Food Tank recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Nick Rose, Executive Director at Sustain, about the health of Australia’s food system and his view on what are the key factors impacting on a healthy and resilient food system in Australia.
Food Tank (FT): What are some of the biggest opportunities to support Australia’s food system?
Nick Rose (NR): The single biggest opportunity lies in the field of education, with the introduction for 2017 of a paddock-to-plate food literacy curriculum, Food Studies, as an elective for all Grade 11 and 12 students in Victoria, Australia’s second-most populous state. As a result, in a few years, as many as 10,000 students could be taking Food Studies. These students will form a growing cohort of capable tertiary graduates who can inform and lead the development of good food policy at the local, state and federal government levels. If other states follow Victoria’s lead and introduce a Food Studies curriculum, the wave of food systems change generated by tens of thousands of highly informed and motivated youth will, I think, be irresistible.
Other significant opportunities include the embrace and resourcing of sustainable and regenerative forms of food production, as well as the expansion of new and fair distribution systems and enterprises, such as farmers markets and food hubs. Legislative and planning protections for Australia’s major food bowl areas close to capital cities are sorely needed. Governments at all levels have a crucial role to play in these and other necessary shifts.
FT: With increasing innovation in the food system and networking technologies, what are you most excited about?
NR: I’m excited about creating a dynamic, multi-layered, and searchable food systems directory that will, for the first time, reveal the scale and breadth of Australia’s growing food systems movement. The development of this directory is a project that Sustain is now working on, with the support of the Myer Foundation, and we’re looking forward to making it a reality in 2017.
FT: From your extensive travels, what are some successful innovations in other countries that could be applied in Australia to improve the food system?
NR: I have a strong personal interest in the great potential of urban agriculture to transform the food system as a whole, and I saw dozens of examples of innovations on my Churchill Fellowship visiting the mid-west United States, Toronto, and Argentina in July–September 2014. Those innovations include: community urban land trusts to make city and peri-urban land available for sustainable and intensive food production, education, and social justice; capturing large organic waste streams to support sustainable and highly productive urban agricultural systems; planning overlays and zoning to facilitate commercial-scale urban agriculture production; the multiplication of inner-city farmers markets with dedicated space for urban farmers; the establishment of small-scale artisanal food processing facilities to incubate food entrepreneurs; the facilitation of city-wide urban agricultural networks; and, the development of comprehensive and inclusive urban agricultural strategies that recognize, value, and support the work of urban farmers and the organizations they are embedded in.
FT: How do organizations and individuals get involved in supporting a healthy and resilient food system in Australia?
NR: There are so many points of entry for individuals, from growing some herbs and vegetables, to supporting a kitchen garden at your local school (as a parent) and, or, your local community garden (more than 500 across Australia). Also, shopping at your local farmers market (now more than 180 in Australia) and, or, fair food enterprise, supporting local and sustainable producers wherever possible. Major change is needed at the level of policy, legislation and regulation, and here organizations can make a difference by joining one of the many local and regional food alliances that are in existence around Australia, or forming one if it doesn’t already exist in your region.
FT: If you could change one thing in Australia to improve its food system, what would it be?
NR: The single biggest obstacle in my view is the concentration of economic and political power represented by the supermarket duopoly—Coles and Woolworths. In the past 40 years, the grocery market share of these two companies has more than doubled to 75 percent. Meanwhile, Australia has lost more than 40 percent of its farmers, with the average age of farmers now approaching 60 years, compared to 42 years for the workforce as a whole. These two trends are deeply connected. As a country, we need to confront our tolerance for oligopolistic concentrations of political-economic power, and the supermarkets present the most urgent task, regarding the long-term sustainability and fairness of our food system.
FT: What personally drives your work to improve Australia’s food system?
NR: My drive stems from years living in Guatemala (2000–2006). It was here my political consciousness was awakened on realizing that the deaths of 200,000 Guatemalans, mostly Mayan indigenous peoples, could be traced to the refusal by the United Fruit Corporation and the then U.S. government of President Eisenhower to countenance even the partial redistribution of its massive landholdings and excessive wealth. This story is all documented in Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the CIA in Guatemala. It was a book that changed my life.
I believe that in working to improve Australia’s food system, I am part of a huge and growing global movement to transform the world’s food system. I dedicate my efforts to the memory of those who died in the struggle for a fair Guatemala.
Australia loves to consider itself a foodie destination, but imagine a city where every inch of public space is covered in something you could actually eat. Urban agriculture expert, Dr Nick Rose, believes our cities are ready to feed themselves. Melissa Howard catches up with him only to discover his ideas aren’t that hard to swallow.
