Welcome to this special Urban Agriculture podcast series celebrating Urban Agriculture Month – Nov 2022.
My first guest is Jacqui Besgrove of Pocket City Farms in central Sydney. Back in 2015, they began the transformation of a disused bowling green into a wonderfully thriving community food hub, and they want to contribute to urban farming becoming a normal part of our society and urban fabric.
Local sustainable food production close to where the bulk of our population live – and can connect with and learn from – is integral in securing a healthy future for our communities and our planet. Pocket City Farm is about growing local and organic produce, providing education about food and farming, and creating community connection through being a welcoming place full of fabulous programs.
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Jacqui Besgrove is COO at Pocket City Farms and has over 10 years of experience working as a permaculture designer as ¼ of Permablitz the Gong!, through her own private consulting practice Earthrise Permaculture and has experience applying permaculture design principles to social enterprise settings with her work at Green Connect. She leads Restorative Ecologies: Permaculture Principles and Practice as part of the UNSW Master of Environmental Management program. She is passionate about urban solutions and promoting permaculture principles and practice within our cities and suburbs to increase resilience and show how much fun radical downshifting can be.
Links:
- https://www.pocketcityfarms.com.au/
- https://www.pocketcityfarms.com.au/events
- https://www.facebook.com/pocketcityfarms
- https://www.instagram.com/pocketcityfarms/
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/pocket-city-farms
Full transcript below.
Morag Gamble:
Well, welcome to the Sense-making in a Changing World show Jaq, it’s an absolute delight to have you. This is a special series as part of Urban Agriculture Month hosted by Sustain Australia. And really the whole point of this is to celebrate urban agriculture in Australia, in all its many forms. And I know from the conversations that we’ve just been having about that your you’ve got your fingers in total, lots of different aspects of urban permaculture. So thank you for coming along and being part of the conversation today.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Morag, thank you, I would never turn down the opportunity to talk about urban agriculture.
Morag Gamble:
It’s pretty much in my heart, too. When I first finished doing a permaculture design certificate way back in the 90s. The first thing I did was to start a city farm – Northey Street City Farm. So the whole kind of focus around bringing urban permaculture, urban community permaculture, looking at how to ripple out these ideas as far and wide so that these places become also educational spaces. So I know that all the different projects that you’ve been involved in, are also educational as well from the sounds of it. So maybe let’s just begin, how did you find yourself becoming an Urban, permaculture, urban agriculture, advocate, activist.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Probably the easiest place to start is I did a degree back in 2006 in Environmental Management. I was pretty worried about the state of the world, I’d been working in international development and seen some really unsustainable development practices. And so I guess, came to that environmental management lens from that perspective, it was a great course, but very, very university focused and really teaching people how to be functioning in a dysfunctional system, a lot of corporate social responsibility. I got to the end of that, and I had all the fear and no idea. I had no practical skills or experience. But I had a real, you know, understanding of the climate crisis and what we were facing the next, I guess, 20 years and a really clear timeframe, you know, for missions goals that we had to hit. And so, pretty much straight after that I started getting really interested in permaculture, did an intro to permaculture with John Champagne, and then went down and did a two week course down at [inaudible] and absolutely changed my life as it does for most people who do a PDC. And from there, couldn’t get a job in sustainability, doing what I was doing in international development, but a group of us four friends in Wollongong started Permablitz. And I think for me, it was just completely life changing, particularly because of how much sharing was involved, you know, for Permablitz to have written those amazing guides, those how to guides for the host for the you know, event organizers, the facilitators, we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel up here, we could just grab that and run with it. And we sort of had three properties between us. And when our if no one comes, we’ll have three parties at our house and go from there. And the support from the community in the Illawarra, who was overwhelming. I think by the third Blitz, we had 60 people turning up. And it’s you know, sort of involves..
Morag Gamble:
For those people who don’t know what Permablitz is, who might be listening from another part of the world. Can you just give us an overview of what Permablitz is and how it works?
