Category Archives: Resilience

Capitalism, Ecology, economics, Local and regional food economies, Resilience

COVID-19 and the Crisis of the Commodified Food System

Republished from www.sustain.org.au

History is being written right now. Are you authoring this chapter – or watching others do it for you?

“The COVID-19 health crisis has brought on an economic crisis, and is rapidly exacerbating an ongoing food security and nutrition crisis. In a matter of weeks, COVID-19 has laid bare the underlying risks, fragilities, and inequities in global food systems, and pushed them close to breaking point.

Our food systems have been sitting on a knife-edge for decades: children have been one school meal away from hunger; countries – one export ban away from food shortages; farms – one travel ban away from critical labour shortages; and families in the world’s poorest regions have been one missed day-wage away from food insecurity, untenable living costs, and forced migration.

The lockdowns and disruptions triggered by COVID-19 have shown the fragility of people’s access to essential goods and services. In health systems and food systems, critical weaknesses, inequalities, and inequities have come to light. These systems, the public goods they deliver, and the people underpinning them, have been under-valued and under-protected. The systemic weaknesses exposed by the virus will be compounded by climate change in the years to come. In other words, COVID-19 is a wake-up call for food systems that must be heeded.

The crisis has, however, offered a glimpse of new and more resilient food systems, as communities have come together to plug gaps in food systems, and public authorities have taken extraordinary steps to secure the production and provisioning of food. But crises have also been used by powerful actors to accelerate unsustainable, business-as-usual approaches. We must learn from the lessons of the past and resist these attempts, while ensuring that the measures taken to curb the crisis are the starting point for a food system transformation that builds resilience at all levels.

This transformation could deliver huge benefits for human and planetary health, by slowing the habitat destruction that drives the spread of diseases; reducing vulnerability to future supply shocks and trade disruptions; reconnecting people with food production, and allaying the fears that lead to panic buying; making fresh, nutritious food accessible and affordable to all, thereby reducing the diet-related health conditions that make people susceptible to diseases; and providing fair wages and secure conditions to food and farmworkers, thereby reducing their vulnerability to economic shocks and their risks of contracting and spreading illnesses.” (emphasis added)

COVID-19 and the crisis in food systems: Symptoms, causes and potential solutions

Communique by IPES-Food, April 2020

These opening paragraphs from the Communique released this month by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) provide an excellent summary of what the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed about national food systems and the globalised, industrialised food system.

Our food systems, global and national, are fundamentally inequitable and unfair. While we have watched in fascinated horror as the daily toll of cases and fatalities from COVID-19 mounts, we have forgotten – if we ever gave it much thought – the silent, constant catastrophe of preventable early deaths caused by poverty, including lack of access to adequate nutrition, as well as safe drinking water and basic health care. According to the World Health Organisation, 6.2 million children and youth under 15 died from these causes in 2018. That’s nearly 17,000 every day, or around 12 deaths every minute. Every minute, every day. It cannot be said in strong enough terms: in a world where a tiny fraction of humanity enjoys lives of almost infinite riches, our politics and economy stand indicted as morally bankrupt, insofar as death and suffering on such a vast scale is effectively accepted within this paradigm as ‘normal’.

Yes, the international community of nations – the United Nations – has signed up to the Sustainable Development Goals. Goal 2 is ‘Zero Hunger’, with targets to end hunger and all forms of malnutrition. However, those goals and targets do not address the fundamental imbalances in power and maldistribution of wealth that produce so much poverty, suffering and hunger amidst so much abundance. As Eric Holt-Gimenez, Director of the campaigning organisation Food First, wrote back in 2012, “We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People…And Still Can’t End Hunger”. Why not? Because, as he argued, ‘hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity’.

