From the archives…
Suburbs feeding themselves
This is a story commissioned and published by ABC Organic Gardener magazine in 2016.
In Adelaide, a small city farm is bringing food production back to the city.
Wagtail, an urban micro-farm, produces fresh vegetables “… with an emphasis on delicious, colourful salad crops like tomatoes, salad mix, cucumbers, edible flowers, Asian greens and fresh herbs”, explained Nathaneal Wiseman who, with Steve Hoepfner and Brett Young, started the enterprise.
“We started off selling direct to our local food co-op, but the scale of production meant we had to expand our market”, said Nathaneal.
Wagtail is different to other city farms in that it only grows fresh, local food for the local market. Most other city farms offer a range of opportunities such as workshops, community gardening, permaculture design and other courses and, in the case of Melbourne’s CERES and Brisbane’s Northey Street City Farm, labour-market training programs. They differ to community gardens in scale (most are larger), in the range of services they offer and by creating training and employment opportunities.
Growing good food is all the backyard-size Wagtail — all 182m2 of it divided into 14m long beds — has space to do. Food production is important to CERES and Northey Street too. They grow and sell at their successful farmers’ markets and, at CERES, through CERES Fair Food home delivery service.
Most city farms are on public land, however Wagtail was fortunate in finding a landowner who wanted to make his land available for community use at a reasonable rental.
Reinventing urban farming for city people
In Australia’s cities, city farms make the old new again by reinventing urban farming for modern city people. Their number is growing, with Hobart City Farm (ed: see update below) operating for several years now and Pocket City Farm in Sydney the newest. Now, there are plans for a city farm in Canberra (ed: see update below).
What these compact but productive city farms do is to return commercial food production to our cities. Whereas community gardens produce mainly for the personal use of their gardeners, the new city farms produce for the market. Cities, like Sydney, already produce much of their fresh vegetables and fruit from their urban fringe market gardens although their number diminishes with the sprawl of new suburbs. The new city farms are the initiatives of a new, younger breed of farming entrepreneur.
“It was all rather serendipitous”
The agriculture entrepreneurs at Wagtail made their start after Nat Wiseman completed an internship and Allsun Farm in NSW and started looking for land in Adelaide. He met Steven and Brett Young, found land, “ …and off we went!”, he said.
“It was all rather serendipitous. We want to show that it is possible to produce an abundance of fresh, healthy food from the suburbs and to make it a commercially successful venture as well. We also want it to be an educational space and get more people growing and eating good food”.
A replicable model?
But is that possible in our cities with their fierce competition for access to public land and their scarcity of private land for farming? Is Wagtail in any way a replicable model?
“That is our intention”, said Nathanael. “Being small scale allows people to replicate our model without a huge capital investment, yet it is also large enough to grow some serious quantities of food and to give people experience at growing and marketing produce.”
Like Wagtail, city farms are making our cities places of opportunity. Importantly, though, they demonstrate to young people that farming can be cool and, for some, it can become a livelihood.
Update
Hobart City Farm closed in early 2020 when its lease was not renewed.
Canberra City Farm is now in existence.
Find a city farm
Wagtail Urban Farm: https://wagtailurbanfarm.wordpress.com/about/
Pocket City Farm, Sydney: [http://www.pocketcityfarms.com.au/]
Hobart City Farm: http://hobartcityfarm.com
Perth City Farm: http://perthcityfarm.org.au
Northey Street City Farm: http://www.nscf.org.au
Beelarong Community Farm: http://www.beelarong.org.au/Home/about-beelarong
CERES: http://www.ceres.org.au
Perth City Farm: http://perthcityfarm.org.au
Sydney City Farm: http://www.sydneycityfarm.org
Calmsley Hill City Farm: http://calmsleyhill.com.au
Allsun Farm: http://www.allsun.com.au/Allsun_Farm.html
Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network: http://communitygarden.org.au
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