Canberra's food producers and agricultural sector will be studied as part of efforts to boost local production and diversify farming practices.
Natural Capital Economics has been appointed to study the food system in the ACT, which the government said would obtain baseline information for the territory.
Environment Minister Rebecca Vassarotti will on Tuesday announce a $178,000 study, part of developing the government's local food strategy.
"This study is ultimately about what we grow, where we're growing it and why we're growing it in the ACT. Armed with this knowledge, our aim is to provide opportunities for farmers to expand their local produce operations in the territory and connect Canberrans with local growers directly," Ms Vassarotti said.
Catherine Keirnan, who lives on a cattle property near Tharwa and is a member of the ACT Rural Landholders Association, said the government needed to identify where food could be grown and ensure future planning decisions protected those areas.
"We want this study to identify where the remnant, good-quality, high-quality food growing land potentially is," Ms Keirnan said.
Ms Keirnan said the study to understand opportunities to increase local food production should also contribute to a broader policy for agriculture in the ACT.
"I think that it would be really great in this election year if people were made aware that they're surrounded by farms. We'd love to do more. We'd love to be more involved in local food production and sales to people of local produce, but we can't. But also the government, in both its policy settings and its administration, is preventing it," she said.
Ms Keirnan said her family ran Black Angus cattle on their 474-hectare property, but were prevented by their lease from diversifying into other agricultural projects.
Farmers in the ACT have long called for changes to their leases to ensure they can access business loans and have greater certainty to encourage investing in the properties.
"We need to have a land tenure system that's actually going to facilitate the ability for farmers to do the production that they need to do to grow the food we all want to have, and at the moment we don't have that," Ms Keirnan said.
Ms Keirnan said the government should also consider payments to landholders who protect ecologically important woodland areas.
"We're the Bush Capital. People who live in town love to see the birds and bees visiting their gardens. If the farmland which surrounds the city was all housing or factories or, well, mixed-urban uses, then they wouldn't be there," she said.
"And so for farmers to have an income from being out in the bush and keeping it next to the city, then it will benefit everyone."
Ms Vassarotti said the study would consider supply chains and consult the sector to understand what has prevented their expansion.
"Consulting with the local Ngunnawal community and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the ACT about further developing the bush food and traditional plant industry in the region is also a key investigation area for the study," she said.
The draft good strategy, released last year, said producers in and around Canberra should be supported to better use available land, increase production and ensure greater local access to fresh produce, with government support to ensure rural farms were more viable.