Nor, I would add, is it caused by natural disasters or pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating this basic inequality in global and national food systems. It has been said that ‘we’re all in this together’ because the disease doesn’t respect boundaries of class or nations. That is true – up to a point. It’s also the case that those most impacted in terms both of exposure to COVID-19 and to the economic crisis that government public health policy responses have caused will be those who are most vulnerable. Low income and casual workers; farm and migrant workers; grocery store and delivery workers – all of whom do not have the option of working from home. And many of whom are not being provided with adequate protective equipment as they go about their essential work. As a result, increasing numbers of such workers are becoming infected with COVID-19 and many are dying. This is further proof, if it were needed, of a society and economy where the requirements of corporations for profit trump the rights of workers to a safe working environment.

Demand for the services provided by foodbanks has skyrocketed in the United States, as an extraordinary 22 million workers filing for unemployment claims in the past few weeks has seen queues of thousands of cars up to 10 kms long at many pop-up emergency food distribution points in various states. In the UK, the reports of a survey conducted for the Food Foundation over 7-9 April found that ‘the number of adults who are food insecure in Britain is estimated to have quadrupled under the COVID-19 lockdown’. The most heavily impacted are the disabled, the unemployed, and those from Black and ethnic minority groups. In Australia, where last year an estimated 20% of the population experienced food insecurity, emergency food providers are experiencing very high demand in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis even as supplies diminish through the collapse of the hospitality sector as a result of the enforced lockdown measures. Meanwhile in the US, the plunging of demand from restaurants and hotels has left farmers with no buyers for their produce; and as a consequence, millions of tonnes of milk, eggs and vegetables are being destroyed or ploughed back into the soil even as queues for foodbanks stretch ever longer.

The IPES-Food report also references the fragility of the industrial food system through supply chain disruptions, which may be caused by the closing down of processing facilities because of infected workers, or by a severe shortage of migrant workers due to border closures. Prior to the outbreak of the crisis, the entire model of factory farming, with its thousands and millions of animals confined in small spaces, was a known breeding ground for pathogens, most recently the swine flu and the avian flu. The COVID-19 pandemic is indeed a ‘wake up call for our food system’, in the words of IPES-Food. And this is without even discussing the other destructive impacts of the food system, such as its role in climate change, biodiversity loss and alarming rise in diseases linked to diet.

The case for change is urgent and overwhelming. It has been urgent and overwhelming for many years. What has shifted is that the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic crisis has brought the sheer wastefulness and inequality of the global and national food systems into the sharpest relief. In 2016, the Right to Food Coalition, including Sustain, stated that Australian governments – at all levels – were ‘failing their legal and moral obligation to guarantee the human right to adequate food for at least 1.2 million people who don’t have access to safe, affordable and nutritious food’. The Right to Food Coalition noted that Australia, despite being one of the richest countries in the world, was actually regressing in terms of its fulfilment of this basic and universal human right.

That regression is accelerating in the contemporary crisis – but out of crisis also comes disruption and opportunity. In their communique, IPES-Food noted that the past several weeks have also been notable for a ‘remarkable upsurge of solidarity and grassroots activism’ in many places around the world. The crisis has thus ‘offered a glimpse of what new and more resilient food systems might look like’. One of the most extraordinary and wonderful examples cited in the communique is the state of Kerala in India, which has funded and supported hundreds of community kitchens run by women’s networks to provide nutritious and free meals to the most vulnerable, delivered directly to their doorstep. In Melbourne, a collaboration of social enterprises led by STREAT has established the Moving Feast initiative, aiming to source and provide thousands of free meals to those in need through a network of kitchens, councils, social enterprises and emergency food relief agencies. On a local level, Sustain is working with partners at the Melbourne Food Hub on a Food Security and Food Justice Drive to mobilise the power of urban agriculture in helping to make good  and fresh food available to those who need it most. We are supporting Community Gardens Australia and dozens of organisations and individuals who are calling on all governments across Australia to recognise community gardening and urban agriculture as an essential service, for the multiple benefits it provides to the Australian community – now more than ever.

History is being made as we speak. If you believe in the possibility of a better and fairer food system – and in a better and fairer world – now is the time to get involved in shaping it. We can and must do it together. Join us and let’s make it happen!

agroecology, Backyard Gardening, Churchill Trip 2014, Resilience, Self-sufficiency, Urban agriculture

People are starving for a real experience

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
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
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
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 at the entrance to the goat shed

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...
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
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
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
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
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.

