Permaculture and food—the edible nexus
Published in original form in the July of 2007, this is a retake, extrapolation and exploration of an address by David Holmgren at the Community Gardens Australia conference in Melbourne of that year.
MORNING TEA BREAK, the MC called. Turning from the first floor balcony that overlooks the plaza below and the waters of Sydney Harbour beyond, I wandered in.
The City of Sydney had given the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance free use of the conference rooms of Sydney Customs House, a grand old building of yellow Sydney sandstone. The event the Alliance organised was to bring together the regional conversations that took place over the previous few months to begin the process of developing a model food policy for the greater Sydney region.
I was sipping the insipid coffee served at events like this when a few people from Permaculture North wandered in. We got to talking. Were they interested in working with the Alliance, I asked? No, one of them answered. They were going to start their own food security process.
I was puzzled. Here was the alliance, an organisation that had profile in the food security milieu, contacts in state parliament, in community development and regional farming circles and which could give permaculture groups some leverage, but here was a permaculture organisation wanting to do its own thing.
Nothing more was heard of the permaculture group’s venture into food security. The Alliance, however, succeeded in producing a regional food security policy which in 2009 was presented to state government politicians in Parliament House.
The role of a handful of us in the Alliance with a background in permaculture showed that although there might be no formal permaculture presence in the conversation then going on around food security, it was there in incipient form.
The buzz
There was already a buzz around the idea of food security — year-round access to affordable and nutritious food for all — by the time the Alliance brought a couple hundred people together that day at Customs House.
The permaculture design system at the time was focused more on domestic food production than advocacy around food. That was good, however food production in home gardens held little potential to feed more than the gardeners. Although there was interest among permaculture practitioners in the bigger picture of food security and food production at scale, permaculture was not to become a big player in advocacy.
That interest was highlighted in Collingwood Town Hall in Melbourne in March 2007. Organised by the national organisation, the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network (now Community Gardens Australia), a day devoted to food security was squeezed in between days devoted to community gardening and the Seed Savers’ Network annual conference.
The speaker
As he walked up to the speaker’s podium he knew he had to explain what permaculture was to those in the audience who might have heard the word but know little of what it might be or, as was common, have a mistaken or partial understanding about what it was.
Somewhere in middle age, fit-looking, his hair tied back in a pony tail, he stood there looking out over the audience before starting to speak.
“Permaculture is clearly about people and food. It’s also about our connection with nature, about tools and technology and about community. So it really covers a much wider scope than it is commonly understood as a specific form of organic gardening.
“It’s concerned with both the production and consumption side and is based on universal ethics and design principles which can be applied in any context.”
David Holmgren goes on to describe permaculture as, “…a grassroots, international movement of practitioners, designers and organisations — of networks”.
David tells the audience there is confusion over the issue of food and it is only now starting to appear in official sustainability thinking.
“I want to take the design approach of permaculture to look at food security in a future world of low energy availability,” David says.
“The official version of sustainability we get from government, very well intended and often well informed… it’s all about buildings and transport but it’s not about food. This is why gardening is seen as a hobby rather than a serious form of agriculture”.
Let me briefly reflect on David’s comment about food growing being seen by government as a hobby rather than as a “serious form of agriculture”. That is what I found when I worked at the City of Sydney as its community garden and Landcare coordinator. I wanted to bring in ideas from the food security and food sovereignty lobbies I was associated with, however there was little interest among staff or elected councillors. There was no structure in council through which to do this.
Rather than a serious, small scale form of agriculture that could make the City more resilient were effort put into improving productivity and linking to food distribution agencies, the growing number of community gardens at the time were viewed by council more as recreational opportunities making use of public land, like swimming pools and tennis courts. That was okay as far as it went, but the food security dimension was not there despite Lord Mayor Clover Moore having spoken at the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance’s Food Summit a few years before. Looking back, I realise it was too early in the development of food advocacy for council to adopt food as a measure of urban resilience.
David has long advocated that the production of food in our cities, in home and community gardens as well as commercial market gardens, should be recognised as a valid form of small scale agriculture. What he talks about, in effect, is the farming our suburbs. He coined the term ‘garden agriculture’ in recognition of this.
