Michael Green

Writer and producer

Farming on the fringe: Q&A with Anna Meroni

In Environment on

Anna Meroni, from Nutrire Milano (Feeding Milan), visited Australia recently for the On the Edge forum, run by Village Well.

Why should people care about agriculture on the city fringe?

I AM a designer – I believe that people really understand something when they are touched by the issue, not because of rational drivers. If I have to convince someone that the food produced just close to the city is important, I would say that it’s a matter of wellbeing and wellness of the whole environment. Frankly speaking, sometimes there is no added value in quality, but it’s better because of the story of that food. The more green you can keep around the town, the better the air and the quality of your life because you can find a place nearby you really enjoy.

I’ve often been asked by people, ‘What changes in reality my body if I eat an organic tomato while I’m breathing the air of a town which is very polluted?’ Okay, nothing changes – it is not the tomato that will save your life. But the more you eat sustainable things the more you increase the possibility for your town to be less polluted.

Tell me about the project you’re working on?

In 2015 we will host the international expo in Milan and the tile of it will be ‘Feeding the planet, energy for life’. Over a bottle of wine with the people from Slow Food, we said this is a huge problem because it will be an opportunity for Milan to build more instead of less.

We decided to design another scenario for a sustainable Milan in 2015 where the biggest possible quantity of food consumed in town is produced around the town. We named this project ‘Feeding Milan, energy for change’.

In the south of Milan there is a safeguarded agricultural area, which is around 50,000 hectares. You can build on a percentage of the space, but you have to cultivate the land.

We said let’s start from the good practices we find and help them grow, because emulation is a very powerful tool. You cannot do things from scratch. Find the best, connect the best and try to support them to become leaders of bigger transformation.

We started by opening up a farmers’ market following the rules of the Slow Food markets. It was the first in Milan. We decided to open an ideas-sharing stall where we do a design activity with producers and visitors, and we use it as a first contact point for new ideas to come about.

We try to create a broader range of services for people who want to buy local food and for producers who want to deliver local food. It’s too much for farmers to work at the market more than once a month – for the rest of the time you need to find other solutions which are not the traditional retail system, like a food box for delivery at home, or pick your own like you have here for strawberries, or collaborative supermarkets. This is more or less the philosophy: try to widen the scope of zero mile production and consumption.

How easy will it be to scale up these kinds of schemes?

We all believe very much strongly in the power of bottom-up initiatives. In Milan, through these small initiatives we’ve been able to create a huge pressure from the public. But what is very clear to all of us is that new business models are needed, where there is a mix of public and private initiatives, profit and not-for-profit, consumers and producers.

The rules of the public policy have been made according to the traditional way of retailing food, with companies, big retailers. What we are seeing now is that there are these purchasing groups such as community-supported agriculture, initiatives led by consumers or by farmers, which are in between profit and not-for-profit, which have struggled to find a formal identity according to the law. They are often categorised as black market because they don’t find any other way to exist. We need policies to encourage these brand new ways of making social business. They must have a legal framework to exist and operate otherwise we won’t really evolve. This is first.

I’d like to see brand new protection policies. So far we have seen that food policy has protected certain kind of situation and institution: the big multinationals. But there are other places that need to be protected. It would create a lot of discussion and debate, but I’d like to see certain fragile economies protected with special rules, and with a clear ethical distinction between good and bad farming practices.

Watch a video of Anna’s presentation here.

Buy Nothing Christmas

In Greener Homes on

What would the festive season be like without the bells and whistles?

ONE way of preparing for Christmas involves buying new things – a lot of new things. But there are other ways too.

The New South Wales Uniting Church runs a website called What Would Jesus Buy?, which contains articles and links – both spiritual and secular – on the matter of consumption. As the website’s coordinator, Stephen Webb, explains, its tagline is “Stop the shopocalypse”.

“For Christians, this is the time of advent, so there’s lots of thinking about the way we lead our lives,” he says. “How can we use our time and income to do something useful, rather than just contribute further to the consumer culture around us?”

This year, with scientists’ warnings about climate change continuing and the global financial system seeming ever more volatile, there’s a growing chorus for a different kind of Christmas.

In the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement has not only spread throughout the country, but also to Santa’s sleigh, with campaign called Occupy Xmas. It draws upon Buy Nothing Christmas, a longer-standing initiative complete with amusing, snarky posters (“Santa Came, Jesus Wept”).

