Your Say

Empowering farmers key to community’s resilience

BY TOM WEGENER

NOOSA will be increasingly threatened by drought, flood, fires and cyclones. We’ve got it all and it is only going to get worse with climate change. How is Noosa responding? We are cutting emissions and focusing on our own resilience and adaptation to climate change. One key to our community’s resilience is empowering our local farming community. When calamity strikes, we worry that the food on our supermarket shelves may disappear. When Covid came last year, this is exactly what happened for Elaine Bradley and the Mary Valley Country Harvest (you see them every week at the Pomona Markets). Elaine was contacted by many worried about food supply. The Cooperative was soon delivering food as well as setting up a community phone tree where they would regularly check in with each other. This was a natural, instinctive way to build empowerment, safety and resilience in a time of crisis. I believe Noosa should learn from Mary Valley Country Harvest and facilitate this response capability across the shire.

How do we do this? First, we need to establish a local, vibrant farming organisation, which can help support the community, especially the most vulnerable. This will bring a peace of mind to residents, knowing there is a web of local growers and food delivery from local sources. However, I am quickly told that Noosa should not expect to supply all of our local food needs. This is not the goal, yet, although a lot more can be locally grown. I have spent 18 months getting to know the local farmers and community groups like Country Noosa and Permaculture Noosa. The first thing I found is that successfully re-establishing local food production will not be an easy task. This surprised me because Noosa has an impressive history regarding local farming from the Hinterland to Walter Hay’s market gardens at the beach. It is mostly gone now. What happened? It is a long story... the past mantra was “go big or get out of farming”. Mono cropping, mechanisation and modern chemical fertilisers were the farming standard. In Noosa, small farms could not compete in the modern model, and since then, much farmland has become idle and degraded. But, now things have changed. Farming practices are now more focused on micro, intensive farming where crops and animals work in harmony to produce abundance and regenerate the land. Now Noosa residents seek out locally grown food, knowing it is organic, healthy and their purchasing supports the local community. The foundations are now being laid for a rebirth of local farming. But still, there are substantial obstacles.

Noosa land is very expensive, and when this is added to the costs of machinery, labour, seed and fertilisers, local farming becomes uneconomic. To add to this, the land has in many cases, has been degraded and climate change poses further uncertainty. Don’t forget the long hours and very hard work. However, there is no job more fulfilling than growing the food that sustains your community. Who wants to be a farmer? The following is a non-trivial vision, requiring many groups and individuals to work together. It is envisaged there would be a peak body, let’s call it “Agri-Hub”. We need to change the paradigm or playing field for local farming. I have a far-reaching masterplan which I have been working on with the Noosa Biosphere Reserve Foundation, Country Noosa, Permaculture Noosa, and local farmers. It is too much to explain here so these groups and I will be creating a Noosa Road Show and go from town to town. You are invited. Please join us, ask questions, and help provide answers. We hope to bring all of Noosa on this renaissance of small farming in Noosa. Please see these groups for the dates.

Tom Wegener