There was significance in the fact that a national community gardening organisation was capable of organising a five-day conference bringing together practitioners of community gardening, the educational use of food gardens in schools and people engaged in the preservation and use of agricultural biodiversity through seed saving. That alone signified how the notion of garden agriculture had taken root in the public imagination.
David distinguished between garden and urban agriculture. “I see urban agriculture to be in some way commercial or which produces a surplus for sale. Garden agriculture I see as part of the household economy where people produce for their own needs. Of course, there’s a complementary relationship between them”.
Australian tradition
Home garden agriculture was not something new at the time when David spoke at the conference. It had been an Australian tradition for many years. We hear this when people recall how their grandparents had a backyard vegetable patch or kept a few chooks. Those recollections indicate the problem, however. When home gardening is described in past tense it suggests it has become a memory for all-too-many, a memory that harks back to their early childhood.
That is not the whole story, fortunately. Home gardening of vegetables and fruit as well as poultry-keeping has been increasing since the 1970s. Just how pervasive home food production has been in Australian social history was disclosed in an Australian Bureau of Statistics report on the subject in 1992 and, more recently, by Andrea Gaynor’s book, Harvest of the Suburbs (Harvest of the Suburbs — an environmental history of growing food in Australian Cities; 2006; University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, WA. ISBN 1 920694 48 X).
Boosted by both official and popular support for the Dig for Victory program during World War Two and then going into decline, home gardening started to pick up as an urban activity back in the late 1960s and through the following decade thanks to the rise of the organic gardening movement and the emergence in the 1970s of ‘alternative lifystyles’ culture. Subsequent years brought steady growth propelled in part by food fears such as those over agro-chemical contamination by synthetic farm chemicals. That was a concern that reached back into the 1960s to the publication of Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring (Silent Spring; 1962 Rachael Carson, Houghton Miffin). More recently, home and community food gardening and the idea of eating locally-produced food has been popularised first by the international Slow Foods movement and later by a plethora of local food, food sovereignty and urban argriculture organisations.
Permaculture must take some credit for the popularisation of home food gardening over the past 40-plus years. It is the focus of permaculture practice for many.
The household economy
What of this household economy David mentioned?
David’s partner, Sue Dennett, led a workshop on the topic later at the conference where she discussed the economic, environmental and food value of setting aside preserved seasonal produce.
Thinking in terms of a household economy would certainly present a challenge to a culture in which the definition of ‘economy’ is narrowly money-related and entails working outside of the home. Sue’s definition includes non-monatary aspects of the household economy. I’m sure that for some the notion comes across as quaint and as something from an earlier age. When I first heard the term what came to mind was the subject for girl students way back in my high school years— home economics.
Today’s mainstream way of life militates against making the home much more than a dormitory, feeding station and a chillout space for days off work. Accepting the idea of a household economy is more than managing a budget and making improvements to increase the resale value of the home. It would require a mindset change that recognised the value of non-monetary activity and which restored the household as a home base and locus of production.
David believes scale is a barrier to developing the household economy.
“It’s very hard for one or two person households to undertake household economy measures. All our systems in modern societies are too big but our households and are too small for the sustainable, efficient use of resources. We can get economies of scale through larger household size.”
I saw the practicality of this idea while staying at Seli-Hoo, an occupant-owned sharehouse that has been in existence in suburban Adelaide since the 1970s. Most occupants work outside the household. The sharehouse has its own workshop, fruit trees, chook run (in which I watched a chook swallow a mouse), a driveway converted into a vegetable garden (the occupants use bicycles and public transport rather than own motor vehicles) and has a weekly shared meal, though people eat together more often. Food not produced in the garden is bought from a nearby food co-operative. With its low-consumption and sharing approach to life, the household demonstrates the practicality of larger household sizes and the value of a household economy to contemporary urban living.
Moving away from one and two person households would be a challenge. They are the fastest growing segment of the housing market in the cities and are supported by the movement of people into apartments, of which there are two main segments. One is made up of first home buyers purchasing apartments because of their greater affordability. The other segment are ‘downsizers’ — parents whose families have grown up and left home or who might be retirees who prefer not to maintain a suburban house and garden. The resource cost of one and two person households was disclosed in Sydney University research around the time of David’s address to the community gardens conference. It found smaller households required the same number of white goods and other appliances as larger households although the appliances might be smaller in size.
