Farming on Sydney’s fringe: can it survive urban sprawl?
As shop shelves emptied, we looked for food produced close to home. For farmers on Sydney’s fringe, it could spell hope.
Odd thing to panic buy, chickens. Yet in the six weeks following the official declaration of a global pandemic, Matthew Fenech, an egg and poultry farmer in Horsley Park on Sydney’s semi-rural western fringe, sold nearly 6000 hens to city-slickers looking to shore up their food supply with a new backyard coop. “And they were lined up out to the road for eggs too,” he says, casting a bemused look at a single brown feather resting lightly on the ground between himself and a socially distanced visitor. One feather. No chooks. Just a stinging waft of manure as a heavy metal door judders open to reveal an empty shed.
Fenech is a no-nonsense type with a neat salt-and-pepper beard and a pithy line delivery. He runs about 22,000 free-range and caged birds across 3.2ha that his grandparents bought in the 1960s, and another two leased plots nearby. He says the panic-buying gave him a headache. “We were running out of eggs by 10am,” he says. “You can’t physically produce 10 times as much just because people suddenly want it. People didn’t like being told there were no eggs.”
Fenech worries about the long-term viability of the impulse-bought live chickens: “It’ll be like when people buy cats and dogs at Christmas time,” he says. But, during that mad month of March when coronavirus began its ruinous advance in earnest, the panic was real. And it brought into sharp focus the issue of food security. People who had never thought about supply chains in their life were suddenly scrambling for sustainable food sources and their attendant peace of mind. Bunnings had a shelf-clearing run on seedlings, and flour became rarer than the teeth of backyard hens as home cooks turned to baking their own sourdough and – again, oddly – focaccia.
The details of what we’ve found comfort in – whether it’s egg-laying chickens, fortresses of loo paper or a throwback ’80s flatbread – will prove useful fodder for social scientists of the future. But there’s little doubt that, for a population used to getting what it wants when it wants it, those empty supermarket shelves were a shock.
It’s an ill wind that blows no good, however. Farmers charged with filling Sydney’s food bowl have long warned of the threat that rampant development poses to the resilience of the city’s food systems. Now, in the shadow of a global pandemic, could their decades-long battle against urban sprawl have taken on a new imperative? In the absence of the white noise of overconsumption and the clamour of an overheated housing market, will their voices ring louder?
Yes and maybe, says NSW Farmers Association president James Jackson, who believes COVID-19 has exposed the fragility of existing food supply chains into the city. “When things go wrong, it’s useful to have something in the fridge,” he says. “We were all getting complacent about how controllable life is, but this pandemic was not in anybody’s business plan.” As the crisis has winnowed people’s genuine needs down to basics, Jackson has noticed a new appreciation for agriculture and a greater respect for farmers, both of which he hopes will become part of the new normal. “I suspect it will be a longer term reset,” he says. “Yes, these empty supermarket shelves will recede in memory but it’s a little reminder that I think will embed in the psyche of Australians for some time.”
The coronavirus outbreak has meant upheaval but also opportunity for the culturally diverse group of agriculturalists on the fringe of Australia’s largest city. They work more than 2000 farms between the Blue Mountains and the coast, from the fruit orchards of Bilpin to the cabbage and cauliflower farms of the Hawkesbury river flats, from the market gardens around Penrith to poultry and livestock in the Wollondilly shire. Since the pandemic struck, these producers have reported upticks in farm gate sales and home deliveries. For Bilpin orchardist John Galbraith, this shift in behaviour is the long overdue wake-up call needed to strengthen the connection between consumers and producers. “People are suddenly taking more notice of where their food comes from,” says Galbraith, who has watched apple and stone fruit orchards in the region shrink from 90 to just eight since moving there in 1972. “And they want the security of food produced close to home.”
Jackson, who farms livestock at Guyra in NSW’s Northern Tablelands, didn’t even connect farming with the state capital until he was elected head of NSW Farmers two years ago. “The Sydney basin is an extraordinary story,” he says. “I didn’t realise that it produces such a huge amount of food.”
