Hope for community gardens in Ballina

Ballina Shire Council staff say they could come up with a list of public sites suitable for community gardens in the region within a week if officially requested.

Councillors at today’s ordinary meeting, the last scheduled for 2023, are due to debate making active improvements to Ballina’s food security via community gardens.

Food security has, along with and partly owing to climate change, become a major environmental theme in the twenty-first century as trade agreements criss-cross the world and the carbon miles stack up.

The first batches of cherries to become available in Northern Rivers shops, for instance, are seldom Australian, let alone local.

But such sweet delights were likely far from local minds when grocery shop shelves started to empty the longer delivery trucks were unable to make it through flooded highways.

Anyone with access to a vegetable garden was likely better placed in terms of feeding themselves and their family, provided it hadn’t flooded, of course – someone with a garden and chooks, even better so.

But with a persistent declared housing crisis and exorbitant land prices on the Northern Rivers, many are having enough trouble finding shelter, let alone space to grow food.

Community garden local hubs elsewhere

Mullumbimby’s Community Gardens in the Byron Shire have become a thriving hub of shared and private allotments in recent years and a space where people gather to share the food grown and skills learned.

Food producing experts from inside and outside the region are sometimes invited to share specialised knowledge, via bee-keeping workshops, for example.

The Byron Shire Council recently voted to allow operators of the gardens to keep various structures on-site including a men’s shed and storage facilities.

A walk around the gardens including chats with gardeners reveals a mix of purposes.

There are tiny herb gardens and bigger veggie patches tended by individuals and groups, as well as more industrial lots supplying small local enterprises.

Lismore’s community gardens are also on a floodplain and have started to sprout again, with the local ‘really free’ markets recently taking residency there.

Council staff only need a week to devise list of options

It’s the only notice of motion scheduled on today’s meeting agenda and has three parts aimed at requests for staff action as follows:

1. Increase the number of community gardens in the Ballina Shire by identifying suitable public land in each major town and village, in line with its existing Community Gardens Policy;
2. Conduct an audit of disused Council owned or managed land that may be suitable for small-scale food production, and pending identification of suitable sites, provide further information on the feasibility of Council providing affordable leases to individuals or co-operatives capable of producing food for local markets;
3. Write to the Hon Tanya Moriarty, Minister for Agriculture and Minister for Regional NSW, requesting that the government deliver their overdue response to the Legislative Assembly Committee on Environment and Planning’s 2022 Inquiry into Food Production and Supply in NSW.

Staff in their comments have said they would only need a week to carry out the tasks listed.

Northern Rivers food insecurity post-disaster highlighted

Cr Dicker has referred to the cost-of-living crisis in Australia in her motion, as well as the local floods and landslides and a recent report from Northern Rivers community group Plan C in collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney.

Plan C is an evolution of Resilient Byron and the group says its focus is still largely on localised community resilience in face of climate change.

The group, which, coincidentally, includes regular Echo contributor Professor Richard Hill, has expanded across the Northern Rivers and in June partnered with the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures to produce a report called Is the Northern Rivers food system resilient?

The report explores the state of food chains in the Northern Rivers, with one of its major findings described by Plan C as a ‘lack of a coordinated government approach to disaster food security, with the burden of addressing food insecurity falling on the community’.

Cr Dicker’s agenda notes elaborate, saying how the report highlighted a need for a more localised food system, ‘drawing on community led food production and supply such as farmers markets, local food retailers, small scale agriculture and community gardens’.

One of the most significant barriers, Cr Dicker notes, is the loss of agricultural land to residential and industrial development, resulting in the loss of land suitable for food production and increasing rural land values.

Call for government to help fund local food systems

Cr Dicker’s reference in her motion to the 2022 Inquiry by the NSW Parliament into Food Production and Supply in NSW is also addressed.

The inquiry, Cr Dicker says, highlighted the important role that local governments play in addressing food system issues.

She quotes from the inquiry report’s recommendation number six: ‘NSW Government works with local Councils to develop and implement strategies to improve local food systems, and provides appropriate funding as required’.

Cr Dicker says the report also notes ‘the important role that community gardens and urban agriculture play in strengthening food security’.

Today’s call for work to start on the introduction of more community gardens into the Ballina Shire may seem straightforward but a recent attempt to overturn a partial balloon ban initially unanimously supported by councillors shows politics in the Ballina Shire Council is never simple.