Permaculture as opportunity
David suggested that food issues, “…throw up an enormous number of opportunities. I’m trying to make permaculture central to the issue of sustainability, putting those simple, core ideas of small, local, nature, food on the table as the most important.
“The other thing we need is dietary change to seasonal, local food that is less processed and that contains less animal protein.
“These changes are possible in a very short time. A lot of it has to do with people’s heads—what they think, what they feel. It’s said that this is the hardest thing in the world to change. We’ll see.
“Full organic methods, including the full recycling to land of all wastes including human waste, is in the long term the most critical feature in the sustainability of the food system. We can’t have that bleed of high quality nutrient in human waste not going back to the food system.
“An element commonly associated with permaculture is what we can probably call polyculture, the integration of crops, livestock and structures rather than the idea that these are all separate systems. This is where we get the synergies, the efficiencies and so many of the social and environmental services. There are elements of beautiful and productive landscapes that come from this integration that polyculture brings.”
Growing in the cities
David has previously advocated the use of public land for food production in urban areas. Just what would an urban agriculture that made greater use of public land look like?
“Firstly, allotment and rooftop gardens. The key thing about these is that they provide maximum solar access in higher density residential areas where individual gardens at ground level next to buildings often really lack product. One of the really great things about allotment gardens is that they aggregate plots together so they can get solar access.”
That is not the only advantage of allotment or community gardens (the terms are commonly used to mean the same thing although some community gardens have shared, communal garden beds rather than allotments for individuals). A reticulated water supply, shared rainwater tanks, shared compost systems and tools are other benefits of the collective approach.
“Greenhouses with minimal bottom heat for seedling production to get an extension of the growing season is a reasonable compromise to purely eating what will grow in the outside environment. In this climate it can provide basic winter salads, although that’s a lot easier in to do in Melbourne than where we live in Hepburn”.
Then there’s home food processing. “Preserving and fermentation using low energy means is an incredibly important part of how we stabilise that huge seasonal flux in food production. Spring is what I jokingly call the famine time. We need methods that use minimum energy to even that out”.
The recycling of nutrients to fertilise our urban garden-agriculture is another thing that can be achieved with a little imagination. Compost systems and worm farms including those at larger scale, deep litter systems for poultry, reedbeds for treating greywater and composting toilets are simple, biological technologies for nutrient recycling that we can do within urban areas.
“Mushroom production on compost and wood in shaded areas is something missing in Australia, in part on account of our Anglo heritage. But it has huge potential in urban areas to produce food from decomposing material.
“Poultry and eggs in deep litter systems, chicken tractors—this idea that has been popularised through permaculture—and orchard range systems. Poultry is a key and appropriate form of animal protein in urban areas.
“I think rabbits for meat production, fed on urban lawns and weeds, are another very important and efficient use of wastes that comes as a by-product from those systems.
“Stormwater harvesting is a huge opportunity in urban areas. We can use this water for low-input pond aquaculture going beyond the sort of wetland systems that are being designed at the moment for stormwater in urban areas.
“We can retrofit those systems for food production and harvest weeds, windfalls and surplus wildlife as free food from nature.”
“There’s neighbourhood goat dairies managed on public land. It didn’t go down very when I suggested this in 1989 during a review of a ten year strategy plan for CERES–the idea of goats munching along Merri Creek. But I think we’ll get there… eventually.”
Growing on public land
We can expand the production of food in our cities even without breaking up pavement or taking down buildings, says David. In Melbourne there is a significant amount of public open space that could, with great social and ecological benefit, be transformed for food production.
“Public open space is about 12 percent of the Melbourne metropolitan area. We might not actually want to cut down the forests on Mt Dendenong or, maybe, log the botanic gardens and turn them into food production”, however there remains plenty of urban open space that could be used for garden agriculture.
“The Melbourne metropolitan area is nearly 9000 sq km. That includes quite a lot of land that’s not built over. On the fringes it includes quite large areas of forest and parkland. There’s almost three and a half million people in this area, a density of 388 people per square kilometre. The area of land per person is 2500sqM, about a quarter acre (1011.7sqM) per person. How much of this is built on I was not able to find out.