On the environmental front, Mr Webb says the relationship between consumption and climate change is clear, but can be minimised with careful thought. “You can still buy certain things and have a good time without contributing to injustice, pollution and global warming,” he says. “And as we celebrate, we can think about what we’re celebrating and what is of value to us.”

If you’re looking for hints about alternatives, Environment Victoria has put together a festive season guide, which contains gift ideas and tactics for reducing waste and needless expense, from wrapping paper to table decorations.

“Christmas is a time of incredibly high consumption, in so many ways,” says Michele Burton from Environment Victoria. “There are all the presents, wrapping and cards, but there’s also all the food, and typically, a lot gets wasted.”

Meat – especially red meat – leaves a hefty mark on greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity. “We’re not suggesting you go vegetarian for Christmas, but it’s a good idea to reduce your meat consumption,” she says.

For more detailed information about the footprint of your yuletide food, see the Ethical Consumer Group’s guide to Christmas, and its new Guide to Ethical Supermarket Shopping, updated for 2012.

When it comes to gifts, Ms Burton says families could opt for a Kris Kringle, rather than buy for everyone; make or bake their own presents; or give experiences rather than things.

“If you do buy something, choose items that will last – for example, wooden toys will last much longer than plastic ones,” she says.

If the choices appear too complex, keep the details in perspective by focussing on bigger issues around the home, such as buying GreenPower, limiting consumption overall and avoiding flights. The eco-savings of obsessing over re-used wrapping paper will be well and truly shredded if you jet to Bali on Boxing Day.

On that note, Ms Burton says the holiday season is a fine time to establish patterns for the year to come. “You can look back on the year you’ve had and the choices you’ve made, and aim for your Christmas to reflect the way you want to live,” she says.

Read this article at The Age online

Farming on the fringe

In Architecture and building, Environment, The Age on

What will we reap when agriculture moves away from town?

IF you drive through Clyde, on the south-eastern outskirts of Melbourne, you’ll see the old farms where a new, very different, crop is being sown.

Next to the market gardens and green paddocks still lined with windbreaks are expanses of soil dotted with earthmovers and giant concrete pipes. On these properties, houses will become the next harvest of the land.

Melbourne’s urban growth boundary was extended last year and is under review yet again. In May, the state government appointed an advisory committee to recommend “logical inclusions” to the boundary in seven municipalities on the city’s fringe.

In Clyde, the City of Casey opposes any further extension (pdf), and argues instead for “logical exclusions” from last year’s ruling. In its submission to the committee, it stated that the boundary has already exceeded a sustainable limit.

Kathryn Seirlis, the council’s manager of strategic development, says the current and former governments haven’t given enough weight to the role of agriculture in the region, especially in creating employment and improving health and wellbeing.

“We think it’s critically important to protect viable, high value agricultural land for the future communities of Casey and beyond,” she says.

The controversy over Clyde fits within a larger debate about farming on the city’s fringes. The issue was the subject of a recent forum on “peri-urban agriculture”, coordinated by placemaking consultancy Village Well.

Trevor Budge, associate professor of planning at Latrobe University, argues good soil should be managed like any other resource. “If you found a supply of building sand or gravel, you wouldn’t just build over the top of it, you’d treat it as a finite resource,” he says.

“From everything we know – whether it’s climate change, peak oil, energy costs or transport costs – having productive agricultural land close to the city makes us more resilient for the future.”

Mr Budge says constant shifts and reviews have turned the urban growth boundary into a “zone of impermanence”. Many farmers and landowners outside expect to be re-zoned inside, and don’t keep investing in their land.

It’s a problem acknowledged by the Growth Areas Authority, the statutory body charged with coordinating the development of new suburbs.

“One of the problems in the past has been short term, knee-jerk reactions, with huge numbers of people all expecting make a lot of money by being [re-zoned] in the next new residential area,” says Peter Seamer, CEO of the authority.

He says the latest round of reviews is different, and will set aside enough residential land for decades to come. “The processes we’re going through will be sorted out by government in the next few months and they’ll set a very clear direction for the next 25 years,” he says.

Mr Seamer says that although “no one likes to see a reduction in farming land”, urban growth comprises a very small proportion of Victoria’s total farmland.

