09-20

=**Remote Organic Farming**= toc

**RTO**
Riverina Institute of TAFE- National Environment Centre

**Contact**
Gerard Lawry Gerard.Lawry@tafensw.edu.au Phone 0260436711

Bec Chettleburgh rebecca.chettleburgh@tafe.nsw.edu.au Phone 02 60436706

National Environment Centre PO Box 827 Albury NSW 2640

**Category**
Empowering learners/RTO-Business Partnership

**Business Partner**
Biological Farmers of Australia (BFA) is the major industry body that performs the role of certification for the industry. The BFA is a member funded body and as such has limited resources available for individual farmer learning support. The flexible course put in context by the specialist teachers and supported by the “e-farm” will perform this role for the industry. This will provide learning support to individual business’ that doesn’t exist in the industry at present and is a drain on resources of the farmer funded bodies.

Executive summary
The National Environment Centre (NEC) is a specialised campus of the Riverina institute of TAFE. One of the main roles of the NEC is the provision of sustainable farming courses in the form of Diploma of Agriculture (Organic Farming). This course is delivered flexibly across the country using hard copy and web based learning guides supported by teachers and bioregional mentors. A network of these teacher mentors was developed via a 2008 framework project and a wiki site was developed to support this network. ( [] The National Environment Centre is based on a 180 ha certified organic farm. This farm is at a leading edge of some of the sustainability issues for agriculture. It physically demonstrates them in its landscape and food production systems. These issues include;

The farm is one of our major teaching tools and is used extensively by our local students and visiting farmer and land-care groups. The flexible organic farming student group scattered on farms all around Australia generally don’t have access at all. This project seeks to address that. The project is to explore and develop a web based mechanism to “e-farm” our farm. So that records, productions systems, day to day management decisions and the farm landscape are all available to students across Australia. The principle outcome from this project is the wiki site developed for distance students. []
 * Designing food production systems for climate uncertainty
 * Small food production systems designed to produce food for local people.
 * Value adding food by environmental stewardship, animal welfare and social networking
 * Environmental farm-land management on the urban interface.
 * Day to day organic farm management