23/04/2024
From Jen Sheridan on Linked-In. Australian Food folk - can you help by participating/sharing to networks? Critical investigation for understanding the value of small farms and their contribution to our nations's food system resilience.
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One of my first projects as a food systems researcher was the Know Your Foodbowl project, which looked at how much food was being grown in the farmland close to Melbourne. We wanted to know how much was growing there because the government and developers viewed these city fringe farms as suburbs-in-waiting, and would argue that they weren’t producing much food at all compared to what they saw as the ‘real’ farmland far from the cities.
As we delved into the question of what grew there, we hit a roadblock: 🤔 farms under a certain turnover or size weren’t included in the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ measurement of agricultural commodities (also known to some of us as ‘food’ 😂). Try as we might, we couldn’t access any data that showed the full production of the region, and we never managed to find a method of extrapolating from other data sources to fill the gap: we just had to accept that small farms’ output wasn’t going to be captured 😔 Our project did find that the farming area was one of Australia’s most important, and I’ll share more on that another time, but we always knew it was an underestimate.
Enter Young Farmers Connect! They are undertaking a critical piece of research to fill this data gap! Their Small Farms Survey has just launched, and I strongly encourage farmers to take the 15-20 minutes they’re asking for to complete it.
Governments rely on data when they make decisions about land use, funding, and how to support farmers. And to-date small farms have been invisible to them, so are often ignored in policy.
Fill in the Small Farms Count Survey to make this incredibly important sector visible!
