Feed Tasmania from Tasmania: Hard Policy for a Living Local Food Economy

Tasmania does not need another food strategy that lives on paper. It needs policy that changes what happens in paddocks, sheds, cool rooms and local markets every single week.

For too long, reform has skimmed the surface: reviews, pilots and frameworks that leave the material conditions of farming largely untouched. Soil is mined, small producers disappear, and regional towns leak wealth through distant supply chains. We debate food in reports while the real work of regeneration struggles to pay its bills.

If we look through a threefold lens of a healthy society, the problem becomes clear. Culture must be free and creative, governance must be fair and enabling, and the economy must serve life rather than dominate it. Our current food system collapses these into one blunt instrument: price. When price alone rules, soil, skill and community are treated as expendable.

The Grow Small, Feed All campaign takes a harder, more grounded position. Food security is not an abstract concept; it is the daily activity of people growing food on local ground, with local water, for local tables. If we want that to endure, policy must invest where life actually regenerates: the small and medium farm embedded in its region.

This is not a soft program. It is practical economic architecture built for resilience, reciprocity and grit.

Five concrete levers make it real.

1. Pay people to grow food locally

Provide regular public payments to small and medium farms that are demonstrably feeding their own region.

This is not a grant for an idea but dependable operational support for the ongoing work of growing food. Linked to real production, local sales and good stewardship, it stabilises income, rewards soil care and keeps diversified farms viable without forcing them to chase industrial scale.

If food is essential infrastructure, those who produce it deserve direct, reliable funding.

2. Guaranteed local procurement

Legally require a rising share of public food purchasing for hospitals, schools and other facilities to come from regional producers via simple local contracts.

This creates dependable demand overnight. Farmers can plan and invest; public money circulates through local economies rather than draining away. It turns ethical intention into binding practice.

3. A revolving community farm fund

Establish patient, low-interest finance for essentials: water systems, fencing, greenhouses, processing sheds, shared machinery and on-farm energy.

As loans are repaid, funds are lent again. One public investment becomes a permanent commons that backs generation after generation of growers, lowering the hardest barrier to entry: upfront capital.

4. Local processing and storage

Build and support regional abattoirs, commercial kitchens, cool stores and distribution hubs so food can be cleaned, cut, chilled and packed close to where it is grown.

Without this, small producers are trapped by distance and cost. With it, value-adding and employment stay in region and new entrants can begin without building everything alone. This is foundational infrastructure, no less vital than roads.

5. Land access for working farmers

Create long leases on public or trust-held land and strong incentives for private landholders to lease affordably to active food producers.

Paired with succession pathways from retiring to incoming farmers, this puts more growers onto good soil without fuelling speculation. The goal is simple and physical: more working farmers on more working land.

Together these measures rebalance the three spheres. Culture is nourished by local food knowledge and place-based identity. Governance sets clear, fair rules that favour life over extraction. The economy becomes a servant to regeneration, not its master.

This is convivial infrastructure: tools and institutions scaled so people can actually use them, cooperate through them and take responsibility within them. It is policy with dirt under its fingernails.

Start with compost piles, seed trays and water tanks and the wider renewal follows: apprenticeships, local businesses, regional cuisines, money circulating through town after town. Not because of sentiment, but because the material conditions finally make it possible.

Turning the wheel from the ground up means binding public investment to living soil and living communities. Feed the region from the region, and resilience stops being a slogan and becomes the ordinary, dependable rhythm of everyday life.