Australia: Sydney once produced its own food – but urban development has devoured the city’s food bowl
Over the last 70 years, Sydney has engulfed most of its local food producers. It wasn’t due to poor soils, floods or disappointing harvests. It was a deliberate choice to privilege capital gains above all else.
By Joshua Zeunert
The Conversation
September 3, 2025
Excerpt:
Cahill’s promise was in vain. Farms continued to be paved over or turned into housing as the suburban expansion gathered pace. Smaller urban farms disappeared in the face of pressures from developers and larger rural producers. Urban development has now severely weakened Sydney’s local food economy.
Sydney still has room to grow food, which would boost resilience in the face of climate threats and extreme weather. But the city has long been geared towards converting farmland into houses, shops or industries. Today, the city’s five million residents rely almost entirely on food transported into the city’s topographic basin.
We have unearthed the diversity of what was lost in our new book, Sydney’s Food Landscapes and in our Google Maps database of the city’s former wealth of food production sites.
In 1770, the naturalist Joseph Banks recorded the botanical abundance of Kamay (Botany Bay). He later convinced the British House of Commons this would quickly lead to a self-sustaining colony. Following reconnaissance, Governor Arthur Phillip moved the settlement north to Port Jackson, but European crops didn’t grow well in the sandstone soils.
The colony almost collapsed in the “hungry years” of 1788–92. Soil fertility is usually blamed for this, but we argue poor agricultural planning and social factors were also central causes.
In the mid-19th century, Botany became a prolific food district. Chinese market gardeners transformed sandy wetlands through highly productive cooperatives, ingenuity, irrigation and liberal application of night soil as fertiliser. At their peak, market gardeners supplied up to half the city’s vegetables, hawking vegetables such as cabbages and turnips door to door.
Read the complete article here.
Source: https://cityfarmer.info/australia-sydney-once-produced-its-own-food-but-urban-development-has-devoured-the-citys-food-bowl/
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