Kia ora tatou...after some encouragement I have decided to share...

I have been involved in the political and social kai space for almost 10 years now…and I am really enjoying parts of it, other parts are a challenge. I am sure this is a sentiment you can identify with. I am based in Otautahi/Christchurch, and I have 2 main projects that I have been the founder of and am still involved in daily operations with. Roimata Food Commons is a grassroots activation of public space with the intention of lifting wellbeing of the community through growing kai. It is mostly food forests which are still developing after 5 years, but with vege production, composting etc. We run a lot of community events to encourage the development of “commoning’ behaviour. We also wrap in some food rescue too.

The other project is Toha Kai, which is a non-profit business that sells organic based fruit and vege boxes that are more accessible/affordable for lower income families. We have a strong ecological focus - we reduce plastic use to almost zero. We are about to branch out into growing kai and developing a cargo e-trike delivery system - which is intended to grow into a fully fledged courier business to supplement the non-profit activities. I struggle….I quite often feel quite isolated. I don’t often connect with people that have a deep understanding of how the food system isn’t working for the majority of people or our planet. I quite often have to run on gut instinct without a sounding board. I don’t mind this, as I have realised I have a fairly robust appetite for experimentation.

I enjoy the cerebral elements of my work….developing systems, which are intended to offer a compelling alternative to the mainstream food retail sector.I am constantly learning too. Every system that is developed along the journey will be shared openly. I also really enjoy the relational aspects of my work too - getting to know people through their stories. I work too much…I act with urgency too often…I am my own worst critic. I know the antidotes but often the call to do more wins. My hopes for the Aotearoa Food Action Network….are that it becomes a safe space for people to seek support, to share their wisdom, to ask for technical help, to offer knowledge openly…to be part of building a network of care and impact across our beautiful whenua. I am happy to share more about my mahi with anyone that is interested…and also am excited to be inspired by all the amazing mahi that is happening all over the place. I encourage people to be honest and open, within boundaries that feel safe for them…and know we care.

Kia ora koutou katoa,

Hoping that each of you is moving through your day well. It is wonderful to feel this intention and energy, and see the mahi.

I have energy and experience to contribute with and collaborate in this space. At many levels of my presence and reach, I am working on the development of islands of aliveness, in the ocean of not that. This is my aspiration for my living and being situation with others. This is the focus of the participatory action research PhD I am doing - applying human understanding of living systems with human systems, specifically in the Waitaha food system.

I returned to the region in 2021 after being away for a couple of decades, mostly in the USA, pursuing sail boat racing and taking my personal journey to living in integrity and contributing to the collective.

@Michael Reynolds, you have been on my list to reach out to and grab coffee in Ōtautahi for some time, having been recommended by multiple mutual friends. Perhaps this can be the lubrication to make that happen?

@Mark Kroening amazing....participatory action systems design is a crucial element of how we more forward collectively. I have also had mutual friends nudge me to reach out to you. So...yes, let's korero :)

Great! I am at [email protected] and 0225822154, shall we skip to one of these to coordinate? How does Tuesday look for you?

I have sent you an email @Mark Kroening :)

Kia ora Mark. Love this idea of 'Islands of Aliveness', reminds me of the story of little pockets of oaks remaining after the ice age, which ended up reforesting Europe once the ice receded. Those Islands might just influence the ocean in time...

Sounds cool Mark, would love to hear more about your research too 😊

Nice, happy to chat about it @Dan K. And hear more about yours too. Would you be up for emailing me at the address in the comment above to find a day/time for next week or the one after?

I believe one of the next steps is for us to convene a Zoom call to create the opportunity to explore these kinds of conversations...and share our stories in a different way :)

Kia ora koutou, e hoa mā ...ko Helen ahau,

I grew up in north Taranaki, in Waitara, a town which revolved around the Freezing Works where my father worked...a town with a strong community who looked after each other well. I currently live in Swampton (you might know it as Palmerston North) in the Manawatū.

I love to see and support efforts in interdependent co-arising, mutual aid, conscious circles of care, community resilience...all those terms used for the interweaving of strong roots and rich soils at the ground level...where all the tangible work happens... and where life is lived!

I have worked in community development (in paid roles, and for the love of it) for all of my adult life...most recently in taking Manawatū Food Action Network (est. 2016) from a coalescing of shared hopes and intentions across various local agencies and organisations to (in 2020) the space of action, outreach and education. That we took four years to talk, build alliances, work on a shared kaupapa before we stepped into doing stuff on the ground was a good thing for how the mahi is now manifesting and progressing. Community resilience work is slow work...an important thing (for me) to remember when the noise and urgency of the overculture begins to roar.

MFAN works closely alongside our local iwi, Rangitāne o Manawatū, to ensure that our efforts match or at least align with the needs and priorities of local tangata whenua, both in terms of people and land. MFAN tends the vegetable garden at the urban marae in the city. The food grown there is given away by Rangitāne to locals who self-identify as needing help with food. (By that I mean, no forms are needed to access this food, no questions are asked.)

