Australia: Bring on the urban farm, but don’t deign to usurp nature
Food security, food equity, food miles, social engagement, mental health, growing consumer preference for local, land-water scarcity: urban agriculture has many drivers.
By Elizabeth Farrelly
Brisbane Times
Nov 20, 2020
Excerpt:
Urban agriculture has been dreamed of for years – probably ever since my grandfather stopped being able to grow everything the family ate or drank in the big backyard of a small state house. But regulators are slow to catch up.
For one thing, it implies a whole new take on city planning. Canberra always makes me itch to fill its gaps – not with cookie-cutter high rise, as it’s now doing, but filling every mile-wide median strip and verge with tight little urban villages and bustling markets. The myriad ideas of the food-nerds, however, flooded this dreaming with new possibilities. The light rail on Northbourne was suddenly flanked with fruiting pears and feijoas. The new but empty student residences were stacked with the succulent green leafage of vertical farming. Aquaculture in the ponds; bok choy and silverbeet lined every verge.
To me, it makes some kinda sense, for the first time, of the otherwise loopy bush-capital dreaming. Canberra is essentially one very long long paddock.
But these, the traditional community garden or even guerilla planting, is just one end of the spectrum. At the other are 30-storey stacks of lettuces that never see sunlight or soil in the frighteningly efficient system known as “aeroponics”. Keynote speaker Henry Gordon-Smith, whose Brooklyn-based company Agritecture works across 25 countries, explained this technology gradient in terms of context and desired impact.
If healthy food with community bonding is your aim, sure, go community garden. One example is the remarkable Canberra City Farm in Fyshwick. This patch of former dairy country deploys purpose-specific teams for orchards, vineyards, wicking beds, compost and propagation to produce organic eggs, honey, grapes and a huge range of fruit and vegetables. It regenerates the soil and makes a beautiful place, where a hard afternoon’s compost-lesson can be rewarded with a champagne picnic in the orchard’s dappled light.
