Empty supermarket shelves during the COVID-19 pandemic brought the issue of food supply chain shortages into sharp focus.
With 90 per cent of Canberra's leafy greens and fruit currently coming from Sydney, programs looking into urban farming and local food production are gaining attention.
Now the ACT government has launched a discussion paper asking the community for ideas to support food production locally, from backyard growing to rezoning of public land to allow for community gardens.
The discussion paper is intended to allow Canberrans to directly inform the ACT government about the changes they want to see in the territory's local food production standards, especially backyard food growing.
University of Canberra Associate Professor Bethaney Turner, who authored a Food in the ACT study in 2012, says the discussion paper is long overdue — the most recent data on local food production is thirty years old.
"In the Canberra region we have so much knowledge but we have very little data about how much food is actually produced here," she said.
"The last data we have is from 1992 from the ABS, which tells us that it was significant production in houses and in public spaces, but we don't know exactly what we're producing now.
"Without that benchmark, we can't really comment on how much more we need to grow, but we know that this is happening and that we can support this in a bigger way and encourage that distribution process whereby more people have access to nutritious, safe food."
A patchwork of urban farms
Canberra's Patchwork Urban Farm project has welcomed the discussion paper, and hope it will lead to more comprehensive government support.
Started by Karina Vennonen, the Patchwork Urban Farm project initially put a call out for appropriate space in people's backyards to grow vegetables on social media.
Five households offered up their outdoor spaces to be used for food production, with the planting, watering and production of the food done by volunteers.
In the space of a year, the harvest has been bountiful.
"We've been growing food in this area since August last year, and we would have only started setting up in July last year so we've definitely made some fast progress," Ms Vennonen said.
"[In one garden] we've got around 84 tomato plants, quite a few eggplants, lots of beans, lots of zucchini, lots of silverbeet and spinach."
Ms Vennonen said the produce gathered through the urban farms was then sold to involved locals on a sliding cost scale, based on their financial situation.
"Through all the produce that we grow in those [five] areas, we then supply 34 households every week a veggie box, which includes us, so we get to eat our own delicious food," she said.
"We also sell those veggie boxes on a sliding scale payment system, so people who come from a different range of financial situations can still get really healthy, affordable food."
Ms Vennonen said she was open to expanding the Patchwork Urban Farm project, and was hopeful the government's discussion paper would allow for more public space in Canberra to be used for food production.
"It depends on how many people are interested in working with us, but if we have more workers then we can work more land," she said.
Project member Michael Fairlamb said he hopes the new discussion paper will lead to more comprehensive government support of projects like theirs.
"There's lots of different ways that government support can be implemented, whether that's from a legislative point of view of making regulations easier for backyard growers, or giving financial support because it's not the most financially rewarding — although it's a very satisfying pursuit," he said.
"Distribution I think is another really big thing that I'm excited about for the papers. We use a sliding scale to make our veggies accessible to across the socio-economic range, and having government support for distributing to lower economic households would be great."
Connecting rural producers with city eaters
ACT Environment Minister Rebecca Vassarotti is also excited to see the results of the discussion paper, and put them into practice to "build a more resilient food system".
"What we're looking at is what we can do to ensure that all Canberrans have access to affordable, climate-wise, and healthy foods," she said.
"There are really good opportunities, such as the opportunity that we're looking at here with Patchwork Farms, where we're looking at how we can use land that isn't as productive now through connecting backyard growers to some of our producers [and] what we can do to promote this idea of more accessible food in the local context.
Ms Vassarotti said factors like Canberra's climate mean the city will "always be dependent" on other areas for some foods.
"But there are probably things that we can do to really increase the ability of this region to produce food," she said.
"There might be simple things like regulations to really support some of the local food production, but this is what the discussion paper is all about: getting people's ideas about how we can make it easier for people to grow and produce their own food."
