Hybrid cultivars : outsourcing industry development and support to the grass roots : the case of Hawkesbury Harvest Inc., Sydney, Australia

Hawkesbury Harvest (Harvest) emerged in the year 2000 to address issues of farm viability, sustainability and health in the local government area of Hawkesbury City, on the north western outskirts of Sydney, Australia. It attracted a group of people from within the community who were passionate about a heritage landscape changing in the face of urbanization, and concerned about family farm viability in the face of global food systems and their market structures. These two dynamics were perceived as contributing to the loss of farms, health and lifestyle disease, and food equity disparities within the community. Hawkesbury Harvest was and remains something of a 'fringe' initiative. It literally came into being on the periphery of the City, in the urban growth zones of the Sydney basin. It is one driven by a small group of fringe dwellers, small-holding farmers clinging to what had become an unviable mode of farming in the face of pressure to relinquish their farms to developers. Development agendas for retaining farm lands in the Sydney basin and policy initiatives designed to protect the small family farm did not attract government attention and effort, whereas tourism did and this made action around the viable farms in the region possible. Hawkesbury Harvest bridged the gap, filling a void created by a policy and action vacuum. In the years since it first emerged, it has transitioned from a functionally-driven entity into a strategic one with influence in the mainstream debates on food, farming, health and urbanization in Sydney, with wider contributions into state and national policy arenas in agriculture, health and tourism. Harvest is a salient example of the hybrid cultivars in governance and industry development, the pseudo-governmental actors that have emerged in community during the last decade to service gaps in sustainable development agendas at the local level.