Agricultural production in the Greater Sydney region is valued at about $1 billion, he says, while the total for the state is about $16 billion. “So one sixteenth of the agricultural output of NSW actually comes from all those farmers in the Sydney basin, which is extraordinary considering how restricted the area of land is and all the encroachments and pressures on agriculture there.”
The past 20 years has seen an acceleration in the rate of urbanisation. “Land at the moment is prioritised for development over agriculture,” says Dr Federico Davila from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney. A case in point: Hawkesbury Council recently submitted plans to the NSW Planning Department to transform 11 rural properties at Glossodia into a 580-home residential estate.
And that’s not the only competition that food growers have to contend with. The fertile Hawkesbury region, which once filled Sydney’s basket with peas, beans, cauliflowers and cabbages, as well as apples, plums, apricots and citrus, is now largely given over to turf farms, which generate a higher, more dependable yield. “Farming is not seen as a useful activity in urban areas according to NSW government planning laws,” Davila says.
The Institute for Sustainable Futures recently published its Sydney’s Food Futures report, a project completed in partnership with the Sydney Peri-Urban Network, which represents 12 councils bordering metropolitan Sydney. The chief take-out from the study is a warning: if current trends continue, Sydney stands to lose 60 per cent of its total food production by 2031. Vegetables, meat and eggs will be hardest hit: according to the report, 90 per cent of current production will disappear, based on the state government’s metropolitan strategy, the Greater Sydney Region Plan, which concentrates urban growth around the city’s north-west and south-west. Instead of meeting 20 per cent of the city’s fresh food needs, in just over a decade the Sydney basin would satisfy just five per cent of demand.
“COVID-19 has shown how vulnerable societies are to shocks and it highlights the need to have strategic planning in place,” says Davila. “These shocks might continue to occur; not necessarily health shocks but we’ll have more bushfires, more extreme climate events, and it stresses the need for short supply chains, for the food security needs that may eventuate.”
We’re unlikely to starve. As Minister for Agriculture David Littleproud pointed out in mid-March when panic-buying hit ludicrous heights, Australian farmers produce enough food for 75 million people – three times what’s needed. “The argument we’re trying to make is that Sydney would lose a lot of high-quality products based on short supply chains,” Davila says.
There are other reasons farmers cite for growing fresh food as close as possible to the nation’s largest consumer base. Beyond the increased cost of trucking in food from further west, city farms reduce the environmental impact of food miles and provide green space for a growing population and a habitat for wildlife. They also help cool the city, an upside of particular significance for Sydney’s sprawling western suburbs, where tree canopy cover is at its lowest and temperatures soar.
And there’s this: primary school kids raised to believe food springs fully formed from the shelves of air-conditioned, fluoro-lit supermarkets. Kids who visit Gavin Moore’s Sydney basin dairy farm, for example, and are shocked to see milk squirting out from a cow’s undercarriage. They’re so isolated from the source of their food, he says, that unhealthy eating habits are almost inevitable.
Moore is a seventh-generation dairy farmer whose family put down roots on 400 acres (160ha) of green rolling hills in Glenmore, near Camden, nearly 200 years ago; today they run 220 milking cows. In the 1960s, the Campbelltown-Macarthur area supported about 300 dairies. Now there are 12. “It’s not just dairy farms being sold to property developers,” Moore says. “It’s beef and orchards too. We’ve seen cashed-up overseas investors land-banking in the hope that in the next 20 to 25 years they’ll be able to move in and unlock 500-acre parcels of land.” The NSW Planning Department projects Sydney will need to build 725,000 new homes to meet population growth over the next 20 years. Moore’s sigh is tinged with resignation. “When all our prime agricultural land has houses on it, how are we going to feed ourselves?”