Jacqui Besgrove:
Yeah, so it’s really a day where the community can come together and makeover someone’s property. You know, based on permaculture principles, there’s a whole lot of fun, didn’t no one on the day would say, where designers work with someone or family to work out, you know, the priorities for their property and goals. And then you know, give them best practice, does permaculture design and then get the community together in one day to do that. And if you come along to three, you’re allowed to put your hand up and say I want to come to my place. So it’s an amazing way to build your community. So, you know, just to connect with the committee, we get people turning up who never want to host one but they just love coming.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. I think what we should do is make sure we keep a list of all the different resources that you’re mentioning And drop the links down down the bottom in the show notes. So we will make those Permablitz links available to people.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Yeah, for anyone who’s interested in starting out as a designer as well, it’s a really great way to cut your teeth as well, because you’re not paid for the design. There’s no money involved in Permablitz at all. And so it is a great way to start practising. We learned so much through that process.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, and you’re absolutely right. I mean, when you do a Permaculture Design Certificate course, a lot of doors opened. But as then it’s the practice of permaculture, it’s the ongoing learning, it’s the implementation, it’s the sharing, it’s the conversations that happen, deepening into your local community and local environment and local climate and local experience. That is really what fleshes out that kind of framework that you’re handed in a permaculture course.
Jacqui Besgrove:
I think it’s an amazing way for people to find, you know, their special superpower as well, you know, for we had a designer whon her passion was drawing and you know, actually creating the designs, but we had another one who was just the green thumb, she could grow anything. We had me who was like, I don’t know, if I can bring anything to permaculture, you know, I’m a project manager, I’m really good at admin. Is that a skill that was needed, and it really was as a facilitator, then we had someone else who was amazing at the social media, the marketing, the email list and things like that. So it was also really about recognising that not everyone has to go and follow the same path in permaculture.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. So you create this sort of ecology of an organisation where you’re all sort of..
Jacqui Besgrove:
A beautiful network that’s way stronger for you know, the sum of all of its parts.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. So where did the Permablitz take you once you started doing that? What did that unfold into next for you?
Jacqui Besgrove:
For me, I mean, for us, as a community, it unfolded into just this amazing community. For me personally, it meant that I could get my first job in sustainability when I was [inaudible] you know, I coordinated and facilitated Permablitz isn’t that like, Oh, she sounds great. And so that was a real surprise to me that volunteering could be the thing that unlocked the door, not my fancy degree or my, you know, 12 years of work experience.
Morag Gamble:
That is such an important point that you just made, I experienced the same thing as well, you know, I went through my environmental planning and design course, landscape architecture course. And the same thing in terms of getting work, or creating work that came through that experience in volunteering.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Absolutely, and that’s what I say to everyone. You know, I know, for a lot of people, volunteering is not always possible. But even if you can just give a little bit of time, it’s such a good way to get skills and experience. And likewise, now, as someone who coordinates a lot of volunteers, I love working with volunteers and finding out why you’re here, you know, what can we do as an organisation to support you to take the next step you need as well?
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, yeah, it used to be my role, too, when we were getting started down the Northey Street City Farm. I’d be the person who’d always been kind of like, we didn’t have any water or power or anything down the city farm, when we started, I just have to get down to the the tap down to the river and carry buckets of water and boil up the little campfire in the middle. And I was there welcoming people like I was the kind of the welcome committee and people come in and find out what they’re interested in, and then buddy them up with people so that we started to, you know, build those skills and strengthen the networks that were there already. And people would quite quickly find their place in their community.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Also volunteers come to us with this wealth of experience, too. So it’s finding out you know, what they bring because we get volunteers who are so highly skilled in certain areas?
Morag Gamble:
It’s absolutely I know, it’s amazing. So you’ve mentioned too, that you worked with a project called Green Connect.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Yeah, so unfortunately, the role at the university lasted about six months, and then we [inaudible] into government. And we were literally sat down and said, the head of environment sacked, you’ll just have to wait out this election cycle till the environment’s back in fashion and back on the agenda. And I wasn’t prepared to sit on my hands for three years. And so I took a chance. And I think it took an $80,000 pay cut and took on a two-day-a-week job with Green Connect. And it was, I think, a three-month contract, something like that. And at the time, we were working as volunteers to save the farm site that had already been established, but the funding had run out on and that’s a 12-acre permaculture farm here in the Illawarra in Warrawong. And then my role also very quickly became working in zero waste. So managing waste at big music festivals and events, and working in an employment creation process to support former refugees for their first employment experience in Australia, which, when you’re sorting out, huge bins of you know, all manner of stuff. It’s really easy to teach someone how to do that with zero English. So yeah, a really interesting project and one that’s that’s going strong today.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. So can you tell us a bit more about Green Connect and its involvement in in and working with refugees and young farmers as well?