Dr Nick Rose, corporate lawyer turned fair-food scholar-activist, has a vision for our cities. He wants us to embrace urban farming to the point that when we walk down the street we’ll be able to spot food everywhere. “You’ll see fruit and nut trees, vegetables in planter boxes and on street verges,” he says. “People will be gardening, kids harvesting fruits and vegetables, and people sitting out in their front gardens sharing food, tips and recipes. Nobody is hungry, we don’t have malnutrition and food is a source of happiness, health and wellbeing.” If that sounds like a crazy pipe dream then, well, you haven’t met Dr Rose.
Rose is the executive director of Sustain: The Australian Food Network, where he sees his role as helping to promote the transition to a better food system. One that feeds all Australians well, cares for our land and ecosystem, and pays farmers fairly. A tall, sometimes-bearded man with a large grin, Rose is today wearing a t-shirt with a cauliflower and an eggplant on it, both holdings placards: “The future is vegetables” reads the cauliflower’s sign and “Occupy lunch” says the eggplant’s. “You can’t work in urban agriculture and not look a bit like a hippy,” I say. “Very true,” he agrees.
Rose is showing me around a huge shared site in the Melbourne suburb of Alphington where Sustain and Melbourne Farmers Market have received funding from the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation for a new project. The Alphington Food Hub will grow 500 square metres of food, host a weekly farmers market and a commercial kitchen, co-working offices, a farmers’ depot, and aims to give “everyone dignified access to good food at all times”.
I start by asking him what exactly is urban agriculture? “Urban agriculture, is the raising and growing of food by people in their own homes or shared spaces in, or close to, urban centres,” he says. It is, he tells me, community gardens, it is aquaponics, it is your elderly neighbour with nets over her peach trees and overflowing tomato produce she bottles once a year. It’s pots of herbs on the balcony of apartments, it’s keeping chooks and goats in the suburbs, and it has enormous benefits. “Anyone who walks around the city will know there are lots of empty blocks of lands that have a fence and weed growing out of concrete. Urban agriculture makes those spaces beautiful and makes them productive. It can provide employment opportunities for young people and provide markets to sell the produce to cafes.”
Rose believes that positive mental and psychological health benefits are an untapped benefit of urban agriculture. “When I was in Argentina I visited a mental health hospital where part of their therapy for people suffering from depression was participating in community gardening,” he says. “It certainly made a difference.”
Using food and urban agriculture to benefit our mental health could help confront the health crisis we are facing on a global level. The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES) released a report in October 2017, which stated that the current cost of the negative health impact of our current global food system is a staggering US$13 trillion – that’s one sixth of the GDP. If we add on the environmental negative effects, that’s another US$10 trillion.
“Every week we see stories in the media about the dysfunctional nature of our food and agricultural system and the impact it is having on our bodies, our communities, our children’s future, our eco systems and on our climates,” Rose says. “Any of the major challenges that confront humanity right now, so much of it comes back to the way we produce, distribute, consume and dispose of food. It’s a crazy situation when the way we feed ourselves is actually harming ourselves,” says Rose. “The need for change is screamingly obvious and urgent.”
So, if urban agriculture is the way of the future and the solution to so many problems then why are we not doing it? Why isn’t every centimetre of land growing stuff? “The biggest obstacle is easy access to land,” he says. “A lot of our most agriculturally valuable urban land is eaten up by sprawl, add in steep land prices for private land and government reluctance to make Crown- and council- owned land available to community groups as other barriers.”
Rose is critical of something he calls ‘land banking’. “Developers acquire land and then don’t do anything. It’s land that’s left vacant, sometimes for years, and it seems like a huge waste of resources and opportunity. Even if it’s going to be built into apartments or something, there’s no reason why in the meantime, it could be a year, a couple of years, it can’t be made productive.” Rose believes incentives, such as a rates discount, could be used to entice developers to let their land be used temporarily. I suggest, similar to the Daniel Andrew’s Victorian government’s legalisation to tax empty houses to force more homes onto the rental market, we tax blocks of land that sit vacant? “I like the way you’re thinking,” he laughs.
But for now, Rose is co-editing an anthology on Australian urban agriculture and recently held Sustain’s Urban Agriculture Forum in Melbourne. Rose hopes the [work he’s doing with the] forum will put Australian urban agriculture in the public eye and bring farmers, gardeners, researchers, city planners, policy makers and the public together with a united vision to make Australian cities and towns edible. “If we are really serious about a healthy population, if we are serious about climate change we need to support people to do this,” he says. “It’s just the right thing to do.”
