and writing. Dr Rose will work with colleagues in these networks, and in local governments around the country, to encourage the development of models, policies and resources to enable the expansion of urban agriculture. Longer-term goals include the recognition of urban agriculture in State planning frameworks; and the recognition of, and support for, urban agriculture in Federal food policy.
Victory Gardens Initiative Executive Director Gretchen Mead, with co-workers Colin and Ellie, Milwaukee
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The principal conclusions from this Fellowship are as follows:
Urban agriculture is multi-functional, multi-dimensional and offers a wide suite of benefits to individuals, communities, local businesses and governments.
Urban agriculture encompasses much more than ‘growing food’, and it should be understood and supported in light of that essential understanding. For example, in Neuquén, Argentina, Dr Rose witnessed its therapeutic benefits in supporting young adults recovering from severe drug addiction; and also its therapeutic benefits for hospital patients suffering from mental health problems.
While urban agriculture is multi-dimensional and multi-beneficial, it also can, and does, make an important contribution to the food security needs of low-income and vulnerable populations. This is especially important in the Australian urban context, where recent indications and trends suggest that food insecurity is a rapidly growing problem for large numbers of people in many of our communities.
Urban agriculture also has significant potential as a means to generative livelihoods and income for its practitioners, who in many places tend to be young. Linking sales from urban farms into local commercial circuits, which include farmers markets, community-supported agriculture box subscriptions, local restaurants, cafes and grocery stores, and the potential for such exchanges to be scaled up over time, means that urban agriculture has an important urban renewal and economic development dimension.
This multi-functionality of urban agriculture, and in particular its economic development potential, is increasingly well understood by local governments in the US, Toronto and Argentina; and by provincial governments (Ontario, Neuquén). Hence these various levels of government have established enabling frameworks, policies and resource allocations to support the expansion of urban agriculture in diverse opportunities. When combined with injections of philanthropic funding, such frameworks and resourcing can lead to impressive results.
The potential of urban agriculture is best realised through creative and authentic collaborations, which can and does happen at different scales and with differing combinations of actors and organisations. Well-functioning networks, coalitions and alliances are very important to the success of urban agriculture.
Urban agriculture forms one element of a local, sustainable and fair food system. Such systems are being created by innovative and passionate individuals and organisations in civil society; and in many places their efforts in turn are being supported and enabled by policy frameworks and resources from local, state, provincial and federal governments; and through philanthropic and community financing.
Dr Emmanuel Pratt, Harvesting silverbeet at the Perry St Farm, Englewood, Southside Chicago
The principal recommendations from this Fellowship are as follows:
Individuals and organisations directly involved in urban agriculture should actively explore ways to expand its current scope, which is largely confined to non-commercial and self-provisioning community gardening. Urban agriculture as a potentially viable commercial activity should be actively explored and promoted; as should urban agriculture as a means to enhance the food security of low-income and vulnerable groups.
Individuals and organisations directly and indirectly involved in urban agriculture should examine ways in which they can effectively form part of a network that supports the achievement of their respective organisational, financial and advocacy goals.
All local governments should work collaboratively with community organisations and other stakeholders to audit all land potentially available within their LGA area that could be suitable for food production, and then classify the sites according to levels of suitability and types of urban agriculture activity that potentially could take place on them.
All State governments should review their planning provisions and legislation to ensure that urban agriculture is included as a permitted and encouraged use across a range of zones, to indicate to local government that the policy approach in this area is one of enablement and encouragement, rather than risk aversion. In other words, the presumption with urban agriculture should be ‘yes’ rather than ‘no’.
The Federal Government should acknowledge the value and importance of urban agriculture, and indeed of local food systems and economies, as a matter of public health, local economic development, environmental sustainability and community well-being, as well as enhanced social capital.
