Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

An environmental education centre. It’s a 30-year old experiment of a communitygroup of a dozen people getting together and discussing how, in an area of thenhigh unemployment, people could come together and create jobs, or usefulthings for people to do, and turn an area of vacant, polluted land, into acommunity park. It’s part-business, part-community, and provides spaces for allkinds of wonderful things to happen [NGO employee, Melbourne].Running at optimal efficiency, their aquaponic system ‘can produce 750 units ofvegetables per week’, and has several other design features which give it advantagesover soil-based growing:You don’t have to weed; harvesting is just pulling out the plants and chopping theroots off; it’s easy to access because it’s all raised. There’s no digging. At thecentre there will be intensive production – aquaponics or hydroponics – but therewill also be raised [soil] beds, because we want a diversity of production systems.However in our modelling those raised beds will be revenue neutral, because it’sbloody hard to make money out of conventional farming. So we modelaquaponics, because that’s what we understand [NGO employee, Melbourne]The CERES aquaponics scheme aims to provide a replicable project, which makessmall scale urban farming financially viable, thus making it an attractive businessopportunity for urban residents. The pilot project operates on approximately 300m 2 ofland, which is considered a small-scale commercial operation which a single personcan operate.The water is pumped through once an hour, the water goes round and round, youjust lose a bit to transpiration. It’s based on the nitrogen cycle, with the fish beingyour little fertiliser factory, and you also get to harvest them…The [plant] growthrate is huge, they grow at 34mm a day, we’re looking at a 6-week cycle, 3weeks in propagation, and 3 weeks in the grow beds, with the biological material.The greenhouse captures all its own water and all our plants are propagatedinside.The fish are stocked at a rate of 20kgs per 1000 litres. This compares to 100kgsper 1000 litres in a commercial aquaculture set-up. Here, the fish are just thecream on the top, they‘re 5% of total yield. We’re planting at 50 plants per m 2 .The plants clean the water for the fish. [Steve Mushin, CERES Aquaponicsproject]Gold Coast PermacultureGold Coast Permaculture started a few years ago with the intention of getting thecommunity involved in a micro-business opportunity. Still in its early stages, Gold CoastPermaculture has nevertheless achieved a lot, not only cultivating a variety ofvegetables using organic principles, but also operating a few bee hives and keeping 26chickens. In addition, they are forging a partnership with Gold Coast City Council, todivert part of its aquatic weeds waste into their composting facilities:We take their aquatic weed and we take their woodchip because normally they'ddump that in a tip. They tip all their aquatic weed and it's about 1200 tonnes aUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 122