Jacqui Besgrove:
Yeah, I think when when I came to the project, it was sort of a fairly new idea and what was a fairly small project. And there was a team of us who came together, one to save the farm site. And that was partly because all of the former refugees who were being supported at that point were surveyed, and over 50% came from farming backgrounds. And you know, we’re way more highly skilled than than any of the organisers in terms of farming. So to create a space where people could use those skills. It was also based at a local high school on Department of Education land, and an amazing school Warrawong High school because every Primary School has a permaculture garden, as part of the living classroom program that Aaron Sorensen and Dan Deighton have been working on tirelessly down here for over 20 years. Then they’ve got the permaculture garden at the high school, and then the farm side. And the idea of the farm site was that kids who weren’t thriving in the classroom, would be able to get some paid work experience out on the farm. And it’s certainly grown and changed over the years. But a couple of the young students I worked with, up to sort of seven, eight years ago, are still in employment at the farm, you know, in the last in the last year or so.
Morag Gamble:
And so where does the food go to? Like, who uses the farm? How does it work?
Jacqui Besgrove:
Predominantly, it’s a CSA system. So I, when I left, I think we were feeding around about 200 households a week, with drop off points and deliveryquite a big enterprise and watching during COVID, in particular, the explosion, I think we went from 100 customers to 200, almost overnight. People suddenly realized, oh, we need food security, and we need this in our urban areas, we can’t have this far away. We saw that with the fires and the floods those supply chains along, and they’re not particularly effective in a crisis situation. So it was interesting to see the, you know, the uptake. And people, I think having that aha! moment that urban agriculture, and growing food where we live is really important.
Morag Gamble:
So you have this farm, and you’ve got all the school programs, and you’ve got Permablitz programs, there’s obviously a big focus on this in your area. I wonder what the local government or other agencies in your area are doing to support that or what more they could be doing to support that kind of program?
Jacqui Besgrove:
Yeah, I’m interested in that as well. And I’m interested to hear from anyone who knows more, because I’m not particularly connected in the local government area. But I think it is something that we’re starting to really hear more and more that local governments are realising urban agriculture needs to be a priority. I was in a presentation recently with someone from Hong Kong, and he was talking about how Singapore have suddenly said, we want to source – I can’t remember the stat, but I think it was, you know, up to 60% of all their food from Singapore, locally within Singapore. And you know, how Singapore is, I think Canberra have recently come out with a local government strategy, saying they want to achieve food security, and setting targets for how much food we can produce. And you know, it’s not necessarily going to be wheat crops or you know, maybe even our rice or our lentils, but certainly lots of those things that are lovely to have fresh, you know, that you want to be able to grab, like your green, your leafy greens, or your salad veggies should be able to be grown, you know, within a really close local area.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, that’s right. And I mean, then it saves all the transportation and all the refrigeration and all the loss of product as it’s going between places. It makes so much more sense.
Jacqui Besgrove:
And then as we’ve seen more recently on areas hit by a disaster, which we know we’re going to be increasing in the years to come, it doesn’t knock that out for everyone else. So hopefully, we can build more resilience in that way. And then how we can then wrap that into regeneration, so that we’re moving beyond resilience, and actually improving the amenity and improving the urban greening the biodiversity and all of the things that we need to rapidly do in urban areas.
Morag Gamble:
As you’re talking, I’m thinking about when you said, you finished university, you’d learn about all the things that were going wrong, but you felt like that, that sense of feeling well, what can I do about it? How have you found that shifted in you? Like, we still know that all of that is there but how has being involved in permaculture shifted that and have you been able to also be a communicator of these ideas differently because of your experience with urban agriculture and permaculture?
Jacqui Besgrove:
I think what I’ve loved and certainly don’t get me wrong, I have many dark days. When you see certain news reports come out, or when you maybe make the mistake of reading in detail those 1000 page IPCC reports, but we’ve got this huge opportunity, the problem is the solution right? So we absolutely need to use this energy that everyone’s got and trying to turn that fear and that anxiety into positive action and showing people that you can start at your back doorstep you can do something and I think for me, it was a bit of a roundabout journey I was maybe that that wastewater for a while that was shaming people for using one straw or a plastic cup or something like that. I think it’s also about doing that with the community all these individual actions mean nothing unless we do them together. So I’m really interested in how we build a community around that and build projects in our communities that support people to feel like they’re acting together, not just sitting at home trying to use plastic straw in a mason jar or something like that.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, and it’s absolutely essential, isn’t it. Because that whole idea of making people feel bad, or like, or just feeling like you’re alone in this and just a little bit this a little bit that. Together with all of us, and then speaking up, we’re able to get the kind of systems change that needs to happen. And I think it really is an approach that we need to focus on.