This acknowledgement and recognition should come in the form of a dedicated Federal Urban Agriculture and Local Food Fund, to be disbursed via an application process that encourages regional and collaborative initiatives with high and long-term impact, to scale up and expand initiatives already existing, and enable the flourishing of multiple new projects and models. Funding should be provided to research partnerships to document changes achieved by the projects and create the evidence base to justify further and ongoing public and private investment. The amount should be reviewed annually to take account of increasing need and capacity, however the suggested starting figure, based on the Ontario Local Food Fund (see above), is $20 mn.
State governments should support this Federal Urban Agriculture and Local Food Fund through their own co-financing mechanisms, according to an assessment of the needs and capacity of the urban agriculture and local food sectors in their own states. For the more populous states (Victoria, NSW, Qld) this co-financing mechanism should be in the order of $5 mn – $10 mn, to be reviewed annually in consultation with the sector. Different financing mechanisms can also be explored, such as a levy on developers, supermarkets, insurance companies, and other relevant private sector stakeholders.
This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on September 27th, 20214
From October 10-19 this year, thousands of Australians all over the country will be celebrating the second Fair Food Week.
Coordinated by the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), these days are dedicated to celebrating the work of women and men in country and towns who are striving to create a fairer food system for their families and communities.
Fair Food Week is also about raising awareness amongst the broader public on the many critical issues our food and farming system is facing, and what we can do to tackle those issues.
This year, the organising team at AFSA have created four central themes to provide a focus for the dozens of events already scheduled. The four themes are:
Beyond The Trolley – Fair Food shopping and eating. Events to raise awareness about the extreme concentration in the Australian supermarket sector, and promote locally-owned food businesses as alternative shopping options,
Support your local community Fair Food projects and groups. The now defunct National Food Plan created for the first time a $1.5 mn fund to support community food projects, like community gardens, farmers markets and community kitchens. 364 groups applied to this fund, but it was axed in February this year by the new Federal government. AFSA is encouraging communities to raise funds for local food projects,
Grow our Urban Agriculture. Having witnessed a small part of the dynamic global movement for urban agriculture over the past couple of months during my Churchill Fellowship, I am especially keen to see this movement flourish in Australia. I have spent time with local governments in Chicago, Milwaukee, Toronto, Rosario and Neuquen, and can see what a key role supportive policy frameworks – and resourcing – plays in the expansion of urban agriculture. So this is a great focus for Fair Food Week,
Support Gas-Field Free Communities. I was delighted to see that that Lock the Gate Alliance, which unites farmers and rural communities with urban environmentalists, is now a major sponsor of Fair Food Week 2014. As many in the Coffs Coast and Northern Rivers regions of NSW know all too well, the rush for unconventional mining – fracking – poses serious environmental and social risks that are yet to be properly evaluated. Which is more important – a new mining boom that may last a few years and enrich a handful of mining executives even further, or safeguarding our best farmland for food security for future generations?
As in 2013, the inaugural year of Fair Food Week, there is a wide diversity of events already scheduled. These include visits to farms and community gardens, long table dinners on farms, farm and garden workshops, Fair Food forums, community cooking events, local business open days, celebrations of ethnic and regional food cultures, permabliztes, soup kitchens and more.
One event I am especially pleased to see is the Food Security Conference in Sydney, to be held on October 13-14. Organised by the newly-formed Right to Food Coalition, whose members include the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, Foodbank NSW, Red Cross, SecondBite, Blacktown City Council, NSW Department of Health (South Western Sydney District), Liverpool City Council and others, the centrepiece of this conference is the presentation by Joel Berg, Executive Director of the New York Coalition Against Hunger. Joel will be in Australia for a series of events during October. His focus is to raise awarness of the structural reasons why hunger persists in affluent countries like Australia and the United States, and why it is unacceptable to continue tolerating this reality.
Anyone can organise a Fair Food Week event! For more information and to see details of all events currently listed, visit www.fairfoodweek.org.au
A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, Saturday 30th August, 2014
Before I left Australia I thought our food and agriculture systems had some serious issues. Increasing rates of dietary-related ill-health. Decreasing numbers of farmers. Increasing power of the supermarket duopoly, to the detriment of most other players in the food system. Increasing rates of biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and loss of farmland due to urban sprawl and mining.
