The view from Trudy Hales' kitchen window is so expansive, it's hard to step away from. She lingers there, taking in the land that lies just east of the Ruahine Range and has been in her husband's family for four generations. "That big mānuka block up there," she says, setting down her coffee to point. "That used to get sprayed, but it just kept coming back. So, when my husband and I came here to live, he stopped spraying and let nature do what it wanted to do. The land was telling us what it wanted."
And on the flatlands of Levin, down a back road off State Highway 1, Emma Clarke walks through Woodhaven Gardens, a commercial growing operation stretching over 700 hectares that her father built from the ground up. Her three-year-old daughter Mackenzie sings and dances her way through a red cabbage crop and Emma talks about how the landscape has evolved and changed. "It looks quite different out here now than when I was a kid," she says.
"I grew up on the farm, and I spent way more days out here than I ever did at kindy."
When Dad bought the farm, it was a small dairy unit. We turned paddocks of grass into rows of vegetables, starting with anything and everything - yams, Brussels sprouts, even Chinese gooseberries. There was no house, no sheds, no infrastructure of any kind. Just a few acres of potential. Dad learnt to grow by what other growers were doing, and he has always grown intuitively by the plants' needs."
In Cathy Tait-Jamieson's office, history lines the walls. Pinned up are the many iterations of the BioFarm yoghurt label dating back to the eighties. Cathy, of Ngāti Tukorehe descent, and her husband, Jamie, took over the family dairy farm in the late seventies and turned it into one of the first organic farms in New Zealand. "Everyone thought we would go broke," she says with a laugh. "We didn't fit any pigeonhole for most people, and they thought we were crazy hippies."
This is an excerpt from 'The Path of Change', our Kōanga Spring 2021 Edition cover story.
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