“I am not suggesting that Melbourne should produce all of its own food, but John Jeavons claims that biointensive, vegan agriculture at its extreme is capable of supplying total food supply on 300sqM per person. I think that’s about the top limit and maybe its theoretical.
“My estimate for a permaculture omnivore is about the 700 to 1500sqM per person. This is less than the total area that is not built upon and paved within the Melbourne metropolitan area. So we do have the capacity in the cities to feed those cities”.
“Once we get intensive gardens covering significant urban areas, the demand for local organic materials will become quite significant. We can look at public landscaping as a source of organic matter and also for conversion into food systems.
“We recycle everything in gardening, but highly productive food systems need a net input of some organic material from lower-intensive systems. This is a common pattern through sustainable, low energy societies where there’s a larger range of forest woodland that supplies fuel and organic material to support very intensive areas of food production.”
There might be considerable scope to repurpose underused public land for food production, especially were some global crisis to reduce the security of the urban food supply. If circumstances were expected to persist there might be potential for a government-supported urban food production program along the lines of the World War Two, Dig for Victory campaign. Existing community gardens could become food production education centres were this to eventuate, and community gardeners could go out to assist people start new community gardens in a persisting emergency situation (this was a reason I developed local government policy to support community garden development and assisted new community gardeners).
Not all public land and city parks can be repurposed for food production. Public parks and reserves play an important role in mental health as venues for relaxation, family activity and passive and active recreation. Disused public land can be habitat for wildlife.
Some unused urban land is unsuited to producing food. When working in local government I had to explain to a group of people who wanted to start a community garden on a fenced-off, unused patch that the reason it was fenced off was because the soil was contaminated. Taking over contaminated land for food gardens is a risk that comes with guerrilla gardening.
A new food market
“I want to mention food marketing because the cost of current, centralised systems makes doing so important. We need to look at how the surplus from gardens can be distributed and how local markets can develop that don’t cost the earth.
“When you shift to subscription agriculture, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), there’s really only the producer and consumer and there are benefits for both.
“CSA has enormous benefits for consumers because it provides food security, it connects them to a seasonal food culture and it gives them influence over the production system. They can actually talk directly to the producer.
“For producers, CSA provides a capital base and some sort of market certainty. It stimulates polyculture and tends to stabilise production peaks and troughs. CSA and subscription farming drive the system towards polyculture and away from monoculture, as shown in Japan where farmers grow many varieties of vegetables.
“It also develops the potential for a seasonal labour pool and, also, informed consumers who are prepared to understand the position that the producer is in.
“Farmers’ markets are useful as local sources for consumers and for distributing seasonal surplus from home processing and preserving. They encourage gardeners to become producers. People who are good at what they do get into creating this new economy.”
Experience in the big cities suggests the scale of the city and the distance between farmer and eater makes the direct farmer-to-eater links of CSAs less effective. This is where food hubs like Brisbane Food Connect, Sydney’s Ooooby and Melbourne’s CERES, which pool the production of farms in the region and distribute it to subscribers, is a more effective food distribution system. Although successful in the cities, farmers’ markets have the limitation of operating only one day a week, some only monthly. American farmer and food commentator, Chris Newman, said the optimal model for distributing regional farm produce in the city is through greengrocers keeping normal business hours so they are accessible through the week.
“Another part of food marketing is that we need restaurants and food stores that provide set menus to reduce waste by saying to that this is the food that’s available, we can’t get it much cheaper, there isn’t any waste, this is what it is”. Local and regional currencies also encourage this local production and consumption.”
A need for policy
Policy is important, David suggested in validating a food advocacy role in permaculture. It is the means by which things are officially made to happen. It started when councils started to adopt policies on community gardening (and here) in the late-1990s. Over a decade ago, the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance advocated for and developed a model food security policy supportive of both urban-fringe farmers and access to affordable food for the Sydney region.
“If we had public policies that are sensible towards urban food security they would focus, first, on production of local food for local people. We need ridiculous health and environmental regulations that constrict garden agriculture to be removed’, David asserted.
“Secondly, policies would remove health and environmental regulations that are impediments to garden agriculture. Just as the corporate world is constantly demanding that government remove the impediments to what they want to do, we need ridiculous health and environmental regulations that constrict garden agriculture to be removed. We need to remove the tax impediments to barter and non-monetary economies.