And so on.
After nearly six weeks travelling through the US Mid-West, Toronto and three cities of Argentina’s interior, I’ve realised – or rather been reminded – that everything is relative. The challenges that Australia faces, grave as they are, need to be put into perspective. As a country, we are at one point of a curve of a global food system crisis that is much, much more acute in other places.
The iconic Packard Car Plant in Detroit – which employed 15,000 workers at its peak, now a collection of abandoned and ruined buildings. The post-industrial future has arrived in Detroit
One such place is Detroit, where I was three weeks ago. What was once one of America’s richest cities, has long since become a by-word for poverty, violence, unemployment, crime and urban blight. As the auto industry crashed and burned, it took the city with it. From a population high of 1.8 million in the early 1950s, Detroit now has 750,000 people. Unemployment and poverty rates exceed 50%. Diabetes has reached pandemic proportions.
Yet even Detroit seems to be in less desperate straights than the thousands of people who live in the cinturones de pobreza (poverty belts) that ring the cities that I have visited, Tucuman and Rosario especially. The conditions in the so-called villas de emergencia (emergency towns) or asentamientos (settlements) are confronting and shocking. Many of the dwellings are shacks, not anything Australians would recognise as ‘houses’, with plastic covering to keep out rain and provide some modicum of insulation against sub-zero temperatures.
Casas precarias in the so-called Villas de Miserias, this photo taken in Barrio Nestor Kirchner, part of the Cinturon de Pobreza that encircles a significant portion of Tucuman, in the north-east of Argentina. Similar ‘poverty belts’ and ‘misery towns’ can be found in many mid-to-large sized Argentina towns and cities.
Domestic violence is endemic, and child abuse is frequent. Teenage pregancies are common. Unsurprisingly, drug taking – which often assumes the most destructive forms, such as glue sniffing – is rampant amongst adolescents. I am reminded of the early 1970s song by the Venezuelan band Los Guaraguao, about the conditions in the slums of Caracas:
Que triste, vive mi gente,
En las casas de carton
Que triste, vive los niños
En las casas de carton
(How sad my people live
In their cardboard houses
How sad do the children live
In their cardboard houses)
Life is hard. Very hard. And yet life goes on. And a key way in which members of these communities are achieving a measure of dignity – and improving their quality of life – is through having access to garden spaces – either in their own yards or in a public space.
The Pro Huerta (Pro Veggie Garden) program, which was established 25 years ago by the Argentina national government, helps 600,000 families throughout the country establish and maintain their own veggie gardens. It does this through the provision of high quality organic seed (the only provider of such seed in Argentina), workshops, and technical support through a national workforce numbering over 800 and a network of volunteer promotores numbering close to 20,000.
Visiting a family in Nestor Kirchner barrio, Tucuman, standing in front of their small family huerta
This is what I have come to Argentina to observe, to see what difference a national program of such magnitude makes to people facing conditions of extreme poverty. In Rosario, where I will be for the next few days, the local government has taken this concept to the next level. They have a workforce of 40 full-time staff dedicated to support urban agriculturalists scale up their production to a commercial level. The local government has made 22 hectares available to dozens of families to cultivate on an agro-ecological basis, and crucially provided infrastructure and marketing support, in the form of 10 producers’ markets that take place throughout the city on nearly every day of the week. 250 producers sell at these local markets. They can’t meet the demand.
From a cauldron of misery, good things are emerging. It’s humbling and inspiring to witness.