Jacqui Besgrove:
It is, and I’m in a position at the moment where I’m asked occasionally to give lectures at uni. And one of them, they asked me to be a guest lecturer in an environmental activism course. And I was like, God I guess what I’m doing is activism. But I don’t see it as you know, out there on the frontlines of activism. But it is, it’s that, you know, those daily changes. But I was asked to speak ast utopian project. Absolutely devastating. Because if growing food locally is seen as utopian, well we have some serious work to do. How do we move it from utopia to something that’s just our everyday?
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, yeah, I take a leaf out of the permayouth’s book, because they talk a lot about PRACTIVISM. So it’s this idea of everyday, practical, positive activism. And that is permaculture. And they deeply see themselves as climate activists, but through the lens of permaculture, and I just absolutely love that. And so I use that a lot in terms of thinking about being an activist and stepping up and speaking up about the things that are going on in the world. I think to this idea of taking it into the universities, is becoming more – I just spoke to University of Tokyo the other day. Getting invited too, to speak into different, like masters programs, bachelors programs, even speaking, various summits and conferences that are being organised by universities, there’s something about what’s been happening in the permaculture movement and urban agriculture movement that I feel is kind of in a bit of a missing link, in terms of what you know, and it because it’s kind of community generated, because it’s very grounded, very practical, very accessible, but also deeply reflective of systems thinking and all the latest science that we have, it’s, it’s the visible edge of that.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Absolutely. And for me I’ve always been really interested and really picked up and run with permaculture, because there’s nothing else that gives you that holistic systems view. And universities traditionally have had lots of little silos or working on amazing things. But yeah, I think everyone’s realizing that we’ve got to stop compartmentalising and building silos, we’ve actually got to start looking at the bigger picture. Because that’s sort of the thinking that’s got us into this situation. It’s definitely probably best to have a look at it from a more holistic view. And I think it’s great that universities seem to be embracing the generalists a little bit more as well. Certainly, the Environmental Management course, it’s not about becoming a specialist in a certain area, but the course that I teach in, it is about embracing generalists.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, so, we haven’t really talked about that yet. But you actually teach permaculture, in a university, you teach people to become permaculture designers in a university, that’s not common.
Jacqui Besgrove:
I’m realising that as I go along, I’m maybe a little bit nuts to take it on. But I was offered the opportunity. The old master’s program that I did, as I said, was really focused on corporate social responsibility. And an amazing new associate professor took over that program. I did a couple of guest lectures as an alumni. In each lecture, I basically told the same story I’ve told you, you know, did the course came out of it with all the fear no idea had to go study permaculture. And she said, I’ve heard you say this in a few lectures now, would you come and teach permaculture? And I thought, no, but I can find you someone who would do that, you know, and then went home to my partner. And she was like, say, Yes, you know, you’ve got 10 years experience doing this. We don’t have time for people to wait to have 40 years experience to be able to step up into these roles. You’ve done that master’s program, you know what’s involved? What’s missing for you? So put those two things together. But I was also really aware a PDC is quite a big commitment. And a lot of students would want to be able to do that. They’re paying 1000s of dollars in fees anyway. And so yeah, I said, Look, I’ll do it, as long as I can run it as a PDC. And it was only 30 hours face-to-face, I think. But there’s a lot of take home activities, as you know, a couple of hours of work to make up that 72-hour course. And we do a field trip, which last year with COVID We weren’t able to do which was the first one I’d run out that was really difficult. But this year did a field trip to some amazing sites in Sydney and down in the Illawarra. And you know, It was just mind blowing to have students in their reflection saying, oh, watched the video and I read about digging as well. But now I’m digging as well with my friends, that was that, to me is the life changing stuff that you often don’t get at universities, it’s that hands on practical, really going, living it, seeing it, that I’m really keen to bring to that as well.
Morag Gamble:
So the feedback from the university has been positive? Because this needs to be shared [inaudible] every university. Is it as an elective? Or is it a course subject? Or how does it work?