The heirloom tomatoes growing on Rita’s Farm might look a bit wonky, but one plush, sun-ripened bite and I’m rocketed back to childhood afternoons spent trailing my grandpa through his lovingly tended suburban vegie patch. Back to a time when tomatoes didn’t taste like wet cardboard. “A tomato that is ripened on the plant, that is picked red, tastes so different to one from far away that’s picked green so it can survive in transport,” says Christina Kelman, tweaking another jewel-like fruit from its stem. “It ripens in the box and then you get it and it tastes like nothing.”
At 26, Kelman’s farming journey has just begun. Thumbing her nose at the insecurity of a future that also promises drought, rising labour costs, long hours and often back-breaking work, Kelman gave up an office job two years ago to work the organic market garden her Chinese immigrant mother, Rita, started as a backyard plot in 2005. Today, the Kelmans have 20ha on the Nepean River at Wallacia on Sydney’s south-western fringe, not far from one of Australia’s biggest construction sites – a vast stretch of land that, in 2026, will become Western Sydney International Airport.
“For Sale” signs have been springing up like mushrooms after rain, as land prices soar due to the planned Badgerys Creek airport and the so-called Aerotropolis supporting it. The development pushed the Kelmans’ operations from Kemps Creek 24km further west to Wallacia. “The area’s been rezoned and it was just not commercially viable any more as a farm,” Kelman says. “You just can’t justify the cost of farming with those sort of land prices. It’s like saying, ‘Let’s do commercial farming in the middle of Bondi’.”
Kelman understands her neighbours’ impulse to sell up. “You have to think not just, ‘Can I grow this and make a profit?’, but ‘Can I grow this and make a bigger profit than I could leasing the land for a car park or to put a McDonald’s on it?’,” she says. “A lot of these farmers immigrated and have been farming for 20, 30, 40 years. Are they going to keep farming and move further out, or are they going to retire?”
Kelman crouches to pluck a neon-green leaf from the soil: “Here, try some wasabi green.” Two rows over, worker Xiao Yu (“It means Little Fish”) is harvesting bok choy, shaded from the sun by a conical straw hat. He’ll pick 600 bunches today, to be boxed and delivered to the doors of loyal customers all over Sydney. During the height of the lockdown, when farmers’ markets were closed, the farm was selling 300 boxes of vegetables a week.
The viability of Rita’s Farm is shaped solely by its focus on niche, high-value crops sold direct to the consumer. It’s just one of the ways urban farmers are having to duck and weave as the margins become more marginal. John Galbraith, for example, brought up seven children on his Bilpin orchard only by supplementing his income with part-time lecturing work. More recently, he has switched it to a pick-your-own business, catering to tourists. “Without that this orchard wouldn’t be a viable proposition any more,” he says.
Two things Sydney basin farmers have in common: a passion for producing fresh food with a high nutritional value, and a desire to preserve the city’s connection to its agrarian roots. “I think it’s really nice the way that when you buy wine you have the sense of the region but also you get that family story behind the farm that grew the grapes,” Kelman says. “There is a very beautiful story to this area in south-west Sydney: all the migrant families – Italian, Maltese, Lebanese, Chinese, Cambodians, Vietnamese – came here from pretty much nothing. They’ve all worked very hard on the land and look what they have achieved over their lifetime. Why don’t we have that sense of provenance towards our food, not just wine?”
Like Kelman, Alex Doan toyed with office life before quitting his job as a civil engineer to join the family business, growing snapdragons, gerberas and statice, a delicate filler flower, in Horsley Park. “I like being outdoors, in the fresh air, getting my hands and feet dirty,” says Doan, whose father began farming in the area upon emigrating from Vietnam in the 1990s. “You wake up, you see flowers blooming, it’s beautiful.” Doan is one of 12 farmers leasing land in the 53sq km Western Sydney Parklands. He hopes to soon add roses to his inventory, saying: “About 90 per cent of roses come from Africa, China and Colombia; they are treated with chemicals and maybe put in cold storage and the flowers have no perfume.”
