Podcast: Sid chats about transition towns

While at the recent Biodynamic Agriculture Australia Conference, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sid Hazel. Sid is a tutor of Organic Horticulture at Coffs Harbour TAFE (Technical and Further Education Institute) and is involved in some great environmental initiatives in Bellingen, on the mid-north coast of New South Wales.

In this podcast Sid discusses the advent of  Transition Towns, which are part of Rob Hopkins’ (UK)  proactive response to the question, “Can you imagine your  town beyond oil?”  Rob’s vision is a town that incorporates resilience, sustainability, and environmental responsibility through growing food where people live (zero food miles), thereby reducing the CO2 emissions generated by the distance food currently travels. Rather than waiting on governments to provide answers, communities decide their future, and indeed their children’s future.  Australian Transition Town initiatives are currently underway in Hervey Bay, Armidale, Bellingen, Bell, Newcastle and on the Sunshine Coast.

In Bellingen, Sid is involved in a community garden, a local food network, and efforts to create community supported agriculture enterprises. Sid says the Bellingen Local Food Network is about “local food for local people”, which reflects a growing  trend for food sovereignty which emerged from the peasant  farmers’ movement, La Via Campesina, and offers a community empowering and environmental alternative  to the global food production system.

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a socio-economic model of agriculture and food distribution. A CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production. CSA’s focus is usually on a system of weekly delivery or pick-up of vegetables and fruit. The CSA movement began in the early 1960s in Germany, Switzerland and Japan as a response to concerns about food safety and the urbanisation of agricultural land. Groups of consumers and farmers in Europe formed co-operative partnerships to fund farming and pay the full costs of ecologically sound, socially equitable agriculture. In Europe, many of the CSA style farms were inspired by the economic ideas of Rudolf Steiner and experiments with community agriculture took place on farms using biodynamic agriculture.

CSAs are yet to catch on in Australia, with just three that I’m aware of:  foodconnect.com.au, purplepear.net.au/csa.html, and biodynamic-food.com.

Purple Pear Garden with chicken enclosures

Community  gardens are “about taking back the ability to produce food for ourselves. At the supermarket, you not only don’t connect to the food system, but the money goes out of the region. People are looking for a sense of community, and they find  it in their local community garden” (Claire Cummings). Find Australian community gardens and community supported agriculture  at communityfoods.org.au.

Hear what Sid has to say by clicking the play button below.