“The growth has got to go somewhere,” he says. “There was a crisis in the middle of last year, when prices for land went up very steeply because there was a shortage of supply, particularly in the Casey area.”

The state government has not yet released the findings of the logical inclusions process.

But the Casey council has foreshadowed using its planning tools to support farming within the growth boundary, even if its submission is rejected. Together with the Cardinia and Mornington Peninsula councils, Casey has been working on a plan to establish the Bunyip Food Belt, a zone of intensive agriculture that would draw on recycled water from the Eastern Treatment Plant.

Mr Budge accepts that Australia isn’t running short on agricultural land, but says proximity to the population makes all the difference.

“Growing food is part and parcel of the way cities operate. The better metropolitan strategies around the world make agriculture one of the core social and economic components of their plans – not something that sits off the edge and can be pushed further out,” he says.

As well as the added security afforded by a short food-supply chain, he says peri-urban farming also improves wellbeing. “Having contact with nature and an understanding of where food comes from is good for us socially and psychologically. It maintains the contact with the real world that we’ve had for 10,000 years of human history.”

Trading herbs for suburbs

IT’S the end of a normal day on the farm at Australian Fresh Leaf Herbs, in Clyde, just beyond Cranbourne.

While the packing workers tidy the cool room before heading home, banker-turned-farmer William Pham gestures at the rows of hydroponic basil in front of him. “We recycle our water, so we need one-sixteenth of the water for conventionally grown basil,” he explains.

Together with his business partner Jan Vydra and their 60 casual and full-time staff, Mr Pham produces and packages 70,000 bunches of herbs each week.

They began operations here in 2008, but their farm was included in the revised urban growth boundary in 2010. They’re looking for land elsewhere. “When we bought here, this road was empty,” Mr Pham says. “Now you can’t recognise it. The development has happened much faster than I expected.”

Mr Vydra, who was recently named the 2011 Young Australian Farmer of the Year, says he wants to stay within 40 minutes of the city. That kind of proximity is better for business: it’s easier to find workers, supplies are cheaper and more accessible, and the cost of transporting the produce is lower.

But once the boundary expands, property values rise and rates increase. “That’s what happens – you have to sell up. It’s beautiful soil around the whole area at Clyde. People have been farming it for 100 years and they have to move,” he says.

“There’s an economic benefit – we get much more money for our property – but as a community, we lose some really fertile soil and they’re going to put slabs on top of it.”

Although he can see the dilemma for planners, who want to provide affordable housing, he’s worried about food security as older farmers retire. “We need to figure out what’s being produced here and how we’re going to shift it elsewhere to make sure we keep producing food for our people.”

Mr Pham is ambivalent about the change: he says small-time farmers will disappear, but doesn’t think there’ll be any impact on shoppers. “A lot of the smaller growers will sell up, make their money and have an easier lifestyle.

“We spent a lot of money on this place, so what the heck – we may as well do it again. We’re too young to retire. We just have to move further out.”

Read this article at The Age online and watch Trevor Budge’s talk on the importance of peri-urban agriculture in Australia, at the On The Edge Forum.

Edible weeds

In Greener Homes on

That plant you despised could become your dinner

ADAM Grubb makes a beeline for a plant clumping in the mulch, behind a park bench, next to the barbeque area.

“This is mallow,” he explains, “which is related to the marshmallow plant and to okra. You can eat the leaves, the seeds and the flowers. It’s eaten widely around the world, especially in the Middle-East.”

We’re in a small, typical park in Brunswick. Mr Grubb, from Very Edible Gardens, runs regular edible weeds walks, in which he traces an extraordinary, wholly overlooked fact.

“The vast majority of herbaceous annual weeds – the most common plants that pop up without invitation – are edible. And a lot of them are medicinal,” he says.

Most can act as substitutes for our normal leafy greens. Mr Grubb also suggests blending them with fruit to make green smoothies.

But it so happens that today in the park, we find mallow, with its seeds, and salsify, a starchy root that looks like a white carrot. “They could be the foundational parts of a meal,” he explains. Nearby we identify five more edibles, side-by-side: milk thistle, dock, dandelion, wild lettuce and cleavers.

At the moment, Mr Grubb is up to his elbows researching edible weeds for a book he’s writing with Annie Raser-Rowland, who teaches workshops on the subject at CERES Environment Park. (While you wait for theirs, see this booklet by Pat Collins.)

