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Mapping the Food Potential of the Blue Mountains

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Among other global environmental crises, climate change resulting from increasing greenhouse gas emissions challenges us to radically change our lifestyles. These changes focus on minimising our use of energy and natural resources — creating and maintaining local production and exchange to achieve collective-sufficiency using our bioregional natural resources to provide basic needs, food security, for all our residents. A key question is: How can we provide food security for all residents of the Blue Mountains?

Currently, in 2009, food grown in the Blue Mountains (BM) meets only a tiny proportion of the demand of its residents. Produce grown for commercial purposes tends to be highly selective specialty products. A small number of households grow vegetables, fruit and nut trees at home. We know that many fruit trees on public and private lands produce surpluses that go to waste.

At the same time there are groups and enterprises supporting home gardeners and food exchange, such as the BM Permaculture Network, the food cooperative (Katoomba), weekend markets in the upper, lower and mid-mountains, the community gardens (Katoomba), gardening in schools and deliveries of food boxes.

What we aim to do

The aim of the mapping project is to collect data to help us understand the natural and social potential of the Blue Mountains as our food basin.

Our strategy starts with Stage 1, simply collecting data on vegetables, grains, fruits and nuts in relation to:

1.    what is growing where right now (commercially or on public or private land)

2.    what grew where in the past

3.    what, from a theoretical point of view — given all the various soil, vegetation and weather types in our region — is likely to thrive or simply grow well with care

4.    what groups, institutions and key individuals are (and potentially are) active in gardening, farming and local food distribution.

How we will do it — activities

Stage 1.1

Some of this data already exists, so Stage 1.1 is identifying what is known — what is growing where right now — by consulting with:

·        government agencies, such as local council and Department of Primary Industries

·        industry organisations, such as Citrus Australia and Apple and Pear Australia Ltd

·        community-based organisations, such as our food cooperative and Slow Food Blue Mountains

·       residents with knowledge and skills offering relevant information (via media releases in the BM Gazette & BM Echo etc.).

We can start this process with a list of possible sources. Ideally, this list includes contact details and a couple of sentences describing the source and what kind of information we expect them to provide. After someone has contacted or logged onto this source and found something useful then it moves up into a new list of annotated sources. With government agencies with complicated websites it is just as likely that we will need to monitor what is updated by returning to the site, say once every 4–6 months.

If you have gone onto a website and been able to download or cite information directly there you can record it, but always keep a record of the URL, title of the document or section and the date. We need a standard form too when we directly target identified sources to record the name of the informant, the person who has collected the information and a date. These forms can be collated by one person, or a designated group of people, onto excel sheets, which will provide the data base for presenting the information visually in print and online maps, Stage 2 of our project.

Stage 2

As to Stage 2, the local council offers a large format copying service (which we will request to make use of free of charge) and the GIS officer has offered support for us using Google tools to map this data. The best forms of presenting the material are unlikely to evolve until we are clearer about the range of data we want to present, and its detail, but the best way to visualise it as a series of layers with distinct kinds of plants on each layer. There will be a vast entire bioregional map zooming down to townships and neighbourhood levels.

Stage 2.1

The same groups but also others — such as historical groups and senior citizens as well as Indigenous people — can be approached for the data related to what has grown here in the past (Stage 1.2). Local history books and scanning old newspapers will provide other sources. This could be a surprisingly rich approach given in times gone by there were presumably stronger pressures to produce locally both commercially and on land around homes. (The BM fruit and nut tree lists include people with historical knowledge to share.) Again how many layers will be required for this information will only evolve.

Stage 2.2

This level of data collection, theorising about what might grow here even though it doesn’t at present and doesn’t seem to have in the past is creative and exciting because it involves dreaming and experimenting, as well as asking key local individuals such as Rowe Morrow and Stuart Hill, for their analysis.

Stage 3

Once we have spent a year or so collecting this information, we need to move to a Stage 3 of consolidation and maintenance (by 2011). At this point we will have decided on a structure for the mapping and have online maps that can include interactive functions that allow people to lodge their information online. The details of the vision for this stage will be formed during the process of collection and preliminary presentation.

Stage 1 has started with all our discussions and activities around the question, ‘How can we feed ourselves?’ Lizzie has started a sheet of what is growing where. The embryonic fruit and nut tree network lists are another source of information. Though some of the detail is confidential we can provide a clear idea of what kinds of things are already growing in certain areas.

We need to agree on both a staged plan, along the lines outlined, and some clear organisation. Once the plan is confirmed, it is simply a matter of volunteering and delegating involvement in a specific aspect of data collection and having monthly meetings, preferably on a set night, like the first Wednesday night of every month.

Where more than one person volunteers to collect data on a particular aspect of food security, e.g. there might be a whole ‘army’ of people interested in potatoes, then they will comprise a working group with internally decided organisation but report back to monthly meetings. One of the responsibilities of a volunteer or working group of volunteers will be to make the meeting or report back through a brief email. These working groups are likely to evolve around a question or objective and then dissolve once their purpose had been achieved. They will not just involve food, two might be set up in semi-permanent ways: one for data collection into the excel data sheet and the other on web presentation.

The whole group will solicit advice, assistance and funding wherever possible too, so we need to formalise ourselves by deciding on a name too.

29 April 2009 by Anitra Nelson

Progress since April 2009

Transition Towns Blue Mountains have held a harvest gathering in May, where the mapping project was presented. It was agreed since that gathering that the food security project would form the working party for the Food Security aspects of the Energy Descent Action Plan.

Stage 1 is about to begin in greater ernest, as members of the Slow Food group are contacted to participate in the mapping project. Data will be collected in a google spreadsheet, and used for initial mapping examples. It is agreed that we can also incorporate the zone system to assess where the food comes from. Designing Our Way to a Sustainable Food System is one method of assessing food that is to be adopted.

Stage 2 has been progressing. Sue has been collecting and collating information about what foods were grown the Blue Mountains by white settlers and into the 1900's. It is agreed that contact and collaboration with the local indigenous peoples should be made to build more solid bridges within our community and grow our local knowledge on indigenous foods. Initial data suggests that surplus crops were not grown in the mountains until the Market Gardens were initiated in the late 1800 and early 1900's.

The extent of maps or layers is potentially boundless.

 To refine the project activities at this stage we have suggested the following maps/layers

• initial concept design map to show what the layer maps could contain
• potential  - what can be grown in the mountains, based on climate and past experience
• growing areas that are available now
• series of maps with specific crop types, including fruit and nut trees, showing location, and indications of quantity
• seasonal maps where appropriate or sub-bioregional maps 
• retail outlets, exchange locations, meeting points for food sharing

Work is also required on what the baseline quantity of food per person is in the region. It is agreed that Department of Health and other statutory bodies will have guidelines on what minimum food requirements are recommended. We are currently seeking this information. It would also be of interest to create a map now of what people generally eat, and how eating habit might change as food supplies change. This harks to a comment Roberto Perez made regarding the challenges that Cubans had to face when their oil supplies dried up overnight. Their diet was traditionally of a European nature, influenced by the Spanish, containing lots of rice and not many leafy green vegetables. It was not based on the climate and what could easily grow. This has now changed out of necessity.

Maps and the information they contain can assist in the development of modified/changed diets that are aligned with supply as opposed to tradition. They can assist in the education involved in assisting the community to make suitable changes.

Updated 15 June 2009 Celeste Salter