Jacqui Besgrove:
It’s as an elective alongside a bunch of other amazing electives, including one, which is on indigenous knowledge and caring for country course, which I kind of almost force the students like, you must do that one as well. You know, this is something that we really need to explore more in permaculture. But yeah, it’s not a core course. But there’s a lot of students like we are able to fill the course each year. And it’s been it’s been really popular. So feedback so far is great. I’m not sure if I can say it on video, but I think you know, I’m bringing the [inaudble] academia and the non-formal education somehow combining that I think with the education and keen each year how I can do more and more of that, less lectures more amazing.. I just came off a permaculture teacher training course with Rosemary Morrow and Brenna Quinlan. So I’m heads exploding with ideas on how I’m going to..
Morag Gamble:
Oh, fantastic. That’s great. I actually did a interview with Ro, you must have been on the other side of the doors, she was outside sitting. It was great. Yeah. And I think this idea of bringing in a different perspective into university course, I used to teach at Griffith University in a food politics course. And it wasn’t a PDC. But I wove in as much as I possibly could, in every single lesson and took in huge amounts of plants. And all of those students ended up having gardens at the end of it. And one of the projects we were looking at food waste, and they could choose whatever they want to do for their project. And some of them actually went out dumpster diving, and then came back and organised a great big feast for the whole class out of the dumpster.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Well, I do have that as one of the bonus activities, and no one’s ever..
Morag Gamble:
Oh, wow.
Jacqui Besgrove:
I’ll make that compulsory for next year!
Morag Gamble:
It’s just mind blowing.
Jacqui Besgrove:
[inaudible] foraging, right. So I’m really passionate as well about how we can say to people zone 5 is the national park over there. It’s that degraded waterway that’s near your house that you can have an impact in regenerating. Make a map out all five zones of permaculture on their map, and some of them, they might be quite far away. But that’s to me where whereas zone 3 is there are city farms, aren’t they? They’re urban farms. They’re the sort of areas that we need to start embracing. What role might you play in that? And for some people, it’s like, I’ll just be a customer. And that’s great. That’s all we need. Other people are like, oh, I want to go and be a community organiser or volunteer or, you know, there’s so many different ways to do all this.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, I think it’s so important to really look at those roles, because often people go oh, I can’t garden or I’m not going to get into that. But it’s not just about the growing of the vegetables.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Absolutely!
Morag Gamble:
Put a permaculture lens on what you do then all of a sudden, the world looks different.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Yeah, my role at Green Connect now is to buy a box of veggies every week and then not have to worry about growing half that stuff. I can focus on leafy greens and herbs that grow well in my shady yard.
Morag Gamble:
And help to organise and educate and mycelium and a whole lot of other action, which is maybe we could start talking a little bit about Pocket City Farms now because that’s somewhere where you’re spending a fair bit of your energy these days. So can you tell us a little bit about Pocket City Farms because I know that it’s it’s quite close to the centre of Sydney and I know it’s been going for some time now. And it’s a huge hub for people.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Absolutely. So yeah, our founder is Emma and Zag in I think back – can’t remember the first year they started talking about it, but by 2015 they wanted to showcase urban agriculture in Sydney and Melbourne seemed further ahead, you know, Brisbane. Sydney seemed a bit a bit lacking in that area. And they were really inspired by Brooklyn Grange and the rooftop farming over in New York, and assumed they’d end up on a rooftop somewhere, and to their delight found that the old Camperdown Bowls Club had been abandoned and it has to be accessible to the local community. So they partnered up with of all people that camp around Hurlstone Park RSL. They put up the money to redevelop the site and redevelop the Bowls Club into a restaurant with the idea of having a farm to table restaurant. And in terms of getting the farm side of things started, there was a crowdfunding campaign. So again, there’s the community helping to build the change. And in 2016, the farm opened up for the first time and has been going strong ever since. I was made redundant from my role in I think 2020, it was COVID? And that’s when I started working with Pocket City Farms. And when I walked in, the entire site had been, we had people regularly contacting us saying, is the farm been abandoned, and what’s going on, there was a huge staff change. But my colleague Rob and I came in at the time and then quickly recruited another amazing Farm Manager Rich who had been working down on his own CSA system in Wee Jasper supplying to the Canberra market. And so I guess we were sort of the new team that took it forward from there. And really saw that it’s a pretty small site, it’s 1200 meters squared, it’s two bowling greens, we only got two of the four bowling greens that’s as big as my backyard in Wollongong. So it’s really a demonstration site. It’s a real hub, as you said. We run team retreat programs for corporate groups looking to do corporate volunteering, I had a team that walked from the city the other day, because they were trying to get their steps up. We will do a really lovely sort of zoom out on Google Maps and you can see just how close it is to the city. But it has, it’s really become a place where the community can connect, we run a lot of education programs for students as well. And for a lot of students, they’ve never seen a vegetable growing. This is the first time they’ll have experience getting their hands in the soil. Seeing how Market Garden operates. We’ve got a little demonstration garden to show what’s possible in a tiny Sydney terrace-sized backyard. And really, I guess I’ve worked in the last two years to try and wrap that market garden in a whole Permaculture system and really look at how we can use every inch of space. We’ve got a community food forest on the verge out the front, which is going from strength to strength and about 180 metres squared of food to share with the community. There’s an honest distal, there’s a street pantry where people can drop off dried goods. And we run lots of volunteering programs as well so people can come and farm volunteer, we do a community volunteering session during daylight savings on the third Thursday of every month, and we do a big community meal. It’s sponsored by Young Henry’s which is lovely over there. And we’ve got compost carers who are busy, you know, making sure that none of the weed seed goes back onto the farm and that it’s all pasteurised, and we had chickens, the chickens have left but they’re just about to come back. So we’ll have a chicken carers program as well.
