I’ve lost about a third of my income this season due to the weather. I thought I had pretty good soil but we’ve had so much rain for so long that it just saturated.
Woonona, NSW
My name is Sarah Anderson. I live in Woonona, just south of Sydney, in New South Wales.
I started backyard market gardening about seven years ago. I wanted to run my own race, and started with no knowledge, no idea, no business plan. Just a north facing garden and sunshine.
Even an ordinary day in the outdoors is better than an ordinary day inside in an office. But it’s been pretty difficult the last couple of years. You’re just getting these extremities, and climate’s the major player.
It’s really hard to forecast patterns – each season I think I have an idea but then there’s a curveball. As a gardener you have to think weeks, months ahead – a fast growing crop takes eight to ten weeks from sowing to harvest, and a fruit tree takes years.
I’ve lost about a third of my income this season due to the weather. I thought I had pretty good soil but we’ve had so much rain for so long that it just saturated. We would have had 1,000 figs this year to sell, share and bottle, but there was so much rain we lost the whole lot because they split. Then two years ago I had to postpone the market garden because we had no water. Two thirds of my garden I had to let go because I couldn’t irrigate.
With all the rain, I was thinking I could build up the beds to drain faster and deal with the water and humidity. But if we got another dry period I’d be dehydrating my crops as I’m trying to grow them. It’s hard to know which way to jump – to plan for wet or for dry?
Climate change is a huge threat to food security. 75% of the world’s food supply is grown by small farmers, but there’s no support for farming at that scale.
I’m in touch with market gardeners up and down the east coast, and everyone’s struggling – people are setting up fundraisers or having to take second jobs because they can’t make it work right now. Those people are feeding their local community – if you can’t feed your people, what happens then?
We’ve got used to having whatever food we want whenever we want. But climate change is disrupting everything. People complain that broccoli in the supermarket has gotten more expensive but they don’t think of the grower and what they might be going through.
The government is meant to be the voice of the smaller everyday person. But they’re just looking after their own vested interests. It doesn’t seem like they’re caring about our ecosystems at all, or how we’re going to keep our home habitable.
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We have spent a summer trapped in our home with heatwave after heatwave hitting our city in the longest and hottest summer of my lifetime (and indeed the city’s lifetime). I have had to stop my three year old son playing outside day after day and we have all had to stay in the same room as it is the only air conditioned one. Summer used to be a time of fun, of outdoor barbecues for dinner, of freedom. Now it has a feeling of containment and dread. My job requires me to confront climate issues and victims of bushfire and other disasters and their experiences and the flood of climate information leave me feeling deep grief, distress and helplessness. My little son loves animals passionately and i dread the day I will have to tell him about climate change and about how so many of the creatures that inspire him are threatened by mankind’s very existence. I fear he will grow into an adult in a time of increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, in a country weakened economically and fragmented socially by these disasters. That by the time he grows up the Great Barrier Reef we describe to him will be dead and gone. Having him despite my fear for his future was an act of hope and defiance, but that hope is hard to maintain when our governments will seemingly not act to end the use of fossil fuels and replace them with renewables with the speed that will give my beautiful child the bright future he deserves. I hope and pray that this case changes the situation. And I thank these elders for bringing this action.
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