Backyard Gardening, Coffs Coast, Resilience, Self-sufficiency

Veggie Swap arrives in Sawtell!

1 Comment

Veggie Swaps

According to sources, veggie swaps in Australia first took off in Brunswick, Melbourne, in 2004 with the CERES Urban Orchard Project. The initial idea was to map household fruit tree plantings in the inner city local government areas of Moreland and Darebin, and to encourage householders to gather surplus and unwanted fruit and bring them to a central venue on a regular basis to exchange for other produce.

From those humble beginnings the CERES Urban Orchard now takes place every Saturday, with residents from over 200 households bringing their veggies, herbs, fruit, backyard eggs and more to exchange.

CERES can hardly claim ownership of the concept of swapping backyard produce, of course. As older readers will no doubt recall, the swapping of produce across the backyard fence would have been commonplace fifty or sixty years ago, when the tradition of home food growing was commonplace.

But the backyard veggie garden is making a comeback. Consistent with a ‘DIY’ and collaborative ethos of a small but growing food movement in Australia, a loose network of semi-structured ‘veggie swaps’ is now emerging to help backyard gardeners meet like-minded souls and find a good home for their surplus parsley, kale and pumpkins.

By some estimates there are now over a dozen regular veggie swaps in Melbourne, ranging from the large and public swaps like CERES and the Yarra Urban Harvest which happens once a month on parkland bordering Alexandra Parade, to smaller neighbourhood swaps such as the Bulleen Art and Garden (BAAG) monthly swap, and the Kildonan Fresh Food Swap, also held monthly on Sydney Rd, Coburg.

Veggie swaps are also popping up in other places, such as West Croydon in Adelaide. Bellingen had a veggie swap for a number of years.

And on 23rd June the first veggie swap was held at Sawtell Public School, from 11.00 a.m. – 1.00 p.m. As one of the organisers I really didn’t know what to expect – we thought only a few close friends might turn up, with perhaps a few bunches of parsley.

Nick and Juliet - the organisers!
Nick and Juliet – the organisers!

But we – and school principal, Michael Cheers – were very pleasantly surprised. Over 25 people of all ages attending, including students with their parents, but also neighbours and residents from the surrounding streets.

The crowd gathers in anticipation...
The crowd gathers in anticipation…

 

And we were delighted to welcome Dave Pepper, who travelled all the way from Glenifer, and brought a ute full of ‘naughty pumpkins’ (naughty because they burst out of the compost and rambled all over the garden), along with buckets of sweet limes, mandarins, chokos, sweet potatoes and tumeric.

 

Other produce included organic bananas from Orara, a wide selection of herbs, many lovingly tied in bundles (thyme, rosemary, parsley, mint, coriander, holy basil, Vietnamese mint and lemon myrtle); comfrey, lemon grass, ginger, rhubarb, packets of rocket and lettuce, chicory and salad burnet. The school exchanged broccoli seedlings, propagated Geraniums, and native Dendrobium kingianum pups.

The produce is on display...
The produce is on display…

And to top it all we even had jars of homemade sauerkraut. Not to mention homemade cakes and cookies, with cups of tea and coffee.

The sun shone brightly as we chatted amongst the thriving school garden nestled amongst the gum trees. The produce was laid out on trestle tables and introduced by those who brought it, and then the ‘swapping’ begun: all present filled their baskets with what they wanted. There was plenty to go round and some to spare.

Chatting in the Sawtell public school kitchen garden...
Chatting in the Sawtell public school kitchen garden…

Everyone enjoyed themselves; and everyone went home to tell a friend about it. The next swap will be on Sunday 21st July, from 11.00 a.m. – 1.00 p.m. If you want more information, write to Juliet Thomas, jtinthegarden@gmail.com.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Farmers Markets, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies, New market mechanisms, Resilience, Small-scale farming

Local food production means resilience

Expanding trust horizons in Karangi

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 6th April, 2013

In February last year , Canada-based blogger Nicole Foss (www.automaticearth.com) spoke at the Cavanbagh Centre in Coffs Harbour, as part of her speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand. Nicole is now back in Australia for another speaking tour, though she won’t be visiting Coffs on this occasion.