Morag Gamble:
Tell me more about the community meal because that was something that I found was really key to inviting people in and keeping people coming in.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Absolutely. So the volunteering session that we hold on the 3rd Thursday of every month, during daylight savings, people come and work for about two hours off, and we’ve got up to sort of 50 people on site. And then we’ve got this just amazing team of community chefs. We had a fundraiser dinner the other night, and the same team of community chefs came and cooked dinner for 80 people predominantly out of produce on the farm. And you know, just trying to showcase all parts of the plant. So Yukako, who’s our sort of lead community chef is a chef herself and passionate about not wasting any part of the plant, when the farm was under green manures she was still buying mulberry leaves to make tea and buying wheat salads and all sorts of things. So yeah, it’s really I think food, food’s a great connector, everyone eats. And for a lot of people, like you said they might not necessarily want to be out there growing the food, but their passion is cooking it and preparing it for other people. So yeah, we’d love to have those community meals just to reconnect everyone. All walks of life are welcome. And I think I sort of had this little misconception, oh, it’s in the middle of the city. It’ll be sort of all a bunch of young, white hipsters, and I couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s such a diverse community. Really interesting who you meet and the skills that they bring. Yeah, it’s absolutely wonderful. And I think, having been through the experience and helping set up Green Connect, and then now coming to Pocket City Farms, my passions really turned. We’ve done this for sort of 5 to 7 years now. We’ve done all the dumb things, trust me. We’ve made all the mistakes, how do we document that and get a sort of farm starter kit or something, you know, so that we can actually start having these kind of projects everywhere and move from that Utopia to our reality is that we do grow food in our cities. ‘One way we’ve done that is with the Find a young farmer incubator’ program. So we have this year trained two young farmers, knowing that our farm manager was leaving, so one of them will take on the farm. And then they’ll basically train the trainer so they’ll train the next lot. And this continual program where we are actually training the farmers of the future, and hopefully with our school kids coming through inspiring them that you know, being a farmer in the city is a career prospect and something that you could think of doing in the future.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, fantastic. That’s so important, isn’t it? I’ve actually noticed a bit of a change over the time because we bring students into our Ecovillage here. Also we used to do it in the city when I when I was living there. And I used to ask people all the time who’s thinking about becoming a farmer or wanting to do this and no one! They would sit on their hands, I think no, no. And so in terms of actually creating viable, urban agriculture futures and livelihoods, how would you describe that? Because it’s not just growing the carrots and the lettuces, because that might not just be enough, just growing the vegetables, there’s other dimensions to it. So for you, how would you describe a viable urban agriculture livelihood? And what are you trying to share with people when you’re doing these incubator programs?