Nick is the director of Sustain : the Australian Food Network, an organisation that he founded after having previously written a PhD thesis on the global movement for food sovereignty. He believes that it is important to understand the collective contribution of people growing edible gardens in cities all over the world and encourages us to see ourselves as part of a movement that goes far beyond our own backyard. He also believes that access to good food at all times is a human right and is fundamental to the dignity of a person. And he advocates for a participatory and democratic food system in which decisions are not made in boardrooms and the lobbies of governments.
Consistent with these beliefs, Sustain promotes collective action towards the development of new food systems for cities and is working towards acknowledgement by local, state and federal governments of a defined ‘urban agriculture’ sector in this country.
Nick has seen innovative models of urban agriculture, often using underutilised and vacant land all over the world, in South American countries such as Guatemala and Argentina, in North American cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago and Toronto, and in Jakarta. As a result, he sees much potential benefit in using vacant land in Melbourne to grow food
In Indonesia, Nick encountered La Via Campasina, an international peasants’ movement of small farmers and indigenous people which was then based in Jakarta. The organisation is currently working against hunger in Brazil, supporting peoples’ struggle for land in the Philippines, fighting for the rights of migrant workers in Europe, helping with the relief effort in Pakistan and always trying to ‘articulate a different visions and future for food and agricultural systems’ and to explore the potential and prospects for change in this area.
Here are some of the Melbourne initiatives that Nick and Sustain have been involved in.
The Melbourne Food Hub
Launched by Sustain in 2018, The Melbourne Food Hub at 2 Wingrove Street Alphington is an urban farm and classroom. It also leases to some small food-related enterprises (including Farmwall, Sporadical City Mushrooms and The Mushroomery).
This urban farm operates out of an abandoned vicarage on the corner of Plenty Road and Tyler Street in Preston. The land is planted out with veggies and is maintained by volunteers.
‘A ‘food is free’ initiative, all of the produce grown on site is distributed amongst the Oakhill volunteers and through local food relief initiatives.
The farm is connected with Preston Primary School which has a passata project using wicking beds at the site to grow tomatoes, as part of their Seed to Stomach Program.
By offering training in urban agriculture and peer-to-peer networking opportunities, Nick believes that the farm not only builds food systems literacy but also empowers community members with new skills and stronger social connections.’
What are Australian governments doing?
Nick says that local councils in Australia have been at the forefront of government support for the emerging urban agriculture sector, being, says Nick, “the level of government in Australia most responsive, accessible and connected to community”.
But, says Nick, so far State and Federal Governments have been harder to influence, still viewing urban agriculture as a hobby and a niche not big enough for them to deal with.
Nevertheless, he is encouraged that the Victorian Government, through its acknowledgement of the artisan sector in Victoria, is talking about a ‘local food economy’. Sustain also recently worked with Agriculture Victoria to map urban agriculture in Melbourne, Bendigo, Ballarat, and Geelong. Nick notes that the Covid crisis was an opportunity for the State Government to take notice of the sector and that it put together a ‘Food Relief Task Force’ to address the problems of families experiencing financial stress was committed to improving both the ‘access and quality’ of the food available.
So, to summarise, Nick argues that the local food movement is much broader than just growing healthy food – it is also about human rights, dignity and social justice and can be seen in a new political ecology at the global level responsive to the climate and poverty challenges we face globally.
I have been directly inspired by the visionary work of Dr Nick Rose, as he motivates all of us to celebrate and raise awareness of Australia’s urban agricultural movement. Nick is an excellent communicator, with an innate ability to empower those around him.
Together with South Eveleigh’s Aboriginal educator and environmentalist Clarence Slockee (Cudgenburra/Bundjalung), I can’t wait to help Nick spread his important message about food sovereignty within South Eveleigh and beyond.– Kylie Kwong
Dr Nick Rose on food sovereignty and fair food systems
Food sovereignty can be a tricky concept to wrap your head around. But it’s important that we do, says Dr Nick Rose, executive director of Sustain: The Australian Food Network. At its most simple, he says, food sovereignty is about creating a fair food system.”The idea of a fair food system is one that’s fair for farmers – they get a fair price for their produce. It’s fair for consumers – they get affordable food. And it’s fair for the land – it’s ethical and involves caring for country.”For too long, Dr Rose explains, Australians have taken their food system for granted, without thinking about where their food comes from, who grows it, or the impact it has on the land.
