Jade Miles & Deb Bogenhuber
Out of the Box: Matching farmers with unused land for their local food systems. Tell us a little about the out of the box and food next door project. Food Next Door Co-op is the organisation and Out Of The Box is the food product created to provide a means for distribution of local fresh food. Based in Mildura, with vast multiculturalism and newly established refugees moving into the area, their farming skills were underutilised.
“Food Next Door matches under-utilised farmland with landless farmers to support small-scale regenerative farming, growing diverse crops & engaging people from diverse backgrounds to supply food to local households.” Tell us a little about the food system in your region? Mildura is dominated by food grown for export - 99% of the table grapes are exported from the region. There are still a lot of family owned farms but large scale and commodity focussed. The majority of what’s grown
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BioLogical || a journal for change
is table grapes, wine grapes and dried fruits + almonds are also increasing. So the local food system has a very small market share. There are 15 supermarkets in the Mildura region alone some have local produce but if they do it’s mostly travelled to Melbourne and then come back. How has the project evolved and developed? Food Next Door came about via a group of community members who had identified a need for better access to local food and the realisation that there was a lot of empty unused land in Mildura which would be ideal for food growing. Some of the land owners were open to having their land used for the purposes of growing local food. It was when this group of volunteers connected with a research project that Food Next Door evolved. The project being carried out by researchers from the Universities of Melbourne and Wollongong looked at
the skills and knowledge of new migrant farmers in Australia, and how their skills and knowledge of farming translated in the Australian context. The main finding for new migrant farmers in Mildura was that their skills and knowledge were not being utilised because the farmers did not have the resources to access land. So Food Next Door formed from bringing together farmerless land, landless farmers and consumers who wanted local food. It was a perfect outcome. Out of the Box was born in September 2017 with 30 family boxes and now they do 70 boxes weekly. There are now 12 or so local growers that supply produce, plus our own farms - the Community Demonstration Farm and River Farm. The community demonstration farm offers farm tours to stakeholders and hopes to offer tours for school programs in the future. In your experience, how can we assist more ecological farming practices?