In Coffs as elsewhere, Nicole offered her perspective on what she terms the unfolding ‘deflationary depression’, caused by the build-up of unsustainable debt levels throughout the global economy, combined with the anticipated impacts of dwindling supplies of cheap energy. Events in many countries in southern Europe would seem to offer early confirmation of her analysis.

Nicole Foss, aka Stoneleigh
Nicole Foss, aka Stoneleigh

Nicole also talked about the shrinking  ‘trust horizon’ that she believes will accompany a prolonged economic contraction. She argues that ‘relationships of trust are the glue that holds societies together’; and while in good times trust expands and the sense of ‘us vs them’ recedes, the opposite is true when hard times fall.

Putting this in a wider historical context, Dr Ben Habib of La Trobe University notes how the Chinese people coped with around 140 years of upheaval, revolution and war from the 1830s to the 1970s by ‘drawing on a cultural practice called guanxi (pronounced “gwan-shee”) which is about maintaining networks of ongoing personal relationships based on mutual benefit through reciprocal ties and obligations.” It was guanxi, according to Dr Habib, that enabled ‘greater social stability at the local level in China than would otherwise have existed during this turbulent period.’

Enter Sam Mihelffy, who migrated to the Coffs Coast with her husband Aaron and young family from Noosa five years ago. They bought a 34-acre property in Karangi, with established stands of citrus, pecans, macadamia, avocado and custard apples. They added some blueberries, apple trees, a vegie garden and most recently dragon fruit; and for the first time in their lives became farmers.

At the start, they weren’t ready for taking on this sort of life project. “It was mind-blowing”, says Sam. “We definitely moved in there with our hearts and not our heads, we didn’t really take on the concept of growing on such a large scale. It’s been a massive learning curve, and we’ve only really scratched the surface. But it’s something you evolve with, it’s really exciting.”

They diversified the farm by fencing it into three paddocks and adding a flock of 30 sheep, three alpacas, six ducks, a shetland pony and a pet pig. So was born the concept of ‘Me-Healthy Farm’ (a play on their name, Mihelffy), a ‘whole farm’ experience. Sam and Aaron opened the farm on Sundays for friends and the public to visit, buy fresh local produce at the farm shop (both from their own farm and nearby properties), and relax with a cup of coffee and some homemade cake, while kids could run around and feed the animals.

Sam Mihelffy at her Coffs Coast Growers Market stall
Sam Mihelffy at her Coffs Coast Growers Market stall

Providing that direct connection with farm animals was a big part of Sam’s motivation. “A lot of kids, even in Coffs Harbour, don’t have that experience, not even with the sheep”, says Sam. “A baby lamb being fed, they have no concept of that, so it’s really that we could show kids, hey look, this is what it’s like to live on a farm, come and have that experience for the day.”

And the concept proved very popular. “The fact that the kids could roam free was a great pull for parents”, Sam says.  “They got excited about the fact that they could chill out, the kids could feed the animals – there were so many different aspects. And get some fresh produce. It was a real experience – and we don’t have that happening any more [in modern society].”

Sadly though Sam and Aaron have had to pause it for the time being, because the amount of work involved in having their farm open every Sunday with a farm shop, was proving to be too much with a young family. But it’s time could come again – and given the need to strengthen our trust horizons – it might be sooner than later.

In Sam’s words, “This is where we should all be going. It’s really what we want to do. It wasn’t just about us – it was about our local community, [about] all the local products of the area. This is what we need to do, get back into that trading idea, someone specialises in garlic, someone specialises in ginger, someone’s doing beef, someone’s doing honey. If anything ever happens, we need to create that community where we can support each other.”

advocate, Collaborative cultures and networks, Corporate control of food, Democratic food systems, Fair Food systems, Food policy, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies, National Food Plan, Resilience, Self-sufficiency, Small-scale farming, Supermarket Duopoly, Urban agriculture

An Australia Day resolution

An Australia Day resolution

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?

advocate, Coffs Coast, Community gardening, Fruit growing, Land sharing, Permablitzes, Resilience, Self-sufficiency

Community-run edible streetscapes

Community Spirit alive and well in Sawtell

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 24th November, 2012

A quiet revolution is underway in Coffs Harbour and its nearby towns.

