Blogs

The Landcare Farm Program would like to congratulate Horticulture Innovation, who released the Australian-grown Horticulture Sustainability Framework, a guide to help the horticulture sector share its sustainable, ethical, and safe farming practice stories with stakeholders. Hort Innovation has worked with Australian horticulture’s industries and stakeholders to develop this framework for understanding and measuring the sustainability of Australian-grown horticultural production and setting goals for the future.

The sustainability framework applies across the whole of Australian horticulture. The primary focus is on those horticultural industries which partner with Horticulture Innovation (fruits, vegetables, nuts and amenity horticulture). With such a diverse sector, some topics are more significant to some horticultural industries than others.

A sustainable horticulture sector is one that is vibrant and prosperous, produces food to nourish and plants to nurture people and communities worldwide, provides fulfilling employment and protects our environment now and for future generations. To attain this, the sustainability framework has four categories of goals: nourish and nurture, people and enterprise, planet and resources, and less waste.

Horticulture Innovation’s sustainability framework provides a logical process to gather together the many pieces of existing information to share horticulture’s story. This will help industry bodies to understand where the sector is out now – where there are strengths and which areas to prioritise for future investment or policy work. Much of the existing data has already been gathered in the process of setting indicators.

Framework: website