Parklands Trust executive director Suellen Fitzgerald says about 100ha have been earmarked for farmers to grow fresh fruit, vegetables and flowers to sell at the farm gate and into markets across Sydney, “retaining the cultural heritage of farming and market gardening” around the city.
“We’ll end up with about 20 farms in Horsley Park and maybe double that across the parklands,” she says. “Our masterplan looks at ramping up the farm gate component so you can buy direct from the producer, but also introducing walking and cycling tracks and food outlets to make it a destination; you can come out to an accessible farming area and see where your food comes from.”
The Parklands are part of the changing face of farming in Western Sydney as the region scrambles to cater for another million residents by 2030. The 500ha agribusiness precinct planned for the Aerotropolis provides another glimpse of the future: a high-tech one based around intensive food production systems, the key elements of which are centralised data centres and automated growing environments. The Western City & Aerotropolis Authority says such a food production hub could support 2500 new direct and 12,000 indirect jobs, but Davila from the Institute for Sustainable Futures sounds a warning. “We need to remember that intensive systems won’t necessarily be run by farmers; they might be run by someone in an office,” he says. “A lot of it will be very tech-based. So yes, growing food intensively can be good for very short supply chains, but there are wider implications of who’s going to do the farming and how diverse is this food going to be.”
Warren Waddell, a fifth-generation orchardist growing persimmons in the Hills district town of Galston, experienced his busiest ever weekend for farm-gate sales at the height of the lockdown. He attributes that partly to the COVID-related closure of the central Growers’ Market at Flemington, but also “there’s little doubt the current conditions have turned people’s attention to better health”.
Nevertheless, he says, conventional farming in the Sydney basin is “finished”. “As land becomes more and more expensive, it’s impossible to justify,” says Waddell, who juggles a job as a Hornsby Shire councillor with the seasonal harvest. “We’ve moved from this term ‘primary production’ to what I would term ‘rural enterprise’, which is more like a thousand different land uses combining to generate a rural amenity that’s quite enjoyable but has no relationship to primary production.” The Persimmon Place is located on the site of the original Waddell family orchard, established in 1889 to grow citrus. Since then, the Waddells have downsized from 23ha to 4ha and switched to growing the high-yield, high-value boutique line. “We have a very valuable product and twice the average land holding of anyone around us, and it still would only pay one person full-time,” he says. Without a supplementary income, he says, farming becomes merely a hobby for “rural lifestylers”.
“The agriculture industry in Australia is doing extremely well but it’s all on scale and it’s all based on a relationship with major retailers,” he says. “What we have now around Sydney is just a combination of rural residential with hobbies that somehow align with different rural usage. Even in horticulture, the most active industries are turf, nurseries and flowers, none of which you can eat.”
A panic-driven upswing in urban farming on a micro scale may have temporarily cleaned out Matthew Fenech’s chicken shed at Horsley Park. But it’s too early for anyone to say whether attitudes and habits will change in the long term and what, if any, impact the new sense of vulnerability will have on Sydney’s farming fringe.
Christina Kelman is young enough to be hopeful but not unrealistically so. “We have customers come out to our farm and take a beautiful photo of our produce for Instagram and tag it #shoplocal and that’s nice,” she says. “But there’s a point people reach and they will make the choice of price and convenience over anything else.” She shoos a white butterfly from the leaves of a fledgling cabbage. “Like, if you tell someone they can only eat apples three months of the year because the rest of the year they’d have to come from cold storage, they’d say they don’t care where it comes from, they want to eat apples all year round.”
She’s also unsure how many people are willing to absorb the higher cost of food produced close to the city, on land worth up to 10 times that outside the basin. And yet. She smiles at a new thought. All those customers clamouring for home deliveries. Swarming farm gates. Overcome by a primal need to move close to the source. “There could be a deeper awareness sinking in,” she says. “I think when people are a bit more connected, they make smarter decisions about their food.”