Bringing food back home

In Australia, food travels approximately 2000 kilometres before it reaches your plate. That's like driving to Sydney and back for your groceries.

Our current agricultural system is heavily reliant on fossil fuels to function. Chemical pesticides and fertilisers are derived from oil and natural gas. Harvesting, processing, packaging, transport and refrigeration also rely on abundant fossil fuels. This arrangement is not only wasteful, it produces huge amounts of unnecessary greenhouse gases and makes us vulnerable to expected rises in oil prices.

The land around Maleny is ideally suited to growing a wide variety of organic food. The climate is suited to year-round production and there is ample rainfall at 1,500mm per year to support the production of food.

With these facts in mind, we propose the establishment of the Maleny Town Farm. This would be an education and demonstration centre focussing on food production (backyard and market gardening, orchards, etc). It would incorporate small animals, compost and mulch resources, etc. It could also include a Sustainability Centre used for demonstrations and education for various community groups. The Town Farm could be a single site, or could be distributed across various sites.

Goals

• Make locally grown food available with minimum inputs
• Self-sustaining
  • Generate income
  • Paid workers ($, LETS, hours)
  • Incorporated non-profit organisation (eg Co-op)
• Stimulate other local agriculture projects
  • Education and assistance in backyard agriculture
  • Allotments available to community residents
  • Make this project a template which can be duplicated in other communities

Core Elements

• Market garden
• Demo household garden (based on average sized block)
• Livestock
• Composting centre
  • Collect organic waste from local businesses
  • Investigate receiving green waste from Council
• Seedling nursery
• Seed bank
• Orchard(s)

Other Possible Elements

• Sustainability Centre - for education and demonstration
• Water tanks
• Aquaponics
• Cafe
• Accommodation
  • For volunteers, eg WWOOF
• Bamboo production
• Bee-keeping
• Specialty food production