An opportunity exists for a team of students to help develop, record, and potentially nationally market a sustainable agriculture pilot in Gloucester, New South Wales.
Regional Australia has the opportunity to actively identify and participate in solutions that will transform the future. A critical component of this is empowering people in regional communities. The second National ‘Sustaining Rural Communities’ Conference will focus on the solutions to Transforming Regional Australia.
This will include identifying those ways in which people in various communities are already addressing these issues, as well as tools, technologies, infrastructure and policy changes that can be used more eff ectively.
The event will enable delegates to put their own ideas and solutions on the table and have them heard well beyond the four walls of the conference. Delegates will be able to network during and after the event with like minded people from regional communities all over Australia including a range of agricultural industries, small business, government, mining, manufacturing, fi nance, tourism, transport, science, education and health professionals. Empowering people in regional communities to actively participate is vital if we are to succeed in transforming the future of Regional Australia.
Abstracts and papers are invited according to the conference theme: STS and the new knowledge society: negotiating innovation, risk, trust, culture & development - Deadline: 1 April 2011.
Globally, food and agriculture industries face increasing challenges to remain productive, sustainable and resilient. What is Australia's role?
The Sustainable Food Summit 2011 brings together some of food and agriculture's biggest players and leading experts in a two-day exchange of knowledge and ideas.
This event focuses on recent policy developments, with emphasis on food security and resilience and how these relate to the National Food Plan. We will seek to unpack what food security really means for Australia, and identify knowledge gaps.
Registration for the Sustainability Assessment Symposium 2010: Towards Strategic Assessment for Sustainability is now open! SAS2010 will take place at the Esplanade Hotel, Fremantle on 25-26 May 2010, with pre-conference training courses available on 24 May. Further information is provided in the attached flyer and on our website (www.integral-sustainability.net). Please feel free to distribute the flyer through your networks.
In a number of newly developing systems in sustainable agriculture, ruminant livestock have emerged as being integral to regenerating landscapes (e.g. time controlled grazing and pasture-cropping). However, adapting the genomes of these ruminants to new systems has been scarcely discussed or considered, yet is critical. This area of the ready adaptation of ruminants and their plastic genomes to sustainable agricultural systems – for which I propose the term adaptive landscape genomics – already has one interesting case-study in Australia.
This case involves the sheep mulesing controversy. Through an examination of what appears a strikingly successful adaptation to an environmental and social-ethical problem (blow fly strike plus animal rights concerns about non analgesic pain infliction), I am examining the contestation of long-held discourses with a new innovative system. Inevitably, therefore, we cannot avoid the intersection of innovation, politics, power and discourses. From such an examination may come a better understanding of factors involved in the adoption or otherwise of innovation in the area of agricultural systems.
Speaker Bio
Charles Massy is a PhD Candidate in the Fenner School of Environment and Society at The Australian National University