“We were left a legacy. When we came here as British colonisers, there was a food bowl here. Bruce Pascoe talks about this; there was a managed landscape that Indigenous people had been caring for, for tens of thousands of years. We’ve been here 240 years and we have, in many ways, devastated large swathes of the country.”
Nick Rose
His mission, through Sustain, is to design and build a fair food system and work alongside communities, councils and organisations to become empowered food citizens.
“We work with local and state governments to say we need to consciously shape our food and farming system and not just leave the dominant actors – the supermarkets in particular – to make all these decisions. They are making them with obvious interests at stake, responding to their shareholders. Those interests don’t correspond to the health and welfare of Australians, nor to the long-term sustainability of the Australian country … That’s what food sovereignty is all about. It’s about feeding people well and caring for the country.”
And why is that so important? Because food and diet is at the heart of good health, for a start. “The biggest burden on population health is diet now; it’s overtaken tobacco and alcohol as the biggest risk factor for chronic disease and early death. That’s a really, really big challenge,” says Dr Rose.
Food sovereignty is also critical in the fight against food poverty and ensuring future food security.
“The issues facing farmers have been decades in the making. We talk about farmers being price takers instead of price makers, which means that in the mainstream Australian food system, it’s the supermarkets that hold most of the power in terms of price setting and contractual arrangements.”
It’s a problem for the country in terms of food security because if all the farmers are getting older and all the young people aren’t farming, who’s going to grow our food in the future?”
And then, of course, there is climate change, which is making farming less viable and accelerating unsustainable forms of land management.
“These are really big, entrenched problems in the way that we relate to the country and manage the land. There’s a really big shift that has to happen, not just with Australian farmers but with the whole country. We need to understand this continent in a more profound way and engage in a process of dialogue and truth-telling with our First Nations peoples and understand what it is to live here and live here sustainably. Managing the land and caring for country and creating habitat for all the diverse creatures that make our life possible. Agriculture is such a big driver of land use change in Australia so this really comes back to the food system.”
But while the challenges are big, they are not insurmountable, says Dr Rose. And there is every reason to feel hopeful and optimistic about the future.
“The work I have been involved in over the past decade, I have seen a lot of things change. A lot more people have been involved – at a policy level, a lot of local governments are now getting involved. COVID was a bit of a wake-up call for a lot of people; a moment of rupture which is going to push things forward positively.”
It may be the case that the darkest hour is before the dawn. There are plenty of reasons to feel depressed and pessimistic but I choose to believe there is a lot of energy and momentum for change. The future is unwritten, it’s up to us to write it.”
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.
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.
‘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, 24th January, 2013
The traditional and conventional thing is to make resolutions on New Year’s Day, or shortly thereafter.
That makes perfect sense. Start the year off on a positive note, turn over a new leaf, and all that.
But resolutions can be made at any time. So why not make an Australia Day resolution? Something that each of us decides that we can do to help make this country a better place to live in, and leave it a better place for our kids.
My resolution is to keep working, in the ways that I can, for a fairer and more sustainable food and farming system for our region, and our country. So that our soils are regenerated, rather than degraded. So that our water tables are replenished, rather than depleted and polluted. So that our cities are full of food growing and producing areas, in schools, in childcare and aged care centres, in streets, parks, vacant lots and rooftops. In backyards, frontyards, and community gardens. So that everyone, no matter who they are or how much money they have in their pocket or bank account, can enjoy healthy, nourishing food, every day.
So that our farmers get a fairer deal, and are not up to their necks in debt. So that five Australian farmers don’t continue to leave the land every day. And so that our children will want to embrace farming and food production, and caring for the land, as a fufilling and dignified life choice.
Because what we have forgotten, in our modern, information age and consumer economy, is that any civilization, anywhere, is ultimately founded on agriculture. If we don’t get the food production right, if we don’t look after the land, the water and the men and women who do the work of producing the food, then we may as well forget about all the rest.
I think these resolutions chime with the sentiments of a great many Australians. In fact, I know they do, because last September, in my role as national co-ordinator of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, I was approached by the Australia Institute to include some questions in their regular national attitudes and behaviours survey.
These surveys go out to around 1,400 Australians, being a representative cross-section of men and women, city and country dwellers, different political affiliations, age groupings and so on.
We asked three questions in the October 2012 survey. The first was, ‘What top two measures should Australia adopt to ensure that sufficient quantitites of fresh, healthy and affordable foods are available to all?’, 86% nominated ‘Support local farmers to produce more’, and 63% nominated ‘Protect our best farmland from different uses, e.g. mining / housing’. 25% said ‘support people to grow more of their own food’, and a mere 5% nominated ‘import more of our basic food requirements’ as one of their top two choices.