“Of course, this is a very radical agenda. We’re not necessarily going to see this but we should be articulating what would be sensible public policies.
“I think we can extend organic certification to include embodied energy and water in food. It would show the benefit of local systems. I believe the Soil Association in Britain is looking at the issue of food miles in organic certification. Food miles are a measure of the distance foods are transported and the consequent emission of greenhouse gases”.
“If governments really want to get serious about understanding alternative policy options, they need to go beyond the tools we have at the moment and start using things like energy accounting, which go well beyond things like ecological footprint, to try to understand the relative impacts of different possibilities.
“How does the use of energy and water in the food system compare to housing and personal transport? How large an improvement could we get by redesigning the food system and how does this compare with redesigning our housing and transport system? There’s a scarcity of information on this.”
The reuse of water
In Sydney, households account for around 48 percent of the total water budget in providing the average household’s food supply. This dwarfs any other category. When restaurants are included, said David, “It probably means that over 50 percent of water consumption is actually being used to supply people’s food”.
Just as forward thinking people are looking at the energy embodied in the production of our food supply, so too are some starting to consider the volume of water used to produce it.
“This concept of embodied water, all the water that is used to make a product, if we look at figures on embodied water from CSIRO researchers — litres per dollar of value, which is a better way to evaluate something in many ways than per-kilo weight — we can see how huge growing rice is in Australia. We’re growing rice in completely the wrong places. When I’m dictator we’ll move rice out of the Murrumbidgie Irrigation Area and up to Northern NSW and Queensland and we’ll close down sugar cane and replace it with rice where it can work quite well”, David jokes.
“Sugar cane uses a surprising amount of water. Fruit and vegetables are 103 litres per dollar of value. Meat products are fairly high. Dairy is 680 litres per dollar value.
“I’ve done some rough calculations on our one hectare property at Hepburn Springs. Our own honey, as far as I can see, uses only two litres per dollar value, mainly in washing the equipment. Sue’s two-goat dairy uses a similar amount of water, about a 300 fold saving on going to the supermarket. Our fruit and vegetable production looks like it’s about five times more efficient than food from the supermarket.
“So, the conclusion is we should use water at home to produce food. Don’t let anyone, including the authorities, tell you that is environmentally irresponsible.”
Permaculture as organising framework
“The living soil is the water and carbon bank for future food security,” David says.
“We need to develop the skills—gardening, food processing, small livestock husbandry—and I think we can use permaculture as an organising framework for that skill development.
“There are some technical skills that need to be scaled-up tremendously. There are a lot people in this room that I see, over the next ten years, extending those skills to a lot of other people.“
What has happened?
Thirteen years have passed since David spoke at the community gardens conference. What has changed?
First, we have seen an increase in home as well as community garden food production. Permaculture has had much to do with this but it is not permaculture’s story alone. In part, the increase in home food growing is attributable to TV gardening programs such as Costa Georgiardis’ Gardening Australia on the ABC. Mainstream media coverage has always been important to spreading permaculture ideas, as the series, the Global Gardener (broadcast on ABC TV 1991) and the Visionaries: Small Solutions to Enormously Large Problems (broadcast on ABC TV 1989, one sesson featuring Bill Mollison on permaculture was entitled In Grave Danger of Falling Food) demonstrated.
The pandemic of 2020 boosted interest in home food growing to such an extent that the supply of non-hybrid vegetable seed fell short. Behind this were food security fears stimulated by the panic buying of food and other products and the consequent limit on purchases as the supermarkets responded to the increased demand. The shortages were temporary artefacts of the supermarkets’ just-in-time delivery system and not due to shortfalls in food production. The national food distribution system bent under the strain of additional demand, but it held. To what extent the interest in home food production continues after the pandemic passes is something we wait to see.
What else has changed? Food advocacies have come and gone. The Sydney Food Fairness Alliance joined national advocacy organisation Australia’s Right to Food Coalition. Four of us started the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance in 2011 and it continues to operate. Sustain appears to be the most active of present-day fair food advocacies. Quasi-commercial organisations like 3000 Acres rose to further stimulate community gardening as well as the local food sector.