A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 16.8.14
My travels continue at what at times feels like a break-neck pace. I have spent a week in each of Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit and Toronto, and have just arrived in Argentina. Last night I stayed in Buenos Aires, then flew this morning to the northern province of Tucumán, where I will be till Friday night, when I take a bus to Córdoba. This week – and indeed the whole month – promises to be one of intense learning, as I immerse myself in coming to an understanding of the scope, scale and importance of the national Pro Huerta program, that reaches 500,000 families across the country, including 45,000 in Tucumán. Every day has brought so many new people, projects and places into my life that I will need a considerable amount of time to process it all. My commitment is to write a brief report for the Churchill Trust (minimum 10 pages), but it feels like a book. Or a number of books. There are just so many wonderful stories. And I already have in the order of 100 hours of recorded interviews. So I’m actually going back to Chicago this time, to share some observations from one of the most remarkable people I have met so far. Someone who has been practising urban agriculture for more than 15 years, making her one of the ‘elders’ of the movement in North America. And someone who has embraced it with a passion and dedication that has to be seen to be believed.
With Vicky and Eric, of VK Urban Farms
I am talking about Nicky, of VK Urban Farms, in East Caufield Park, Westside Chicago. She and her husband Eric, a policeman and trained chef, are working two vacant lots adjacent to their home, where houses formerly stood. Their focus is animals, rather than fruit and veg, and Nicky explains why: “When I had my children, that’s when I decided to get the chickens. I come from the city and I want my children to have culture, but I think there is an irreparable disconnect when you don’t have the space to put your hands in dirt, and land to live and look, and grow your own food. You can theoretically learn about it, and think about it, but when you have a tangible connection to your environment, it does something that connects you to your universe and your environment that you can’t just do in a book.
Some of the 15 chickens, VK Urban Farms, Southside Chicago
You can grow fruit and veg, and you can know to take care of your environment, theoretically. But when you have a live animal that eats up that ground, and then you’re going to eat off of what it gives you, it’s a different conceptual reality. So that was why I got the chickens. .” Nicky refers jokingly to her chickens as a ‘gateway drug’, because goats followed in their wake, and this year two pigs were added. Now their urban homestead includes 15 chickens (10 eggs per day), eight goats, and two beehives in addition to the two pigs. Nicky told me how wonderful it is to have goats: “ I love the fact that we milk every day, and we make cheese every third day. So I make feta and chevre, and farmhouse cheddar. I get a gallon and a half of milk each day.” “A gallon of milk yields about a pound a half of cheese [so that’s about 20 pounds of cheese per week – somewhere in the order of 8 kilos]. We work together with a remarkable woman in Austin, Carolyn Yoder, a remarkable human being. We ship in the hay together for the goats and split the freight charges. We care for each other’s goats when we go on vacation. She had a birthing crisis and I had to help her with the midwifery of her goat, which was ridiculously fantastic. We had to reach in and turn the kids, we had a 2% chance of birth and we did it, it was quite lovely.
Nicky milking one of her goats, VK Urban Farms, Southside Chicago
“Urban ag people – we have to do everything, we have to midwife, we have to castrate, we have to disbud (burning off the horns), it’s a high calling that you have a responsibility for these animals, and you better educate yourself, because there’s no-one to call for help.” Nicky speaks lovingly of how the animals work together, in harmony with the land and the growing of vegetables and fruits: “There’s a beautiful symbiosis with all of the animals and the farm. The goats produce a ton of manure, and that’s direct feed for the soil, you don’t have to age it. It’s enough for all of my gardens and a lot of community gardens in the neighborhood. It’s the difference between a few tomatoes, and a LOT of tomatoes, and they’re delicious! Especially in this table city soil. It’s exactly what you need to amend your soil. There’s a place for the goat poop to go, which is necessary.
Nicky with her chickens
“So they feed the garden, the garden feeds us, and the compost goes right back into the composter. They give me all this beautiful milk. I make cheese, and there’s a by-product of cheese – whey – which is the most magical thing in the world. You can wash your face with it, it cures acne…what we don’t use here, we feed back to the goats and the chickens and the pigs. Between all of the animals there’s no waste at all. We have no food waste at all. Everything gets eaten, between the goats, the chickens, and the pigs will eat whatever’s left over.
The daily haul of eggs…
“If you just have chickens, you’re going to have more waste – but the goats, the chickens and the pigs create a beautiful balance. 8 goats, 2 pigs, 15 chickens, 2 beehives, and a mass of gardens.
