FOR LOCALS AND LOCAL LEADERS
What can one person start in a small town?
By Sam Marwood
A good idea for a small town can start with nothing more than a shed, a backyard, or a question asked over the fence.
Here are eight possibilities from No Better Place, the guide for anyone with a vision for their place. There are hundreds more.
Treat each one as an illustration of something you could try, rather than the story of any real town. Let them light up corners of your imagination you haven't explored yet.
A native plant nursery from nothing
Picture one person collecting seeds from remnant native vegetation on local roadsides and farms, and growing seedlings in their backyard.
Within a few years, that could be a commercial nursery supplying revegetation projects, mine rehabilitation and council plantings across the region. It starts with a wheelbarrow and a shed.
A farm stay tourism trail
A handful of farms in one valley could create a tourism trail, each offering something different, such as a working dairy, a market garden or a heritage homestead.
Visitors drive the trail over a weekend. The farms earn extra income. The town's cafes and pub see more traffic.
It can start with one farmer saying to her neighbour: what if we did this together?
A local food brand
A group of producers in one district could create a shared brand that connects them directly to restaurants and markets in the city. Instead of each farmer marketing alone, they present as a region: one story, multiple producers, consistent quality.
Carrying the district's name, a brand like that can become something the whole community is proud of.
A bush food enterprise on Indigenous land
A First Nations community could partner with local agronomists on a bush food enterprise, growing native peppers, lemon myrtle or wattleseed on country with cultural significance and agricultural potential.
It could create jobs, reconnect the community with traditional food practices, and build a commercial product with growing market demand.
Housing for workers
Where a district can't attract workers because there's nowhere to live, a local champion could source modular housing and place it on underused land near the town centre, as affordable accommodation for seasonal and year round workers.
The farms get labour. The town gets residents. The main street gets customers.
A training hub in the old school
An old school building could become a training hub for young people, offering farm skills, trade skills, business planning and digital literacy. Local farmers and business people could volunteer their time as the trainers.
Young people who might have left the district for education could stay and build careers locally.
Waste into energy
A regional town could explore building a biodigester: a facility that takes organic waste from farms and food processors and converts it into renewable energy and fertiliser.
The waste is already there. Instead of leaving the district, it would come back as power, and as nutrients for the soil.
A regenerative demonstration farm
One farmer could take a degraded property and turn it into a demonstration farm for regenerative practices: holistic grazing, soil carbon building, biodiversity corridors, integrated crop and livestock rotation.
Opened to visitors, with workshops, it could become a destination for farmers from across the state.
What starts as one person's experiment can become a regional resource.
The full guide, No Better Place, is free at cultivatefarms.com/resources.
You can build your own plan at cultivatefarms.com/plan.