Jacqui Besgrove:
I think from my perspective, what I’ve really seen is that we often expect our urban farmers, whether they’re young, or whether mid career changes to do everything. So they’re expected to grow the carrots and the lettuces and everything, but they’re also expected to be social media and marketing gurus, they’re meant to be able to find customers and keep those customers. They’re meant to run voluntary sessions, they’re probably at farmer’s markets, you know, farm gate stores. So they’re actually required to do so much. And to me having been through this startup process with Green Connect, and then seeing the startup that the guys at Pocket city farms went through it’s this perfect recipe for burnout. So, if we’re able to, I think, take some of that pressure off with our young farmers that we’re training instead of them, right, we’ve got a site for you. Because let me tell you, there is no shortage of land in urban areas, once you start running something like pockets, advance people offer us land all the time, but don’t necessarily have the farmers to go along with it. So for me, it’s about saying to them, Go, Go grow the veggies, we’ll find the market for you, we’ll prepare all your work, health and safety systems we’ll do your invoicing, we’ll do all the boring stuff. We’ve done a lot of work. My colleague Rob is an absolute wizard at all the tech side. So we have this thing with QR codes now and getting those systems so that all that data is recorded, you know, trying to take all those difficult steps out of it and be able to say to people who are new to farming or young farmers just go and get good at growing?
Morag Gamble:
You see, that’s not just going out and doing it yourself. That’s being part of a bigger ecology of organisations in a way.
Jacqui Besgrove:
And that’s what I’m trying to do with Pocket City Farms at the moment is go, where do we take that next? What does it look like? Is it you know, a whole bunch of farming cooperatives that, you know, has PCF as the support? We’re trying to work out what that looks like at the moment. And we’re really interested to hear from people who would like that support as to what would benefit them as well. So, I’m not saying we have the answers at the moment. But..
Morag Gamble:
This is fascinating, because this idea that you’re actually being offered land and you don’t have farmers, there right there’s this huge opportunity. And if you have this community network and the market, and all of that set up, all of a sudden, possibilities just start to kind of open where they were not before.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Absolutely. The only other missing piece, I would say is there is a little bit of startup capital involved in a new site. And we don’t have that either. So we’re looking at how we find that startup capital, but it’s not huge. And we’ve floated the idea. Rich came to us with a walk behind tractor – game changer, even on a small market garden, but we don’t use it every day of the year. So if we had that on a trailer, and it could go around 10,12 different farms, suddenly, you’ve got this really efficient sharing economy of use of that equipment rather than sitting idle for 90% of the time.
Morag Gamble:
That’s great. I would imagine too that if you start to get a new site, and someone’s donated that site or invited you to come and use it, and you put together some kind of crowdfunding, that’s linked with this whole sort of bigger picture that quite quickly, you’d be able to generate that funds through a crowd funder as well, I would imagine because there’s already that support there. It’s not spending right from the very get go again,
Jacqui Besgrove:
Although I think coming back to what you touched on earlier, I think that’s.. wouldn’t that be amazing? If that was where local governments were starting to put that priority and say, You know what, we will come up with the startup capital if you can get it up and running.
Morag Gamble:
So urban agriculture grants, and remember, we now have community garden grants in Brisbane. So it’s just the next logical step really, isn’t it? But it does require them to have some kind of policy in place, which was why it was important we worked with local government in Brisbane to create this sort of urban community garden policy.
Jacqui Besgrove:
In Illawarra as well, a lot of work was done by some amazing people at council to get those community garden policies to be able to say, yes, we’ll enable that instead of us always having to work outside the system.
Morag Gamble:
There’s a shift that needs to happen because the community gardens is, it’s a community project. And it’s not about selling the produce. It’s about sharing and working together, as soon as it starts to become something where people are buying produce from a place. There’s something that shiftsin the local government perspective on what it is. And so I think that’s a really important part and I also really liked the idea too of really contemplating the possibilities of urban agriculture land trusts because there’s a lot of land in and around urban areas against put for bush land trusts, like, you know, rewilding areas, we could just as well identify where that best agricultural land is and if the local government or the state government could help to purchase that land, and that’d be available for urban agriculture, seeing that bigger picture of the of the resilience and robustness of our urban communities.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Absolutely and I think there’s a fairly big piece of work to be done in mapping that out, because, Sydney Water have got land, you know, sometimes universities have got land. There’s Department of Education, there’s lots of land, like. What I’ve loved about permaculture is once you start walking around with a permaculture lens, you’re like, Oh, look at all that lawn. Doing amazing stuff Farm it Forward, where people are literally saying, I’ve got a backyard I’m not using, farm it. So I think it’s not a one size fits all model. But there’s certainly work to be done in mapping that out, and you’re getting it really on the agenda as a government priority.
