Events

Sustain: The Australian Food Network's third national Urban Agriculture Month is happening from 1st - 30th November 2023, and everyone is invited! Urban Agriculture Month is a month-long celebration of all things urban agriculture, featuring a range of exciting events happening right across Australia. From open gardens, workshops, guided tours, communal feasts and other hands-on learning experiences, we bring people together to connect, share and learn.

Sustain: The Australian Food Network's 4th National Urban Agriculture Forum (UAF), will be held from 17th-19th November this year in conjunction with Community Gardens Australia’s National Gathering, exploring this year's theme of Feeding the Future, Nourishing Country. How can urban agriculture create more nourishing cities and towns and foster more socially and ecologically just urban environments? The UAF is an opportunity for policy makers, practitioners and innovators to explore these que...

Sustain: The Australian Food Network is hosting our third signature event for this year's Urban Agriculture Month in Canberra. This Urban Agriculture Forum: Churchill Fellows Speak with Senator David Pocock at the Endeavour Centre on 7 December will discuss the importance of urban agriculture and edible town, cities and suburbs. We feel strongly this is a movement whose time has come.

Co-hosted by Sustain: The Australian Food Network and City of Sydney, the Sydney Urban Agriculture Forum held on Fri 11 Nov is the centrepiece of the 2nd national Urban Agriculture Month. This Forum will be a celebration of the fantastic work underway across Sydney to strengthen the city's food system in face of mounting and serious challenges. It will also be a deep dive into some of the policy and practice responses to those challenges, at the global, national, state and local levels. Th...

Urban agriculture - the growing of food in urban and peri-urban areas - is as old as the first world’s first cities. In early 2022 Sustain worked with Agriculture Victoria to conduct a first-ever mapping and survey of the urban agriculture sector in Victoria. What did we learn? Urban agriculture is always about much more than growing veggies. Now more than ever, urban farmers in all their diversity can play an important role in helping governments and communities meet the challenges of c...

In 2021, Trust for Nature secured funding from the Lord Mayor's Charitable Foundation to collaborate on an innovative project: Protecting our Sustainably Managed Farmland. The project, also supported by the McLeod Family Foundation, identifies a number of permanent protection and collective ownership models that can secure important peri-urban landscapes threatened by encroaching development, and support new and young farmers seeking access to sustainably managed farmland. A feature of the proje...

Join Nasser Mashni, 3CR presenter & Vice President of APAN (the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network), as he hosts a global discussion on food sovereignty in Palestine. Coinciding with World Food Day, Saturday the 16th, this conversation will feature guests & voices from an international network of food justice champions & agencies.

The Victorian Independent Food Systems dialogue explored key challenges and opportunities facing Victoria's food system now and in the coming decades.

Valuing the food that we eat starts from knowing where it came from. That means knowing who grew it, how it was grown, and what it takes to get it from paddock to plate. At this farm tour, we'll take you out to Willowmavin, about an hour north of Melbourne, to meet the farmers behind Dalhousie Farm & Remi's Patch.

Care Farming & Gardening in the Climate Emergency. You are invited to the 3rd National Urban Agriculture Forum (UAF) in 2021! Join us as we explore the growing urban agriculture initiatives in Australia and beyond and the positive impacts it has on our community’s health and wellbeing.

The ways in which large institutions, such as schools and hospitals, purchase food have a sizeable impact on the larger food ecosystem. Leveraging institutional food procurement can be a powerful means of supporting local producers and ensuring consumers access to nutritious food--potentially creating a food system that is more equitable, sustainable, and resilient. In this webinar, Program Director Jake Claro and Network Manager Sarah Danly will discuss their experiences with institutional proc...

Increasing protection for farmland is a crucial step in bringing about food system resilience and fair food access. This is a particularly pressing issue for the areas surrounding Australia's fast developing cities, but assuring the long-term security of farming areas is a pertinent lesson for the country as a whole. In this webinar, Program Director Jake Claro and Network Manager Sarah Danly will discuss how their work in Vermont attends to the intersection of food access with land use planning...

A three-part webinar series that invites Australians involved in the food systems communities of practice to learn from the Vermont Farm to Plate plan.