Facts about all kinds of plants roll off his tongue – like these about cleavers: “Also known as sticky-weed or goosegrass, it’s in a lot of ancient medicinal books as a lymphatic stimulator. Pliny the Elder said it’s good to improve one’s lankness and to keep from fatness,” he says. “You can also make a coffee substitute out of it.”

If that sounds obscure, here’s something more straightforward. “Remarkably, a large percentage of these wild plants are more nutritious than spinach,” he says. “They’re higher in vitamins A, C and E, higher in omega-3, and much higher in anti-oxidants.”

Aside from the nutritional benefits, there’s a practical plus to all this weed-eating. “Learning to see the benefits of these plants is revelatory, because it means you have to do less work in the garden. The only definition for a weed is a plant out of place. We can do the weeding in our minds,” he says.

Mr Grubb offers a word of caution, however: some are poisonous. The Greek philosopher Socrates was sentenced to death by drinking a cup of hemlock, which is common around Melbourne. “Don’t go eating anything you haven’t identified beyond doubt,” he says.

Ms Raser-Rowland says that from an ecological perspective, many weeds help repair damaged land. “They can stabilise and rebuild topsoil, trap nutrients and slow water movement,” she says. “In doing that, they create homes and food for birds, insects and other animals.”

She says the good things about backyard vegie patches, such as reducing transport and packaging, are magnified in the case of weeds.

“If these plants can produce food in our urban areas, with no need for labour or inputs pillaged from other ecosystems, it seems worth asking whether they have a role here – not an unchecked role, but a role.”

“There’s also something very, very reassuring in walking your territory and picking food. It has been the dominant activity of most of our human history, so perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising.”

Read this article at The Age online

State of Australian Cities

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How well are our cities working?

Here’s some encouraging news for city-dwellers: per person, since 2006, we’ve been consuming less energy and water, producing less waste and recovering more of it, and breathing cleaner air.

This information comes from the State of Australian Cities 2011 report, prepared by the federal government’s Major Cities Unit.

The study, which was first undertaken last year, compiles dozens of indicators regarding population, productivity, sustainability and liveability in urban areas.

Among its varied findings, the report reveals that while inner-city areas have become denser, it’s the outer suburbs that still accommodate most of the population growth.

Despite the gathering sprawl, average commuting times – longest in Sydney (35 minutes) and Melbourne (31 minutes) – remained steady in the decade to 2006.

The report also shows that public transport use is on the rise. The average distance travelled by vehicle peaked early last decade and has fallen slightly since then. Nevertheless, the total “vehicle kilometres travelled” in our cities continues to increase, because we have more people and more freight altogether.

So how should we judge these facts about our cities?

Alan March, senior lecturer in urban planning at University of Melbourne, says the analysis lacks a yardstick. “I don’t see a forward projection there, which is the point of ‘sustain’ in sustainability: a sense of how we’re going to deal with a low-carbon or a low–fossil fuel future,” he says.

He’s also troubled by the scant attention given to inequality and disparities in service provision. “The way cities operate is crucial to the difference between the haves and the have-nots, which is clearly increasing in Australia,” he says, citing, for example, the need for everyone to have a primary school within walking distance.

“I put that under the social sustainability mantle – if you let some people get a long way behind then it’s much harder to bring them back later. In many ways it’s much less efficient.”

And while a reduction in energy, water and waste per person is heartening, it’s the total eco-impact that counts. With a growing population, cutting overall consumption is a bigger challenge. When it comes to housing, that could entail retrofitting and adapting the housing we have, rather than building new.

Dr March argues that governments need to switch investment away from roads and into public transport, and pay heed to other concerns, including habitat loss and the way we feed our towns.

“We need to take our food supply into account,” he says, “particularly all the knock on effects when you relate it to oil-scarce economies and the large distances involved. Food should be weighing more heavily on our minds.”

In the same way, he says, we must assess our cities’ ability to withstand crises. “The evidence is conclusive that we’re going to have more extreme weather events. We’re also becoming increasingly aware of the fragile nature of the world economy.

“One of the big movements in sustainability now is thinking about the resilience of places, not just to natural disasters, but also to things like economic shocks, terrorism, or pandemics,” Dr March says.

“We have very vulnerable single-service systems, like our water and electricity supply. We know they’re not resilient and therefore not particularly sustainable if something goes wrong with one key element of that chain.”

Read this article at The Age online