Online conversation suggests there is now greater interest in food security in permaculture although the time is now past when permaculture as a socio-ecological movement could start a food security advocacy of its own.
We can view what David spoke about at that 2007 Melbourne conference as an intellectual artefact of the times, as ideas based on our understanding of food security and urban agriculture as they were then. I prefer to view what he said as still largely relevant, as ideas with continuing value and potential utility in making our cities more food secure and productive places to live.
More about home and urban agriculture
Online—
Fair food advocacy…
Food Fairness Illawarra https://foodfairnessillawarra.org.au
Sustain https://www.sustain.org.au
Right To Food Coalition https://righttofood.org.au
Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance https://afsa.org.au
Kylie Newberry, Our Food System blog http://ourfoodsystem.com/about/
Eva Perroni, Food For Thought blog https://evaperroni.com
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Urban food hubs…
Brisbane Food Connect https://www.foodconnect.com.au/
Ooooby Sydney https://www.ooooby.org/sydney
CERES
Fair Food home delivery: https://www.ceresfairfood.org.au/about-us/
Grocery store: https://ceres.org.au/social-enterprises/grocery/
Huski Greens https://www.huskigreens.com.au
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Organisations…
Northern Rivers Young Farmers Alliance http://www.futurefeeders.org/nryfa.html
CSA Network Australia & New Zealand http://www.csanetworkausnz.org
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Reading…
Some titles may now out of print.
Milkwood—real skills for down-to-earth living; 2018, Kirsten Bradley, Nick Ritar; Murdoch Books, Sydney. ISBN 978 1 76052 461 6.
Harvest of the Suburbs: an environmental history of growing food in Australian cities; 2006, Andrea Gaynor; University of Western Australia Press, Perth. ISBN 1 920694 48 X.
How to grow More Vegetables-than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine; John Jeavons, 1974–1995; Ten Speed Press USA.
Growing Vegetables South of Australia — year round Tasmanian food gardening; 2002, Steve Solomon; Steve and Anne Solomon, Tasmania.
One Magic Square — how to grow your own food on one square metre; 2008, Lolo Houbein; Wakefield Press, South Australia. ISBN 978–1–86254–764–3.
Weed Foragers’ Handbook; 2012, Adam Grubb, Annie Raser-Rowland; Highland House Publishing, Melbourne. ISBN 978 1 86447 121 2.
Community Gardening as Social Action; 2014, Claire Nettle; Ashgate Publishing Company UK & USA. ISBN 9781 409455868.
Growing Community — starting and nurturing community gardens; 2010, Claire Nettle; South Australia Department of Health. ISBN 978 1 74242 019 5.
Reclaiming the Urban Commons; 2018, Nick Rose, Andrea Gaynor ed; UWAP Publishing, Western Australia.
Marrickville Backyards; 2001, Jane Gleeson and others; Marrickville Community History Group, Sydney. ISBN 0 646 41212 4.
City permaculture-sustainable living in small spaces-Volume 1; Earth Garden Books, Victoria. ISBN 978 0 9578940 6 8.
Permaculture Plants-a selection; 1996, Jeff Nugent, Julia Boniface; Sustainable Agriculture Research institute, Western Australia. ISBN 0 646 29081 9.
Agroecology — The Science of Sustainable Agriculture; 1987, 1995, Manual Altieri; Intermediate Technology Publications (UK), Westview Press (USA). ISBN 0–81–33–1717–7.
History…
The biggest estate on earth: how Aborigines made Australia; 2011, Bill Gammage; Alan & Unwin, Australia. ISBN 978–1–74237–748–3.
Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture; 2014, Bruce Pascoe; Magabala Books, Australia. ISBN 1921248017.
Call of the Reed Warbler—A New Agriculture , a New Earth; 2017, Charles Massy; University of Queensland Press, Australia. ISBN 0702253413.
Postscript…
Following are remarks made on social media linking to this story:
Shane Simonsen
Vegetable production is a very competitive market, with high risk and narrow margins. Like a lot of fields cheap industrial produce dominates most people’s expectations of price and quality.
The biggest issue is perishability, with a lot of crops too delicate to be handled on a large scale even with refrigeration. A lot of crops lack dedicated machinery as well, so the amount of labour is always high.