Nicky with her 2 pigs, VK Urban Farms, Westside Chicago
I asked her what it was like when she first moved to Chicago, and to the west side: “20 years ago it was very different here. Culturally. I was told I was crazy. I was the only white girl here, for years. We were raised, in Maine, that everyone is the same, doesn’t matter if you’re poor, or white, or black. But it’s easy to be raised like that when you live in a homogenous area. It’s easy not to be racist when everyone’s white. So people thought I was crazy when I moved here, to an all-black ghetto. They told me I was going to be cut up into little pieces, and raped every day.” Yet her experience of hostility came not from the westside of Chicago, but from its predominantly white north: “I lived in the north side of Chicago for a little while, but I found it very hostile. Nobody spoke to each other when you walked in the streets. You had to look down at the pavement, because God forbid you smiled at each other. They would recoil from me if I said ‘Good morning.’ The white people were just not friendly, whereas the black people are. I felt so lonely and isolated. The rent was very high. I looked into buying a place, here, on the Westside. I paid $30,000, and my mortgage was $234 a month, as opposed to $1600 a month, to rent a place with no backyard.
VK Urban Farms, Southside Chicago
“So I came to this block and I asked the neighbors, what would people think if I moved in, and they said ‘Oh honey, you’ll be fine’. And I felt so much more at home, among black people. They don’t look at you funny if you look them in the eye. People would come and knock on the door if it was street cleaning and I hadn’t moved my car. It’s so much more – it’s southern hospitality, and I felt embraced, even though I was the anomaly.” Nicky and Eric also tapped 66 maple trees from the streets surrounding their property, and boiled up 7 gallons of home-made maple syrup – possibly the first such product from an urban farm in North America. This was a great bonding experience for the community, Nicky says, because it ‘started so many wonderful conversations, because people didn’t know what maple syrup was. People have conversations that they never would have had otherwise. It really unites people.” At the end of the process, which lasted a couple of weeks, they had a big community pancake breakfast.
Products of VK Urban Farms, Westside, Chicago
Nicky is unsure about the future of her urban homestead, because the neighborhood is slowly becoming gentrified, and that could lead to tax rises. It could also lead to the City wanting to sell the vacant lots, which Nicky and Eric are trying to buy, so far without success, to a developer. A main issue for her are the constraints the current rules place on the ability of urban farmers like her to commercialise their produce, when it’s mainly derived from animals. So she and Eric are looking for creative ways to monetise some of their labour: “Our plan is farm to table dinners – we started this year with an urban wedding, a 100-person wedding, and those you are allowed to do. You are allowed to feed people with the food we produce here. So that’s why we’ve added the pergola, and why we’re doing the landscaping. We’re going to put down old pavers from the old City of Chicago streets. We can do events here, and there’s a lot of money doing that. That is an idea that we’re going to hope to keep things going. And maybe if we make enough money, the City will sell us this land. Having spent over an hour with Nicky, I asked her what the urban farming meant to her:
“For me it’s like the core of my happiness. Being out here and digging in the dirt, it connects me to the most fundamental space in my heart, which is nature. It gives me peace, and it calms me down, I’m not listening to podcasts, or news, or music, or looking at my cell phone. It’s just connecting with my environment. And it gives me back something for doing this!”