Supported by small grants from Coffs Council, first under the Local Food Futures Project and now via the ‘Our Living Coast’ Regional Sustainability Program, several primary schools and child care centres have established productive gardens for their children over the past year.

These intiatives build on longer-established school veggie gardens, such as those at Toormina Primary School and Casuarina Steiner School.

And now school veggie gardens are becoming edible streetscapes, with the planting of around 30 ctirus trees in two locations in Sawtell. First, on Friday 16th November, kindergarted and class 5 students from Sawtell Public School planted trees on the school’s boundary. Then, on Sunday 18th November, over 30 local residents of all ages worked for an hour and a half to plant lemonades, oranges, mandarins, lemons, limes, cumquats, grapefruits and blood oranges on the road verge off 18th Avenue, adjacent to the Richardson’s Park sporting oval. Thus was born the very first ‘Sawtell Community Citrus Grove’.

The Sawtell Citrus Orchard team!
The Sawtell Citrus Orchard team!

Both these initiatives were spearheaded by the Sawtell Healthy Homes community group, with the organising energy provided by Peter and Erika van Schellebeck. Advice on species selection and soil preparation came from Juliet Thomas, of the Coffs Harbour Regional Community Garden. Over the past year Juliet has worked with the school principal, Michael Cheers, as well as staff, students and parents, to set up a beautiful fruit and veggie garden inside the school.

 

 

Erika highlighted the social and community-building aspects of the citrus tree plantings. “The project has been a great opportunity for us to get to know our neighbours, and I hope that the grove will become a community space where neighbours meet and walkers and cyclists stop for a rest and some shade”, said Erika. “This pathway is very popular, and so we designed a pathway through the grove to encourage people to move through it and enjoy the space. We also designed a small circular space in the middle that hopefully will one day have a seat and table to encourage neighbours to meet up in the space – maybe for Friday night drinks.”

 

Sawtell Public School kids planting citrus trees
Sawtell Public School kids planting citrus trees

Planting and caring for fruit trees also brings clear health and educational benefits for children. “I hope that the nature strip planting at the school will build on all the work the school is already doing to educate the students about healthy eating, and growing fresh fruit and vegies”, said Erika. This is part of raising levels of food literacy amongst children – an understanding where food comes from, how it’s grown (and raised), what healthy eating involves, and the importance of composting food scraps, so that soil fertility can be maintained and enhanced.

Erika hopes that these initiatives in Sawtell will help inspire other groups of residents in other parts of Coffs Harbour and its surrounds to also get behind the push to make this region ‘edible’ – and for the Council to support them with small grants and making the paperwork easy.

“The grove already looks great – it has turned an unloved and unused piece of swampy land into a space for the whole community to enjoy, and, in a few years, to enjoy a wide variety of free citrus. I hope that the grove and school nature strip planting will encourage Council to consider the merits of growing food in public spaces.”

This work in Sawtell builds on the Bellingen Edible Streetsacpes project begun in 2011, as a collaboration of Northbank Rd Community Garden, the Bellingen Chamber of Commerce, Transition Bellingen, and with funding from the Local Food Futures Project. Bellingen Council has also embraced the spirit, with a raised veggie garden at the entrance to Council Chambers.

Further afield, the trail has been well and truly blazed by Yorkshire café owner Pam Warhurst and her army of volunteers in the market town of Todmorden, with the Incredible Edible Todmorden project.  In Pam’s words, “I wondered if it was possible to take a town like Todmorden and focus on local food to re-engage people with the planet we live on, create the sort of shifts in behaviour we need to live within the resources we have, stop us thinking like disempowered victims and to start taking responsibility for our own futures.”

Amazing things have been achieved in Todmorden, and they’re just getting started. Makes you wonder what’s possible for Coffs Harbour, with our climate, water and soils.

