Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

This vision highlights the multi-functionality of urban agriculture, and in particular itscapacity to build community, in addition to any contribution it may make to net foodproduction and thus to urban food security.An interesting and relatively novel concept in Australia that was raised nevertheless bysome interviewees is that of community farms, where members of the community areable to learn and practice organic methods of cultivation while fostering communityspirit and being rewarded financially and/or through fresh fruits and vegetables. In arecent and innovative project on Tamborine Mountain, Gold Coast, small farmers haveinitiated a community farm which operates in conjunction with an organic cultivationtraining course.The idea of making it a community farm rather than a garden, where people couldparticipate in a commercial farm and see what other crops are grown and so on…We started this idea to combine the practical training with the community farmformally only last year, and we’ve now got 20 people all doing our training who dothe practical work here on our property. We give them [community farm workers]a little plot so they’ve got their own plot but they also then see what other peopleare growing on the plots nearby, we also get them to participate in our actualfarm, where we grow over 50 crops. So our farm has developed into one wherewe grow 50 fruits and vegetables, herbs and nuts and berries - so they get thecost of the training back through fruits and vegetables harvested from the farm.Then the other concept we had last year was when they finished the training,which is a prerequisite, they could then become part of the community farm on anongoing basis. We share the profits in proportion to the time they spend on amonthly basis and we produce a monthly set of accounts and a monthly bulletintelling them what’s going on and what we’ve done and what our plans are. Weproduce a summary now of the products we’ve sold each month so you can seethe seasonality and which ones are making money and so it’s made the farm a bitmore businesslike and it’s also gradually making it more profitable with less workfrom us.4.1 Urban Agriculture in practice in Melbourne and the Gold CoastConsistent with the expansive visions and inclusive conceptualisations of urbanagriculture outlined above, interviewees identified a similarly long list of urbanagriculture examples taking place in and around Melbourne, as well as on the GoldCoast and surroundings. As shown in Table 1, urban agriculture in the case studyareas is not solely about food production, and there are numerous other examples ofpractices in education, policy, food processing and retailing.Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 120