In the first of a three-part webinar series, Program Director Jake Claro and Network Manager Sarah Danly will share an overview of the decade-old program: How it has successfully increased employment, business creation and food security through collaborative, whole-of-system actions and networking, aligned to a shared agenda of a better food and farming system for Vermont.

In this webinar, we are excited to highlight the important policy and program implications of the National Pandemic Gardening Survey. Our detailed analysis and presentation, the result of weeks of work, will focus specifically on the role of local government, health services and other key stakeholders in supporting and enabling edible gardening and urban agriculture.

In this month’s webinar, we are excited to present our findings from the recently-completed Pandemic Gardening Survey. The national survey was conducted in the hopes of understanding how COVID-19 and its restrictions have impacted people’s attitudes and actions towards growing their own food. Speakers include Costa Georgiadis, Naomi Lacey, Kelly Donati and Nick Rose.

This webinar will highlight the importance of building social inclusion and justice into our urban and peri-urban landscapes and community agriculture projects, catalysing empowerment, knowledge sharing, training and employment opportunities as well as improving food security through the production of culturally appropriate foods.

Join Tanya Massy and Julia Laidlaw of Farmer Incubator, Joel Orchard of Young Farmers Connect and Sam Marwood of Cultivate Farms for a conversation with the new wave of farmers and connectors to discuss new models and opportunities for the next generation – and we can apply these innovations today.

In the face of extraordinary challenges and hardships, Australia’s food systems organisations have rallied in 2020. While restrictions ease, we know we will never return to where we once were – nor do we want to. Since our establishment in January 2016, we have said that so much of how we manage our landscapes and feed our communities is unjust and unsustainable. The major challenge we face going forward is how to keep the momentum up, grab the increased interest in sustainable and resilient...

Join Michael Buxton (RMIT), Andrew Butt (RMIT) and Nick Rose (Sustain) to discuss the pressures on Australian peri-urban areas – practice, protection, policy and development. The urban fringe holds 50% of Australia’s biodiversity and most urban water source, but land use decisions are jeopardising critical natural resources. What can we do to protect farming in the food bowl as demand for subdivisions and dwellings grows and climate change continues to take its toll?

Attended by over 50 people from the NENA conference and beyond, Higher Ground showcased the produce their chefs grow in their very own market garden and discussed their collaborations with Farmwall, who supply organic mirco-herbs and greens, and Wormlovers who supply vermiculture solutions to divert kitchen scraps from landfill.

The 2nd national New Economy Network Australia conference in partnership with the Australian Earth Laws Alliance attracted approximately 250 people. This year’s theme was “Strengthening the New Economy for the Common Good”, inviting people to come together to share stories of success, address challenges and join the broader movement.

A multi-disciplinary four-day event held at William Angliss Institute, in partnership with the Municipal Association of Victoria and the Transition Hub for Australia involving national and international keynote speakers and panellists, with a strong focus on sustainable food systems.

The 2nd national Urban Agriculture Forum, held at William Angliss Institute was attended by over 250 people, with more than 60 local and national speakers and presenters, including international keynote Lenore Newman. The forum was followed by a national speaking tour, reaching more than 1000 food system stakeholders, and supporting the formation of a statewide Food Futures Alliance in WA being led by Perth NRM.

The first Cardinia Food Forum, featured international keynote speaker Devita Davison of Foodlab Detroit as well as several state and local speakers. Attended by 100 people, this Forum was both a celebration of the wonderful work being done across the Shire as well as a call to action to work together to tackle serious food system challenges.

The Melbourne Knowledge Week Design Sprint for a Sustainable Food System, was a whole-day workshop attended by 90 people to explore the issues facing Cardinia Shire Council and co-design solutions held at William Angliss Institute.

The 21st Symposium of Australian Gastronomy, held over four days across Melbourne, featured dozens of artisanal agriculture and premium food producers, chefs and food businesses from around Australia and internationally.

The first national Urban Agriculture Forum held at The University of Melbourne, Burnley campus, featured two international keynote presenters and more than 40 local presenters and panellists, followed by a mini-national speaking tour.

The inaugural Australian Community Food Hub conference and national speaking tour was held in lively regional centre, Bendigo, with international keynote speakers from the United States and Canada and consisted of 13 events involving more than 1500 people with partners including several local governments, universities and TAFEs.