The second question was, ‘How important is it to you that Australian family farmers and small-to-medium sized food businesses are economically viable?’. 62% said ‘very important’, and 30% said ‘quite important’. 2.3% said ‘not very important’ and a tiny 0.4% said ‘not important at all.’
Finally, when asked ‘What do you think should be the main two goals of Australia’s food system?’, a whopping 85% nominated ‘Promote and support regional / local food production and access to locally produced food’. 43.5% nominated ‘Achieve a globally competitive food industry and new export markets’, and 35.6% said ‘Ensure ecosystem integrity’.
Should any government or political party choose to take notice, these figures speak to a massive national consensus in favour of policies and public investment in regional and local food economies, and for support for our local farmers and food producers. Such policies enjoy twice the level of support of the goal of building ‘a globally competitive food industry and new export markets’.
Can you guess which is the primary objective of the Federal Government’s National Food Plan, due out shortly?
A version of this article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 9th June, 2012
A little over a month ago I introduced Angelo Eliades, and his permaculture food forest experiment in the Melbourne suburb of Preston. What Angelo has done embodies the wave of food self-sufficiency sweeping the inner north and west of Melbourne. This wave has been generated by individuals and community groups, but it’s increasingly being embraced by local governments, who are integrated policies on community gardening, edible streetscapes and urban orchards into their policies and strategic frameworks.
Angelo is remarkable for the methodical and systematic way he has built his backyard food forest, and in particular for his documentation of everything he’s done, from species selection, plantings, climate events and yields. All of this is available at his blog, deepgreenpermaculture.com.
Angelo built his food forest on the ‘leached and lifeless’ soil of his 80m2 backgarden during the winter of 2008. He calls his method ‘backyard orchard culture’. It’s based around the careful selection and strategic siting of a range of different tree species (Angelo has 30), interspersed with numerous varieties of berries (21, with multiples of several varieties), herbs (90) and other perennials, with some space left for annual vegies. Typically early, mid- and late fruiting varieties will be chosen, because ‘this gives extended seasonal cropping – instead of having one tree produce a glut of fruit all over a few weeks, you can extend your cropping [over several months].’
For Angelo, a key motivator is yield; his aim was to show what’s possible in a small space, the ‘typical suburban backyard’ in inner Melbourne. Remember, he wanted to counter the scepticism of folks in DPI and elsewhere who scoffed (and still scoff) at the idea that permaculture and backyard gardening can actually produce significant amounts of food.
Angelo Eliades in his garden in Preston, Melbourne
But he’s also very interested in resilience: in selecting species that can do well in a Melburnian climate that is behaving increasingly erratically, with damp and cool summers, short and mild winters, freak hail storms, and extremely hot days in early spring. Never mind the droughts, the fires and the floods.
So he and his colleagues are looking abroad and at other cultures and agricultural traditions, trying out species that you wouldn’t think of as forming part of the ‘normal’ Australian diet, if such a thing still exists. The multi-functional and ‘very highly productive’ Peruvian root crop yacón is one. “It’s very sweet, you can eat is straight, or stir fry it; you can also produce a natural, inulin-based sweetener out of it”, says Angelo.
The cold hardy babaco, a member of the paw-paw family, is another tree that features in his food forest. It’s also known as champagne fruit, because it tastes ‘like a lemon-sherbet pineapple-strawberry blend and it’s quite fizzy’. It also has medicinal properties, having four times the bromelain (anti-inflammatory) content of pineapples. And, Angelo told me, it ‘makes great smoothies, too’. Unfortunately none were ripe when I visited. He expects the tree to yield 50kgs per year when it reaches maturity at four years.
Angelo explains the strategic thinking that informs the selection of perennials, not annuals, in this type of orchard design:
“They’re more flavour-intensive, they’re far hardier, and they grow much better. We find all these types of plants, like French sorrel, and perennial spinach, things that are high-yielding and good tasting. And then we propagate them, and distribute them out through the local community, so everyone gets hold of these plants. The more we share them, the more we have of them.”
You can see here the outlines of a vision for a community-based resilient food future, which I’ll flesh out more in a later column. But what about his yields? Angelo has documented approximately 200kgs per year, with a roughly 60-5- 35 split between the trees, the berries and the vegies. All his trees are a few years away from maturity, – a third are not yet producing at all – so he thinks 500kg a year is quite feasible.
Even his current yield equates to 14 tonnes per acres. Average dryland wheat yields in Australia are in the 2 tonne per acre range, even after many many millions of dollars have been spent on research and genetics. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
