Key Facts:
A UNSW academic's award-winning online exhibition records the environmental impact of agriculture in Australia.
Back in 2020, Associate Professor Joshua Zeunert, from UNSW's School of Built Environment, started a research project exploring the sustainability of Australian agriculture into the future. As part of the project, A/Prof. Zeunert set about collecting aerial footage of agricultural landscapes from across Australia to assess the state of the agricultural environment, to inform scenario testing of Australia's food production to 2050.
Using a wide range of sources, A/Prof. Zeunert created a database of agricultural sites to visually survey to gain a systematic picture of the current state of food production environments. And over several trips from 2020-23, he photographed and filmed thousands of sites spanning all states and territories, all commodities and major industries, and all scales of commercial farming.
The result is Food | Landscapes Australia – an interactive online exhibition of drone videos revealing Australia's diverse agricultural landscapes.
Last week, A/Prof. Zeunert received the Award of Excellence for Research, Policy and Communications at the 2025 National Landscape Architecture Awards for the project. This followed an Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) NSW Excellence Award earlier this year and five international awards. The AILA National Jury described Zeunert's project as "almost superhuman in scale and scope" leaving viewers with the question: "what will we do with this new-found knowledge, as practitioners and arguably stewards of landscape in this country?"
The substantial scale of the project includes more than 880 videos (selected from over 10,000 recordings), equating to over 8½ hours viewing time. Much of it is expansive vision that consumers are not ordinarily exposed to.
The impact of the industrialisation of food production
The divide between food consumption and production is an ever-increasing one – with 86% of Australians living in urban areas constituting just 0.5% of Australia's land area – and many increasingly unfamiliar with how standard it is for Australian agriculture to take place at industrial scale.
"So much agriculture has been pushed out of urban and peri-urban areas to the point where it's increasingly hard to perceive the scale of commercially viable Australian farming," explains A/Prof. Zeunert.
"This means most urban dwellers are subject to the romanticised impressions created by food marketing and industry lobbies. As the scales and intensities of agriculture production increase, it has been relocated to regional and rural environments, which are out of sight for the great majority of people," he says.
"As Food | Landscapes shows, the great majority of Australia's food production is industrialised. Farms routinely operate at such vast scales that it's difficult to appreciate their sheer size without the help of scale comparison drawings. And this style of production typically has a big environmental impact. We are seeing agribusiness livestock densities in poultry – even free range – for example, occurring at 10 or 15 million times greater than the densities for natural populations of wild species – like brushtail possums, swamp wallabies and dingos."
Agriculture is the biggest land use in Australia and as a consequence, impacts the environment more than any other industry.
"Agriculture impacts such a diversity of bioregions and climate zones across Australia. Even the fragile range- and arid lands have been extensively impacted by hard-hoofed animals brought to Australia to support farming," explains A/Prof. Zeunert.
"If you care about the environment and wild species, you need to care about agriculture. As Wendell Berry, an American farmer and writer says, 'Eating is an agricultural act'. I like to extend that by saying 'eating is an ecological act,' " he says.
"What we choose to eat has a significant impact on the environment. And my question is, would consumers change their habits if they better understood the environmental impacts of food production?"
Zeunert makes it clear that the purpose of putting Food | Landscapes together was not to critique farmers, or individual practices or individual industries.
"Rather, I wanted to bridge the gap between consumers and food production and create a space looking at the overall farming system. In many ways the system is imposed on farmers, who usually don't seek to degrade the environment. So, is the current corporatised system creating the right outcomes? Is this a system Australian consumers want to support, if real transparency was in place? In many cases I don't think so," he says.
Beyond climate change: straining finite resources
Australian agriculture relies on the carrying capacity of its ecosystems and their ability to provision us with resources and assimilate wastes. As Food | Landscapes shows, this is becoming increasingly strained.
"What we choose to eat has a significant impact on sustainability and the environment. That's why so many industry lobbies and marketing campaigns are desperate to greenwash their practices and products with false or overstated claims. These defy the comprehensive visual evidence in Food | Landscapes, as well as leading science in the world's top journals that increasingly encourage adoption of plant-based diets, which greatly reduce the spatial and environmental impacts on ecosystems. Don't simply seek to validate your existing choices, as there's plenty of easy disinformation available to do just that," says A/Prof. Zeunert.
