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Urban Food Resiliency: Slovenia, a Perfect Model?

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Slovenia food self-sufficiency index (the rate between home production and consumption) is considered low when compared to countries of Western Europe. It’s not easy to find reliable figures on what this exactly means thus I invite anyone finding reliable sources to please publish them in the comment session of this article. I have provided some reference from which I extracted the figures provided next.

An article on the Slovenia Times states that self-sufficiency in Slovenia is 93%, lowered to 78%, if we consider that Slovenia imports 99% of its feed (old issue of feeding animals instead of people?)

Slovenia is a net importer of vegetables, grains, potatoes and beef (though for our globalized absurd system it also exports a certain amount of these) as reported in the FAO agricultural commodities balance sheets.

Documented these figures, I must say that, at least in some parts of the country, villages seem well geared to maximize food resiliency. I wonder how this backyard production is accounted for in the mentioned statistics and what role it plays in feeding the population.

Every time I am in Slovenia I find it amazing how food production and resiliency are integrated within the villages. Each house has its own kitchen garden and orchard in its front and back yard. Even train stations have their own vegetable garden, small polytunnel and some, their small yard animals. Vegetables, flowers and aromatic herbs are arranged in such a functional, productive and aesthetically manner that they would generate envy to the most posh and manicured front yard. Some corners are reminiscent of well designed permacultural guilds and small scale food forests.

Trees are charged with apples, plums, apricot and cherries, some are trained against the wall of the house and people can collect fruits from the first floor windows. Shrubs of berries are also plentiful. In each garden there are one or more compost bins. Many yards have rain water catchments in the form of tanks fed by water flowing from the house roofs. Yards and gardens are not fenced and anybody can enter. Everybody has its own, no need to harvest from someone else garden. On the edge of the village, sheep and cows browse on green mixed grasses prairie managed through grazing rotation and mobile electric fences. The prairies are surrounded by woodland. Everywhere you can spot the colorful bee hives of the honey producers. Then, just a few steps outside town, you feel immersed in nature. I strongly recommend anybody working on urban food resiliency to visit Slovenia to see what we might be aiming for, and it looks pretty too.

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References:

ICID report (1999) https://www.icid.org/v_slovenia.pdf

OCDC review (2001) https://goo.gl/CvgiSz

Republic of Slovenia Statistical Office Balance Sheets (2013): https://goo.gl/iJjXbe

6 Comments

  1. I noticed a lot of this in Albania and Macedonia as well. My time in the Balkans really pushed me in the permaculture direction before I even knew what permaculture was.

  2. Here in rural Latvia where I now live there are many garden allotments too. One of the authors that I think you might be interested in is Petr Jehlicka from the Open University in England. He has written a few papers on food provisioning in Czechia and Poland. He also questions the narrative that the rising middle classes in these places are consuming more as often they are also producing more of their own food and more careful in their food choices. Anyway here is a link for you for his papers
    https://oro.open.ac.uk/view/person/pj586.html

  3. So yesterday I spent a couple hours surfing Slovenia, specifically Litija and Smartno, via Google Earth. WOW! To begin with, it seems to be a good climate analogue, at 46 degrees, to my own Pacific Northwest USA climate, especially up in the Cascades. Short summer growing season, coniferous forests, similar plant types, etc. But what fun to just stroll around these communities and find a little garden or orchard tucked into a plot of ground, almost everywhere I looked. Many folks are growing grapes on fences, the trees in their lawns are apples or pears, and little poly tunnels over what appear to be berry crops seem to be part of every garden. Thank you for pointing me in this direction.

    I would be interested to know more about how this is promoted in these communities. Is it a civic emphasis from the municipality, or a cultural ethos built of necessity? How do Slovenians think about their gardens? Some of these little plots wouldn’t seem to make much of a dent in a family’s food budget, so are they grown for fun, for health, for organic vs. conventional ag, etc.?

  4. Closer viewing revealed I was wrong about the poly tunnels – they seem to be season extenders over tomatoes. The Google Earth images are from September and October.

    Galen

  5. We just love home grown food. We believe it’s healthier and has a better taste, no pesticides etc…

    It’s also a part of our heritage. While we have no food shortages nowadays I assume that after world wars and other such events people learned to be self reliant.

    Maybe some smaller gardens don’t produce enough to keep you stocked on vegetables through the winter but it’s enough to have fresh veggies during the season.

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