With one of VK Urban Farm’s 8 goats, Westside Chicago
Urban agriculture is becoming a movement, she says, because it speaks to a deep yearning amongst many people for (re-)connection: “ A lot of people involved in this are younger than me, they’re in their 20s and 30s. I think there’s a way in which we’re so disconnected – we have Facebook instead of actual friends, we have screens instead of human interactions, that people, especially in that age demographic, are starving for a real experience, in the world.” These words chime very much with my own feelings about urban agriculture, and the fair food and food sovereignty movement more broadly. Whereas the big, globalised and industrialised food system is premised on a series of disconnections and separations, everything about urban agriculture speaks of connection and healing: communities, minds, bodies and souls. Often this is also expressed through cooking and food preparation, as Nicky notes in relation to Eric: “My husband is a city boy, never grown anything in his life. When he first moved here he mowed over my herb garden. He’s like if it’s green it’s grass…No! Watching the transformation in him has been miraculous. Now he loves the gardens, he loves the animals, he’s proud to tell people about it. As a trained chef, it woke something up in him, that was even more than I have. For me, it connects me to my universe and myself, but for Eric, cooking for people is his connection to his world. To be able to have it be so real for him, is pretty beautiful.” Nicky says that urban agriculture is a diverse and grassroots movement and phenomenon, but it’s the basic desire for connection that unifies all those who are involved in it: “I think the people who stumble upon urban agriculture – because everybody does it for different reasons – and it does seem like a ‘stumble upon’ thing – you had a neighbor, who had bees, and you got into it; or you took a class in college, on agriculture, and got into it. But it’s not being passed down, it’s not like a farming technique, so everybody’s coming at it from all these crazy different directions. Some people like to brew beer, so they ask, well, where do my hops come from? And you grow your own hops, and then you start growing everything. “But I think it all stems from that same place of just been starving for an actual interaction with your universe.
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
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
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
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
“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.
A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 9th November, 2013
‘We are today part of a new revolution, The Urban Revolution. Cities that housed 200 million people, or ten percent of the world’s population in 1900 now accommodate 3.5 billion people, or fifty percent of the world’s population, and will, by 2050, accommodate 64 billion people or seventy percent of the world’s population… More than 80% of Australians already live in cities that are projected to double their size in the next 40 years.’
These are the opening words of the City of Melbourne’s, Transforming Australian Cities For a More Financially Viable and Sustainable Future, first published in May 2009 and updated in March 2010. For anyone who has spent time in Sydney or Melbourne recently, the prospect of these megalopolises doubling their size by 2050 is rather alarming, to put it mildly. Which no doubt explains the steady flow of urban refugees, the tree changers and sea changers, only too happy to exchange peak hour on Hogbin Drive for the daily grind of the M4 or the South-eastern freeway.
As Australia’s big cities double in size, how will they be fed?
From my perspective, it was doubly surprising that the word ‘food’ did not appear once in the Transforming Australian Cities strategic document. At the heart of the strategy for ‘sustainable growth’ (an oxymoron, arguably) of our big cities was the concept of ‘productive suburbs’, with the iconic ¼ acre blocks forming corridors to become the new ‘green wedge’ zones of Sydney and Melbourne. There was discussion of ‘making backyards productive’ through installation of rainwater tanks and greywater recycling systems. This, combined with the rollout of solar PV panels and other forms of domestic-scale renewable energy generation would, it was claimed, help Australian households move closer to ‘self-sufficiency’ and therefore ‘sustainability’.
But what about food? Given that some of the projections of climate change anticipate a reduction in productivity of our major foodbowl regions – the Murray-Darling in particular – of as much as 60% by 2050 – surely any strategy for the sustainability of our cities must integrate as a matter of highest priority how the residents are going to be fed?
Or perhaps, more to the point, how they are going to start feeding themselves, if we are serious in talking about ‘self-sufficiency’.
This conundrum of feeding growing cities is not of course a uniquely Australian issue. Indeed it is driving the burgeoning urban agriculture movement in North America. New York City now has an estimated 700 urban farms. Some of these are familiar community gardens, where groups of residents work small plots to produce food for themselves and their families.
Urban agriculture goes commercial – and up to the roof
Increasingly, many others are commercial-scale operations that have negotiated supply contracts with restaurants, grocery stores and supermarkets. And one of the recent trends is for commercial-scale farming to take place on the flat roofs of high-rise office and apartment blocks.
Rooftop Farming in New York City
One of these is the 555 m2 Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, based on a warehouse on the East River in Brooklyn. Eagle Street is an open-air intensive market garden which supplies organic vegetables to nearby restaurants by bicycle, and operates a farmers’ market onsite during the growing season.
