The Wimmera Southern Mallee grows more than three million tonnes of grain, oilseeds and pulses in a typical year. Most of it leaves the region and much of it leaves the country. By the standard measure, this is one of the most food secure places in Australia.
That measure is wrong, and the region knows it.
Two facts sit alongside the production figures. First, the system that produces that food depends almost entirely on inputs the region does not control: imported diesel, urea manufactured from gas mostly sourced offshore, fertiliser whose cost is around 60 per cent energy-linked, and freight corridors that flood, congest and age.
Second, in the towns that grow the food, people go without it. When the Wimmera Food Security Network, convened by the Centre for Participation, surveyed local services, 78 per cent reported demand for more free food than they could meet, and most emergency providers were purchasing food to fill the gap.
A region can be a major food exporter and food insecure at the same time. Food security is not what you produce. It is whether the system keeps functioning when something breaks, and whether everyone inside it can eat.
The national policy system has arrived at the same conclusion. The National Food Security Preparedness Green Paper, co-authored by Andrew Henderson and John Coyne through the Australian Strategic Policy Institute with input from more than twenty industry bodies, warned that treating export volumes as proof of food security is a dangerous assumption, and named the same dependencies this region lives with: imported fuel, fertiliser and crop protection inputs, and supply chains built for efficiency rather than resilience. The Commonwealth has committed to a National Food Security Strategy in response. What that strategy will need, and what no paper can supply from Canberra, is evidence of what preparedness actually looks like inside a producing region. That is the work now underway here.
What the community actually said
Earlier this year, WSM Development asked participants in the region’s climate adaptation and resilience work what food security meant to them. The answers did not converge on one definition, and that is the point.
Some anchored it at the household: when you cannot get food from the supermarket, where do you go next? Farmers pushed the frame upstream: if I cannot grow and produce food sustainably and profitably, I will look for alternative markets. Others named the chain itself: food has to be produced, transported, available, affordable and accessible, and weakness at any point undermines the whole. And some extended the horizon: not just now, but ten, twenty, thirty years out, with water security part of the question.
Household access, producer viability, supply chain integrity, long-term resilience. Four frames, one system. The farmer’s point deserves particular weight. It is not a complaint. It is a plain statement that if producing food here stops stacking up, production will move, and no amount of national strategy will bring it back cheaply.
There is a live counterpoint to that risk. Interest in agrifood processing in this region is growing, and one of the attractions is genuinely new: the prospect of large-scale energy generated locally. Processing has historically bypassed the region in part because energy supply and cost made the numbers hard to stack. The generation now being planned and built changes that calculus, but only if it can actually be connected to regional industry rather than exported straight through transmission lines. Processing is where food security and regional prosperity meet: it turns farm output into local jobs and gives the region supply options when export routes are disrupted.
What the workshops tested
The scenario planning workshops held at Longerenong College in June put this system under pressure deliberately. The Agriculture-Plus scenario asked the hardest version of the question: can the region build on farming without staying exposed to it? New opportunities in processing, value-adding and energy all demand the same scarce inputs as agriculture itself: land, water, workforce, housing, energy supply and planning certainty.
The judgement that emerged was consistent with the finding this series reported last month. Nobody in the room argued to turn investment away. Every table argued about the terms. Applied to food security, the terms question becomes concrete: does the investment now arriving make the food system more resilient or more exposed?
Why energy is a food security question
This is where the energy transition stops being a separate story.
The prevailing way of talking about energy and agriculture is coexistence: two competing land uses to be balanced through planning approvals, compensation and consultation. That framing treats energy as something that lands on farming country and has to be tolerated. It is incomplete, and at the scale now underway it is inadequate.
The alternative framing, which WSM Development set out with co-author Sabiene Heindl in the Farm Policy Journal in late July, treats renewable energy as a productive input into agriculture itself. Modern farming runs on energy. Fertiliser, fuel, processing, freight and cold storage are all energy costs, and most of them currently arrive through long, thin supply lines the region cannot influence.
Designed into the production system rather than beside it, the energy build changes the food security equation. Renewable generation feeding regional demand puts downward pressure on input costs. Green ammonia produced from renewable energy displaces imported urea, converting the region’s single largest input vulnerability into a domestic supply chain. Locally-produced fuels reduce exposure to imported diesel for the freight and machinery that move the harvest.
Designed poorly, the same build delivers none of this. It competes with farming for land, water, workforce and community trust, extracts value through transmission lines, and leaves the food system exactly as exposed as it found it.
The difference between those two outcomes is not the technology. It is the design and governance decisions being made now.
What the region already has in place
WSM Development does not advocate for or against individual energy or resource projects. That position does not change here. The work is on the terms: whether the investment arriving in this region is structured to strengthen the systems the region depends on, starting with food.
The good news is the region is not starting from zero. The Wimmera Food Security Network, established in June 2025, has mapped stakeholders and is building the referral, storage and distribution capacity that determines whether households can eat when supply tightens. WSM Development is a participant in that network, not its owner, and this article draws on its evidence with thanks.
The region’s climate adaptation and resilience group, supported through the Commonwealth Future Drought Fund, coordinates risk work across agriculture, water, freight, energy and local government, so that effort goes where it matters rather than where it duplicates.
The newest piece is the WSM Food Security Resilience Lab, which WSM Development established this year to pull these threads into one frame. The Lab’s job is to turn the Network’s household evidence, the adaptation group’s risk work and the scenario planning findings into a preparedness framework the region can act on: which dependencies matter most, what breaks first under a compound shock, and which design decisions in energy, freight, processing and land use would actually shorten the region’s supply lines. It is the local answer to the green paper’s national question. This project is supported by the Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal (FRRR) through the Community Led Climate Solutions program, funded by the PNI Foundation. WSM Development’s submission to the national food security strategy process last year put the region forward as a pilot for exactly this kind of place-based delivery, and that offer stands.
Food security preparedness is not a stockpile or a slogan. It is a set of design decisions: about inputs, corridors, energy, processing and household access. The region has more influence over those decisions right now, while the investment is being shaped, than it will have once the concrete is poured.
Growth is not neutral. Neither is the food system it lands on.