The niche a lot of small growers seem to be exploiting is based on crops that need human labor and are highly perishable, since the premium for being closer to consumers is higher, and you are effectively just monetising your labor. They also often have a higher turn over than other crops, so you can cram more in a small space.
Once you shift to the more durable/mechanised end of the vegetable spectrum it is much harder to compete because produce can come from much further away without a major drop in quality, and labor costs are much lower.
Any producer though needs to hit a minimum scale in order to make logistics and marketing worthwhile. No one is going to make money delivering six lettuces a week as the overhead costs and market access issues would eat any margin.
I worry about people going into these kinds of businesses in the current economic cycle since this kind of product is in many ways a luxury crop. If people’s incomes drop then that overpriced kale is likely to be one of the first things left off the shopping list. I also noticed the business featured does a lot of sprouting. This is something anyone with a kitchen should be able to do themselves, cutting down on transportation and packaging costs.
Shea Watt
Agree with Shane, but there are valuable plants we need and want a lot more of than the very narrow range of ‘vegetables’ sold in shops. Firstly people always pay x4 for a flowering plant in a pot, especially one they can take cuttings from later. Secondly there is an extreme lack of perennial and especially tropical vegetables in Australia that can’t be grown from seed and very few people grow anything from cuttings. Start doing some research and finding plants that are scarce and grow only from cuttings and you will have a market!
Jay Ess Dee
Yes. Selling to our food hub here in Sydney. Expanding to include food grown at schools we work with. Money goes back to school. I have a bit of thing about microgreens and indoor growing. The more indoor growing we accept the more we give rise to opportunity to over develop cities and regions because we can feed ourselves from shipping containers. We can’t afford to lose any more nature or connection to soil regeneration and outdoor spaces. We can’t discount the purported nutritional value of microgreens though.
Kerin Pollock
I think it’s certainly possible. Particularly if you have the skills and time to preserve surplus produce. We currently have a very small surplus from our garden.
Over the past 5 months I’ve also been looking after a neighbours vege plot. This has significantly increased our surplus. We haven’t sold any thing for cash but we have traded. Cabbages and cauliflower for a bootload of woodchip. Peas and beans for skills I don’t have. We’ve also given away surplus to other neighbours without expectation and it comes back in the form of eggs or kimchi.
I’ve been offered money for preserved goods rather than fresh produce. Dried herbs, pickles etc. It’s also been suggested repeatedly that we give surplus to a local coop who would pay in store credit but their prices are high enough that it doesn’t seem like as good value as trade does.
While none of this has earned as income as such, it has certainly meant there is more money left in my bank account at the end of the pay period.
From next week I’ll be working one day less a week and have been looking at ways to continue reducing what we spend by solidifying these opportunities for trade. I think the key will be having more time to do things like preserving that other don’t feel they have the time to do.
I’ve been very fortunate to be caring for the neighbours garden as it’s given me the luxury of experimenting with the idea without having to invest the energy and time it would take to generate the same surplus from our own yard.
Claire Pare
It’s quite amazing how many people are selling plants on Facebook marketplace.
Michelle Stevens
I’ve been selling a few veggies on Facebook. Only about $15 a week. But have had so many enquiries I’m growing extra as a side line experiment… if I can make that $150 I’ll be extremely happy. So far seedlings haven’t sold but indoor plants have.
Permaculture Australia
There is an article about a Permaculture West member who has a backyard small food production business — from memory he started or still is growing in his backyard in Perth.
https://permacultureaustralia.org.au/giving-greens-permaculture-careers/?
Permaculture Australia
Sulyns Garden in South Hobart is a market garden in her backyard supplying
to local restaurants
David Livingston
I think the gig economy is here to stay as people have realised that they are better off with out bull shit jobs plus they don’t need to be in the office 9 to 5 every day.
Also, the centers of towns are going to undergo big big changes. Office costs are going to sink like a stone as companys no longer need such large and expensive structures (insert not huge tears here).
So we need to be more resilient and that is where your garden comes in.
More reading about food in Pemaculture 3.0
Food waste: what to do about it?
HOW WOULD YOU go about reducing food waste in restaurants?
medium.com
On Retrosuburbia
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