Other rooftop farms operate year-round, by erecting greenhouses and using aquaponic and hydroponic growing techniques.
Office and apartment blocks in a city like New York are inherently more suited for this type of production than similar buildings in Australia, because their roofs are already built to a higher load-bearing capacity because of snowfall. But that’s not to say that this type of ‘farming’ can’t happen in Australia. In fact recently I was lucky enough to visit what is one of the very first attempts to do it, at the Mesa Verde rooftop bar and cinema at 252 Swanston St, Melbourne. It’s the brainchild of Mr ‘WormLover’, Richard Thomas, and I’ll tell that story next time.
‘We are today part of a new revolution, The Urban Revolution. Cities that housed 200 million people, or ten percent of the world’s population in 1900 now accommodate 3.5 billion people, or fifty percent of the world’s population, and will, by 2050, accommodate 64 billion people or seventy percent of the world’s population… More than 80% of Australians already live in cities that are projected to double their size in the next 40 years.’
These are the opening words of the City of Melbourne’s, Transforming Australian Cities For a More Financially Viable and Sustainable Future, first published in May 2009 and updated in March 2010. For anyone who has spent time in Sydney or Melbourne recently, the prospect of these megalopolises doubling their size by 2050 is rather alarming, to put it mildly. Which no doubt explains the steady flow of urban refugees, the tree changers and sea changers, only too happy to exchange peak hour on Hogbin Drive for the daily grind of the M4 or the South-eastern freeway.
From my perspective, it was doubly surprising that the word ‘food’ did not appear once in the Transforming Australian Cities strategic document. At the heart of the strategy for ‘sustainable growth’ (an oxymoron, arguably) of our big cities was the concept of ‘productive suburbs’, with the iconic ¼ acre blocks forming corridors to become the new ‘green wedge’ zones of Sydney and Melbourne. There was discussion of ‘making backyards productive’ through installation of rainwater tanks and greywater recycling systems. This, combined with the rollout of solar PV panels and other forms of domestic-scale renewable energy generation would, it was claimed, help Australian households move closer to ‘self-sufficiency’ and therefore ‘sustainability’.
But what about food? Given that some of the projections of climate change anticipate a reduction in productivity of our major foodbowl regions – the Murray-Darling in particular – of as much as 60% by 2050 – surely any strategy for the sustainability of our cities must integrate as a matter of highest priority how the residents are going to be fed?
Or perhaps, more to the point, how they are going to start feeding themselves, if we are serious in talking about ‘self-sufficiency’.
This conundrum of feeding growing cities is not of course a uniquely Australian issue. Indeed it is driving the burgeoning urban agriculture movement in North America. New York City now has an estimated 700 urban farms. Some of these are familiar community gardens, where groups of residents work small plots to produce food for themselves and their families.
Increasingly, many others are commercial-scale operations that have negotiated supply contracts with restaurants, grocery stores and supermarkets. And one of the recent trends is for commercial-scale farming to take place on the flat roofs of high-rise office and apartment blocks.
One of these is the 555 m2 Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, based on a warehouse on the East River in Brooklyn. Eagle Street is an open-air intensive market garden which supplies organic vegetables to nearby restaurants by bicycle, and operates a farmers’ market onsite during the growing season.
Other rooftop farms operate year-round, by erecting greenhouses and using aquaponic and hydroponic growing techniques.
Office and apartment blocks in a city like New York are inherently more suited for this type of production than similar buildings in Australia, because their roofs are already built to a higher load-bearing capacity because of snowfall. But that’s not to say that this type of ‘farming’ can’t happen in Australia. In fact recently I was lucky enough to visit what is one of the very first attempts to do it, at the Mesa Verde rooftop bar and cinema at 252 Swanston St, Melbourne. It’s the brainchild of Mr ‘WormLover’, Richard Thomas, and I’ll tell that story next time.
A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 4th May, 2013.