Morag Gamble:
Just going back to your utopias, I interviewed Rupert Read, who was part of the movement a while back, he sort of stepped aside from that. Now he was talking about Thrutopias. He said, you know, we have this notion that we’ve got this dystopian future, we’ve stepped back and thought, Oh, we want to create a utopian future. What we need to focus on now are the thrutopias, what are the stories? What are the skills, what are the possibilities to help us get through these difficult times, because it’s constantly changing, we can’t really see what’s going to happen in five years time. But if we have the robustness and the resilience and the skills we need to work through this. So that’s like, Permaculture is a thrutopia.
Jacqui Besgrove:
I learned new words today Morag. I love practivism and thrutopias, they’ll be in my back pocket from now.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, look, I think they’re fantastic words, I use them all the time. And as well as myceliate. We myceliate as community organisations. That’s where a lot of the power of these urban agriculture movements is. It’s not this visible force of an organisation, applying something, it is this network of people being inspired and connected. And it’s everywhere you look, you just need to scratch the surface and they see those mycelial threads connecting and supporting and feeding one another.
Jacqui Besgrove:
I’ve always said to come right back to the start to Permablitz, if we have to start on urban farm somewhere tomorrow, you know, all the trucks have stopped. I’ve got a group of swell diggers who are already trained up. I’ve got a group who can no dig like no tomorrow with any materials on hand. So, yeah, we’ve got those people, it’s just about making those connections. And I do I love that idea. We ran a permaculture design course at Pocket City Farms this year,as well, which I lead and most people come to you going, I want to know how to grow food one, you have to set set that expectation pretty early, we’re not going to be learning that much about growing food, we’re going to learn how to change the world instead. And then also people really focused on when I get five acres, when I can sustainably you know, properly can be self sufficient. And so, what I hope by the end of an urban agriculture focused PDC is that people like oh, well, we can do this right here, right now and get on with it. And I don’t need that five acres that I thought what I did,
Morag Gamble:
Yeah, that’s right. And it’s such a shift isn’t it? Also putting a limitation on like, well, I can’t do it now. I’ll get to it maybe when I retire or I’ll I’ll get to it later on because I can’t afford to move out yet or I can’t I just don’t have that possibility of doing that. But particularly with this focus on working together and bring whatever skills and wherever we are, the change is totally possible. I focus on doing this in our urban areas where most of Australia lives it’s absolutely essential.
Jacqui Besgrove:
I get people turning up they don’t own a car because they live you know, they’re probably living more sustainably in some ways and that person on five acres because they’re walking, they’ve got access to public transport.I think the the work needs to be done in our cities. And we’ve got people who actually love living in cities as there’s so many benefits of being able to connect with so many people with employment, all that sort of stuff. So I think it’s yeah, it’s a really interesting shift, isn’t it? Yeah. You know, how do we eat those cities?
Morag Gamble:
Well, thank you so much for joining me and conversation today about urban agriculture and the multiple different ways in which you’ve been involved in creating it and spreading it and sharing it and experimenting. And I think this is the thing too, isn’t it? Like, it’s not a fixed and done thing with a whole set of experts as well, people are just really playing with this idea of trying to find out what it means how it works, talking to other people. Cherry picking different ideas, putting it all in the soup, where you are and seeing what happens.
Jacqui Besgrove:
And if there’s anything that those of us who just have that little bit more experience can do to help. I always say to the students at the end of a PDC, which I need to fast track this. You don’t have time like me to sit back and for 10 years go, Oh, should I be a teacher? Or not.
Morag Gamble:
Step up and speak up and do what you can. And then if you feel confident one way but not in somewhere else, find someone else who could do that bit. And as a team, you can do it. Absolutely. Yeah.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Yeah. Well, thank you so much. It’s lovely to talk all things Urban Ag. We’ve got a few events at Pocket City Farms that hopefully I’ll get up on the website very soon.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. So is that all for part of urban agriculture month?
Jacqui Besgrove:
Yeah. And we’ll certainly be having our regular volunteering and working listed as urban agriculture month. And I think we’re hopefully going to have an in conversation session with Rosemary Morrow and her amazing new book.
Morag Gamble:
Oh, brilliant. Yeah. I have it right here next to me.
Jacqui Besgrove:
isn’t that a gift that book?
Morag Gamble:
Absolutely wonderful. Well, for everyone who’s listening, I’ll drop all the links that we talked about down below and further information about how you can find Jacqui and Pocket City Farms and all the different projects and thank you so so very much. It’s been an absolute delight chatting with you today.
Jacqui Besgrove:
Absolute pleasure. I’m going to go off and look at some more thrutopias.
Morag Gamble:
Take care. Thank you.