​The following is taken from a presentation which Gerry recently delivered at the NSW Landcare Conference in Orange NSW.
 
The City and the Soil
A circular economy from the Ground Up
Introduction
 
Despite 2015 being recognised by the United Nations as the International Year of Soil, we still see little recognition of soil as the fundamental base for the production of food and with it the basis of all forms of human economy.
 
The principal focus for humanity throughout its entire existence has been access to food. This access to health and wealth was stabilised with the rise of agriculture, the farming family and the shift away from hunter-gather societies.
 
Food is the pure basis of the human economy. Food, as nutrition, is in fact the basis of all forms of economy financial or ecological. Protection of our agricultural base and with it protection of our soil is fundamental for human survival.
 
The soil is our mother, everything we are, everything we ever will be is predicated on what we eat.
 
But with our expanding coastal social structure and the emphasis on the city and with that the focus on urbanisation, society is losing it's connection with our soils and the farming community as our food producers.
 
Despite the rising interest in TV cooking programs and quality food being described as the “new rock and roll’ – the urban population is losing both the connection to and the knowledge of food production systems.
 
With the loss of that connection goes the influence of the food producer on government policy and the farming individual as the doyen of our soils.
 
Agriculture as a percentage of our Gross Domestic Product has fallen to around 15%. (ABS). While this may not seem to be of strategic interest – growing food is the basis of our entire economy.
 
The diminishing influence of agriculture on GDP seems to coalesce with a reduced understanding of the importance of agriculture in economic circles as the basis of our economy.
 
However, no economist has yet come up with an alternative to food as the key to community.
 
Along with the falling influence on GDP, Leigh Vial, Nuffield Scholar, pointed out in a recent Department of Agriculture seminar in Canberra, that farm family employment has fallen from 250,000 in 1980 to 150,000 in 2010. Farming families in total may in fact represent less than 1% of the total Australian community. www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/Lookup/4102.0Main+Features10Dec+2012
 
Yet this tiny percentage of our population is responsible for our daily sustenance.
 
While the political interests of our food producers used to give the farming community a 15% political influence thirty years ago, this has now fallen to 5% and with it, the ability to persuade and influence the conversation and the national agenda.
 
So while food production in reality maintains its important role in the function of any nation state, understanding of its economic function, input needs and influence has fallen dramatically.
 
While discussions on food and importance of cooking are celebrated on prime time television, the importance of agriculture as the producer of the very food cooked on those programs and the survival of farming as an industry are not.

Details on how City and the Soil works and its success in engaging community can be found here: www.groundswellproject.blogspot.com 
 
Details of how the program works at Armidale-Dumaresq can be seen here:
​www.armidale.nsw.gov.au/environment/waste-and-recycling/city-soil

 Compost project in Samoa - Opportunity for Food Plant Solutions

An organics composting programme in Samoa is clearly showing that with the correct design community composting can take a leading role in healthy food production. Local groups using their own food waste and garden waste can create a first step to underpin community garden food production and community health. This compost process will fit readily into any of the Food Plant Solutions programs around the world.
 
The model designed and implemented by Canberra based Waste Recycling Environment Network (WREN), is intended as a model for use in smaller communities where size, scale and population determine the placement of the process. The SPICE compost process in use has no odour, requires no turning and takes only 10 weeks to produce a high-quality compost product.
 
The funding for this project came through the Recycle Organics project designed by the Centre for Clean Air Policy with funding from the Department of Environment and Climate Change, Canada (ECCC).
 
This community site has its own compost shed where nine 1.2 cubic metre boxes, lined in fine woven cane mats, sit side by side under protection from wind and rain. The box designed originally by Maye Bruce in the 1920s was used in the Dig for Victory Program in World War II Britian to grow food for a population under siege by Germany.
 
The boxes sit side by side and are based around the number of participants. They are intended to be individually filled on a weekly basis. The locally made SPICE compost inoculant enables the boxes to safely reach well beyond the pasteurisation temperature of 55 deg Celsius, without fear of spontaneous combustion. In many instances the temperature can be held for over a week, to produce a weed free, quality compost to be used later in the production of local food for the participating families.
 
The compost process is entirely scalable from several to hundreds of homes.  Initially 20 households have registered to bring their food waste to the existing site in covered buckets. Households are given a spray bottle of the compost inoculant to control any potential odours. 
 
Whenever supplies of food waste become too large for the given number of boxes the compost process can be easily expanded to a more traditional windrow system. This can be supplemented with grass and vine trimmings from local homes and public lands. The process is intended to expand to up to 100 homes at this site while seeking out other locations including the establishment of a larger site on public land at the local landfill
 
At the heart of this Samoa compost project is a potential training program which could be spread throughout the Pacific and around the world on the basis that the SPICE compost process can collect and compost without odour or turning and at any scale. As such it has enormous potential to build on the Food Plant Solutions work where more than 35,000 edible indigenous plants have been identified in many communities around the world. As such it provides not only the basis of a networkable Zero Waste program but is also a living model of a full circular economy. Its potential impact on Non-Communicable Diseases such as diabetes and other community health issues is also significant.