On Wednesday this week I was in Melbourne attending VicHealth’s ‘Sowing the Seed’ information day at the Melbourne Convention Centre.
VicHealth – the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation – is a semi-autonomous state government agency, funded through alcohol and tobacco taxes, that was established in 1987 with a mandate to promote good health for all Victorians. Over a number of years, VicHealth has funded significant research and food security projects that, cumulatively, have contributed to substantial increases in levels of awareness about these issues in Melbourne and regional Victoria.
In particular, VicHealth made a major strategic intervention with the launch in 2005 of a five-year, multi-million dollar project entitled Food for All. A primary objective of this project was to bring about policy change with regard to raising the prominence and priority of food security in council policy processes and documents. As I discovered last year while investigating urban and peri-urban agriculture in Melbourne, and its role in meeting climate change and food security challenges, the lasting impacts of the Food for All project can be seen in several Melbourne councils.
Sowing the Seed is a competitive grants program that VicHealth launched a few weeks ago. Up to $100,000 is available for the two best projects that address the ‘challenge question’:
“How do we improve fruit and vegetable supply and access, as well as develop and promote a culture of healthy eating in Victoria?”
Unlike Food For All, Sowing the Seed is aimed mainly at non-profit and community groups, as well as small businesses. Attendees heard from some leading Melbourne-based innovators already working in this field, such as Chris Ennis from CERES Environmental Park and Organic Farm in Brunswick, Andrew Twaits of the veggieswap.com.au website, Cassie Duncan of Sustainable Table, and Bruce Neal, co-developer of the FoodSwitch app at Sydney University’s George Institute.
Criteria for successful projects are centred around innovation, collaboration and utilisation of digital technologies. Andrew Twaits’ Veggie Swap is a good example of how all three can be combined. The concept is simple: to encourage backyard gardeners to share and swap their surplus. Andrew, a new backyard gardener, had attended a couple of the neighbourhood veggie swaps that have begun to emerge in different parts of Melbourne in recent years, and was inspired by the range of produce that was available, as well as the social possibilities of these sorts of gatherings.
But he also saw there were limitations: the relative infrequency of the swaps which meant that some produce might not last that long; the common experience of an over-abundance of a few items which meant that often you walked away with many bunches of, say, kale that you didn’t necessarily want; and the lack of any commercial element which meant that non-growers couldn’t buy produce.
So Veggie Swap was created as an online harvest swap to overcome these sorts of issues. Members can see who is growing what in their neighbourhood, and organise their own swaps when and where they want. Non-growers can connect with growers to purchase some of their surplus. And physical swaps can be supported by greater coordination amongst participants, so avoiding the glut of a few items.
Innovative, collaborative and making great use of new technology. Veggie Swap has members Australia-wide, and is even spreading overseas.
With over 100 creative and passionate people wanting to submit applications, there’s every chance the Sowing the Seed challenge will generate the next Veggie Swap, or Sustainable Table. As the song says, “From little things, big things grow…”
“We’re trying bridge the gap between traditional grassroot methods of growing food and city planning policies.
Sometimes, when people want to start a community garden, it can be hard to find a site or know who to talk to for access or planning approval. We’re helping to connect gardeners with empty land, and also with the right people in local government, to make sure everyone can work together.
Our website provides a map of actual and potential community garden sites around the city of Melbourne, Australia. A team including representatives from local government review potential sites and help make suitable land easier to find.
We provide ways for people to get in touch and organise around their community garden, as well as resources to help get started and make connections with land owners, local councils, and a whole range of resources.”
About the OFN:
“The Open Food Network is a community of people working together to build a free and open source platform that provides an open marketplace and supply network for local food, so that:
Eaters can “know their farmers” (where they are, how they farm, exactly what price they get) while still having wide choice and the ease and convenience of local pick-up and access.
Farmers can set their own prices, tell their own stories and choose who they trade with.
Ethical and diverse food enterprises rebuild local economies by supporting these farmers and eaters to distribute food”.
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
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.
