Domestic residential garden food production in Melbourne, Australia: a fine-grained analysis and pilot study

Even though cities cover approximately only 3 per cent of the earth's land area, they are often located on what previously was prime agricultural land. In line with what was common historically, many cities around the world are now deliberately seeking to promote and expand agricultural production within their borders. Pressure for change is coming from a number of sources, including both governments and private citizens. Potentially, community gardens and domestic backyard food production have an important role to play in this process, but while there now exists a sizeable body of research on the former, there is a serious lack of data on current productive practices in private domestic gardens. While other researchers have asked householders to estimate garden production, we believe this to be the first project to carefully document measured output by multiple households. The paper presents the results of a fine-grained study of 15 selected householders in metropolitan Melbourne. Participants collected detailed daily information about their food production over a three-month period. In addition, two of the respondents had been keeping daily production records continuously for one or more years. The results demonstrate enormous diversity in the food harvested, as well as some extremely high levels of productivity from relatively small domestic spaces. Participants were also questioned about their motivations for engaging in backyard food production and dealing with surpluses.