For more info on Incredible Edible Todmorden, search for Pam Warhurst’s TED talk on www.ted.com.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Community gardening, Resilience, Self-sufficiency, Uncategorized

Garden of Eden at Coffs Jetty

Garden of Eden – Garden by the Sea

A version of this article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 13th October, 2012

For the past 21 years, Wayne Kirkland and Mary-Ann Crowther have been living with as low an environmental footprint as it’s possible to have – on a yacht, travelling up and down the east coast of Australia.

For the last few years they’ve been coming back to Coffs, and now they’ve so fallen in love with the place, that they’ve taken over the lease for the Galley café and burger bar at Coffs Harbour jetty.

Wayne and Mary-Ann are passionate about sustainability and treading lightly on the earth, but it’s not about preaching to people. As Wayne told me, ‘I live by the philosophy of just show people how to do it’.

And now, with the help of Steve McGrane, Matt Downie and some willing volunteers from the Combine St community garden, Wayne and Mary-Ann are showing their customers, and the people who work, live near and visit the Jetty, just how amazingly productive a 6m2 veggie garden can be.

Steve McGrane (left) and Wayne Kirkland

 

This wasn’t a case of turning the first sod. Rather, it involved clearing out some pretty massive rocks, on the café side of the breakwater. Underneath was some gravel and fairly barren soil, laced with salt spray.

But Wayne wasn’t deterred, because he knew Steve had a very cunning plan. After years of research and trial and error in his own gardens, Steve has developed a special no-dig garden, layered lasagne-like with ’17 secret herbs and spices’, as he likes to say.

Actually, they’re not so secret. They include lucerne; sugar cane mulch; blood and bone; bags of comfrey, tansy and other leaves;  various manures; molasses (‘very important for the microbial action’); wood chip; and mineral rocks (calcium and phosphate). With the exception of the lucerne, everything’s organic.

The Garden by the Sea – early stages

The results are truly impressive. The garden is barely six weeks old, and Wayne and Mary-Ann have been eating out of it for three weeks. As Steve explains, the porosity of the mix, and the rapid action of the microbes in breaking everything down and making the nutrients available, allows the roots to grow very fast, producing very rapid growth above the ground. More than that,  the nutrients ‘aren’t leached out of the system, because the microbes hold them in suspension’.

The end result is both a super-healthy and productive garden right now; and even better, it ‘will be more fertile at the end of this growing season that it was at the beginning.’ That’s something, because what’s already growing is impressive enough: rows of broccoli, beetroot, kolrabi, lebanese cress, leeks, onions, chillies, tomatoes, a pumpkin vine, two varieties of sweet potato, several types of basil, parsley, lettuce, chinese greens, choko, taro, kumara, and flowers for companions.

The Garden - up close and personal!
The Garden – up close and personal!

The food tastes sensational, and because it’s so rich in minerals, it is very nutrient-dense.

In the next phase, Wayne will put in native wildflowers and grasses, ‘to attract the birds and bees’. He’s already got a resident blue tongue.

As for the salt, everyone told Wayne he could never have a veggie garden by the sea. He’s proved the doubters wrong, through ‘a bit of love and care, and keeping the salt spray off it – I just come and gently hose the plants down when there’s been a bit of spray, and that keeps them fresh.’

Wayne and Mary-Ann are delighted with the garden, and so are their customers. ‘People love it, they sit here and look at the plants, and talk about it.’ Some people have even anonymously put in plants after closing time: Wayne has arrived in the morning to find chillies and tomatoes that weren’t there before. And in the few short weeks of its existence, it’s already creating a web of relationships, so that it can truly be regarded as a ‘community garden’ in its own right.

One of the most satisfying things for Wayne is that he can now send all the green waste from the café to the community garden, where Matt has established an extra worm farm to cope with it all. In return, Matt takes plants to the ‘garden by the sea’, and Wayne now gives him extra seedlings. Community garden volunteers will help out with extensions to the café garden. And Wayne is even getting donations of plants from other yacht owners; and encouraging people to pick parsley.

