In Season

Australia’s farmers are delivering food in new and old ways.

- Amanda Burdon

STUART WHITELAW IS EXCITED THAT POTATOES ARE BACK ON THE MENU. NOT JUST ANY POTATOES, BUT CREAMY EARLY SEBAGO SPUDS GROWN AT DEUA FARM, ON THE FERTILE RIVER FLATS JUST 5KM UPSTREAM OF HIS HOME NEAR MORUYA, ON THE NSW SOUTH COAST.

He’s fresh from the town’s Tuesday farmers’ market, having filled his basket with potatoes, fennel, beetroot, cauliflower, broccoli, blueberries, stout bread, and full-cream Jersey milk and cheeses – all grown and made by people he knows, no further than 20km away.

“The joy of our market is that it has brought us back into the rhythm of the growing cycle, eating whatever is in season,” says Stuart, a retired architect, artist and keen home gardener, who helped establish the market. “You can buy just about everything you need – seafood, meat, dairy and vegetables – and it’s true local food. I know exactly where it came from and the values of the people who produced it.”

Vegetable production – mostly corn, tomatoes, beans and potatoes – was a mainstay of the Eurobodalla Shire economy throughout the 1950s and ’60s. But mechanisation and larger-scale agricultural production put paid to most of the small market gardens that quilted the coastal strip. It became nearly impossible for residents to buy anything grown locally.

Then, in 2009, came not-for-profit community organisation SAGE (Sustainable Agriculture and Gardening Eurobodalla) with a bold plan: to inspire home gardeners to get their hands dirty and grow a commercial food supply.

“We wanted to become much more self-sufficient locally and to recapture and share the knowledge and expertise of the old farmers before it was lost,” Stuart says. “But any food system is about a lot more than food. It’s also about growing the community.”