Today, along with about fifty other like minded folk, I attended the 1st Sydney Urban Agricultural Forum at Sydney City Farm in St Peters.
Organised by Dr Nick Rose from Sustain (www.sustain.org.au) and MC’d by the almost immortal man without an off button, Costa Georgiadis.
The Forum was designed to be a celebration of the fantastic work underway across Sydney to strengthen the city’s food system in face of mounting and serious challenges. The urban agriculture scene needs to be strengthened in order to bolster the fragility of current supply chains.
Great to see so many people in one place interested in this becoming a reality. Walking through the densely populated Inner West after the event brought home the gravity of enabling the city to feed itself.
The event was held in collaboration with City of Sydney and was attended by Council Sustainability Officers from various councils, representatives of OzHarvest, Vegepod, Waterups, FoodMap, Sydney Edible Garden Trail, Pocket City Farms and the odd punter trying to grow their own food and make sense of it all – like me! The speakers included Nick Greenwich MP, Clarence Slokee, Lauren Flaherty (City of Sydney), Belinda Thackery (Sydney City Farm), Brendan Moore (Royal Botanic Gardens Community Greening Program) and Chris Sara (Pocket City Farm).
There is some great work being done from people in all walks of life, which is greatly reassuring.
I think it was Simon from Vegepod who mentioned that it is all well and good having the great minds in the room coming together to try and work a solution, but asked how we get the masses on board too? This comment cast a spotlight on the glaring lack of top down leadership on the issue from the Federal Government.
The post event walk through the streets got the brain into gear and it churned out a few ideas so I thought I would share them here.
My personal trip down permaculture lane started off with me just wanting to grow enough food to feed the family. As we all know too well this expands into learning how to compost, feed the soil, harvest, propagate and sharing/ preserving the harvest. Oh and you pick up a few Wombling skills in making use of the things others leave behind in the bargain. Move on further down the lane and I’m taking waste from neighbours, processing my own humanure, growing my own mulch, food for the chickens and making the chooks do more of the compost and weeding chores.
In short I’m constantly exploring ways to close my home and garden loops within the boundaries of my own property or immediately locally, with less effort from me and less reliance on commercial earth killing supply chains.
To get to this point I’ve been on a very steep learning curve for seven years and counting and I’m still not producing close to what my family eat.
Two big realisations for me are that growing food
• Is a lifestyle change
• Does not make money
You do it because you love it and it really ticks the mental boxes to share your excess. Your ‘farm’ becomes your passion and a place you prefer to be in. I once heard David Holmgren say something like – why do we pay so much money for a house and then spend all our time working to get away from it?
I am not sure if there was one person in the Forum today that soley grows food for their income. Everyone is doing multiple side hustles such as tours and educational workshops/ courses. Putting it bluntly – growing veggies does not alone pay the mortgage.
Surely if we are to get urban agriculture feeding a reasonable portion of the city’s consumption my home scenario would need to be replicated hundreds and hundreds of times over so that there are micro farms and community gardens in every suburb – as well as taking over green spaces and copying Pocket City Farms excellent example.
The two factors I feel have the biggest impact on achieving this are:
• Education
• Localisation
Education
In order for urban food production to be doable everywhere we would firstly need education that suits the purpose. How good would it have been if you left school already knowing where to plant a citrus tree?
I’m not a massive fan of our primary and secondary schooling system now that my two kids are at the pointy end of it. This is no fault of the teachers, but the system in which they have to operate. I just can’t understand how ninety nine percent of my generation and now my kids generation are leaving school with zero basic food growing/ foraging skills – we all need to eat!! What on earth is more important to learn?
My kids are probably not destined for university, but instead crave opportunities to apply what they are learning to real life, and the sad fact is that quite a bit of what they learn has nothing to do with that. My daughter loathes school, but is almost managing the local pizza shop in the evenings and loves it…. Maybe not a career for life, but a great introduction into how to run a family owned business before she has even finished year 10.
So, to remedy the lack of food growing skills how about every primary school student ending up with a Permaculture Design Certificate when they graduate? After two generations of this it would be reasonable to conceive that a vast proportion of society would be slightly more frugal and rigorously understand what is costing the earth and what isn’t. There would surely be a large shift in more people growing their own at home.
Localisation
My local organic farmers market is once a week, 5km away from where I live – I walked it once just to see what it would be like. A three hour 10km round trip with 12kg of shopping on the way home!! It isn’t convenient to sell or swap my excess produce there because I wouldn’t have enough.
Whilst a reasonable proportion of the younger population are earning their green fingers each suburb could develop its own centre for various services. I can’t think of a better place for this than the school itself. The buildings are put to use whilst no-one is there and the kids grow up right in the centre of a functioning, thriving community hub learning about the local services which could include:
• Processing green waste (including wood chip) into compost that residents could all take for free.
• Bulk liquid ‘weed tea’ fertilizer and worm wee.
• Produce and artisan goods market
• Repair café
• Tool library
• A swap hub – for anything, whitegoods, plants, clothes, sporting gear, baby stuff etc.
I guess changing the urban food scape really involves changing us as people. Some little tweaks by the educational powers that be on how our kids view the world will have far reaching effects that we won’t be around to get the satisfaction of.
In the meantime it is up to all of us to support local community organisations, keep growing and fair sharing to benefit everyone we know and advocate change by doing. Say it loud and say it proud – I am an Urban Farmer!