For Wayne and Steve, this garden is about living their vision: ‘We both have the philosophy that we should be planting every square inch that’s available. Food is essential to life, and if people got more involved in the backyard garden…That’s what stitched communities together, a generation ago. But today, you buy everything from the supermarket. A lot of young people don’t know what fresh food is, they’ve never seen it”, says Wayne.

“This is trying to show people that fast food doesn’t come from MacDonalds. This is fast food. I can take this out of the garden and put it on your plate in five minutes. That was the essence of the project, to shift people’s understanding, and thinking, of what you can do with a garden.”

If the last few weeks are anything to go by, Wayne and the team behind this garden have already achieved a lot.

advocate, Chefs and restaurants, Coffs Coast, Local and regional food economies, Resilience

Local Food Film Festival 2012

Local Food Film Festival returns to the Coffs Coast

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 4th August, 2012

“The reality is, if we don’t relocalize our food system over the next decade, you or your children will be lining up with your ration ticket at Coles, with your government allocation of what you can get through the centralised food system. Because that food system is going down. All of that system is extremely dependent on cheap energy, and the era of cheap energy is coming to an end.”

Food Inc - one of the seminal food politics films
Food Inc – one of the seminal food politics films

These are the words of permaculture co-founder David Holmgren, speaking in prophetic tones at the start of the challenging documentary Anima Mundi, which is one of two feature films in the 2012 Coffs Coast Local Food Film Festival. Also featuring leading thinkers and writers from Australia and abroad such as John Seed, Vandana Shiva, Stephen Harding, Noam Chomsky and Michael Ruppert, Anima Mundi shines an uncompromosing lens on our current trajectory, and then focuses on the myriad community-driven initiatives that are directly raising levels of sustainability and resilience.

Informed by the principles and practices of permaculture and Gaian philosophy, Anima Mundi tells the stories of ordinary people educating themselves, and working together to create their vision of a better and more sustainable future. At the same time, it doesn’t pretend that there are any ‘easy solutions’ to the challenges we face.

“Eating food that’s locally grown, sustainably farmed, buying it in a farmers’ market, eating it with your family and friends – this isn’t a fad. This is what people have been doing since the beginning of time. It’s about our humanity. It’s a civilising ritual, it gives meaning to life. Food is part of everybody’s experience. It’s the pause in the day, when it’s possible to reflect, and share.”

This is US chef Alice Walker speaking in the Festival’s second feature film, Ingredients. This documentary tells the story of the partnerships between chefs and farmers that, over the past three decades, have given rise to the burgeoning local food movement in the US, which, as we now know, has now spread rapidly across the English-speaking world. For those who want to know where the local food movement came from, what it’s become, and where it’s going, this is the film to watch.

Alongside these feature films, the Local Food Film Festival will also screen a selection of locally-made films from budding documentary makers on the Coffs Coast. Last year six outstanding entries were submitted, telling stories of food-based sustainability from around the Coffs Coast. The winner, The Bushman of Tamban, made by Fil Baker, narrated the recovery of knowledge of bush tucker and native foods in the Nambucca region. “This film has gone on to be shown at many venues, and is featuring at Adelaide’s From Plains to Plate’s Feast of Film this year”, festival coordinator Jocelyn Edge of the Nambucca Valley Local Food Network told me.

The Festival is now calling for entries into this year’s short film competition, along the theme of ‘local food creates healthy communities’. Thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Coffs Coast Growers Market, Nambucca Valley Council, Bellbottom Media and Kombu Wholefoods, a $1,000 first prize is offered for the best entry, and the top three short films will be screened at the Festival. All entries will be published online.

“Through the short film competition we are asking people to find inspiring local food stories and projects that are happening up and down the Mid North Coast, and we want to be able to bring these to a wider audience,” said Jocelyn. “We particularly encourage primary or high school students to submit entries.”

Related articles
advocate, Backyard Gardening, Resilience, Self-sufficiency, Urban agriculture

Angelo Eliades – Practising Permaculture in Preston

1 Comment

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
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?

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

The rise of the dachniks

2 Comments

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

The rise of the dachniks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related articles