I trained in permaculture with Slow Farm, which is Phil Steven's (Phil introduced himself above me in this thread) farm and permaculture school. In 2021 I completed the For the Love of Bees 'Earthworkers' course in urban regenerative agriculture to enhance my permaculture education.

Locally, I support the Awapuni community garden (a garden which prioritises land access for refugees), co-facilitate Palmy Crop Swap, and co-facilitate a peer-to-peer food growing education group at a branch library here in the city which is in 'the 4412' ...the postcode recognised as being the most food insecure. The library has a tiny garden which our group looks after so we can use it to demonstrate skills and also grow a little bit of food for sharing. These sessions are drop-in, informal, and always involve sharing tea and seasonal, home-made kai. We try to make sure we always have something: seeds, seedlings, crops...for our beginner gardeners to take home so we are supporting food growing efforts with physical materials as well as knowledge.

I live in the centre of the city and have turned my small front lawn and verge into a densely planted permaculture food garden in the hope that the garden might act as a site of informal education, inspiration, norm-disruption... #foodnotlawns I share the kai I grow in multiple ways with my community, through the avenues mentioned above, plus I give it away at my front gate. (I am also FED by my community who give me boxes of the fruit & veg I don't have room to grow...in the dance of non-transactional radical reciprocity which is possible when we open ourselves up to the sharing economy.)

I'm a writer, too. This year I'm writing my third book, a memoir about foraging, wild food and local food, which will be coming out in early 2023.

Like Michael, I have been through cycles of burn out. I'm trying to learn from my previous graceless 'face-splats' and look after myself well to avoid that happening again. I think circles of peer support (like this one will hopefully evolve into) can really help mitigate the feelings of loneliness and overwhelm in community activism. Because we are most useful to our families and communities when we are well,...well-rested, healthy, and nourished in all the ways...am I right?

That's probably enough from me for now. Thank you if you read this far! I look forward to getting to know everyone over the coming months.

Ngā manaakitanga.

Beautiful Helen, a list of achievements to aspire to.

Some fantastic actions here Helen, kia ora and thanks for sharing 😊

Hello to all potential Aotearoa food action allies. With the ball rolling, I thought I'd better introduce myself as one of the people who is sowing this seed. It’s really nice to see some of you starting to inhabit this space, thank you for sharing.

Forgive me if this becomes a bit of an essay, but in the spirit of sharing and openness, some of my story...

I’m Aaron McLean, a mongrel ‘scatterling’ with shallow roots, severed in (predominantly) Scotland and Ireland and - a couple of generations in - attempting to find a place here in Aotearoa. I grew up between Arrowtown and Queenstown, but escaped as a teenager as the millionaires started arriving and after a series of stops ended up spending more than twenty years in Arch Hill, Auckland, hustling to raise my kids and coaxing almost every inch of our little 360 sq meter site into food production. That garden, like Helen’s, fed us, but also intentionally acted as a disruption to the front yard norm, a conversation starter with passers by and a repository of material for friends starting their own gardens. #archhillfarm

I’ve recently escaped the tide of mondo grass again by moving to the Far North where I am now the temporary custodian and collaborator with 30 acres of ex Kauri forest made beef / dairy / sheep farm. We’re attempting to put down deep (syntropic) roots there and have planted more than a thousand trees in the year we have lived there to keep us company, attempt to halt the erosion, and expand the space for the rest of the living world. My wife Emma and my children Luca and Arlo and I don’t aspire to tall fences. We’re not seeking SELF-sufficiency or ‘Homesteading’ but rather hope to find a reciprocal space within our new community where we can provide healthy poison free food to people, and the space for participation. We’re not rooted enough to know exactly what that looks like yet, and what financial constraints will allow, but hopefully it might lead to the next phase of my life having a list of achievements more similar to what Helen has mentioned in her introduction. In the short term, if you’re in Northland and need tethonia or banna grass cuttings, or cow shit for a composite pile, or an enthusiastic diatribe about syntropic agroforestry or food politics - we got you. You can engage with us on Instagram @seedsforpala

I came to food through a privileged childhood climbing old heirloom apple trees and foraging field mushrooms at our home down South, then at 11 I got my first restaurant job neck deep in a sink. I went strait from school into a series of other restaurants until I fell in love with photography in my mid 20's, which once children arrived, lead me to a 20+ year career as a photographer for food magazines and cookbooks. But there is always hypocrisy in capitalist realism, and I’ll be transparent right up front. As the relatively benign work in publishing has died, and my children still needed feeding / mortgage paying, I’ve taken more advertising work in the last few years (I hate advertising), and with an expertise in food, this has led me to being paid by some of the people this alliance would like to see cease to exist. The farm is hopefully a path out of that dilemma… at the moment it’s a juggle as we get established. It has given me a first hand window into the worst of our food production and land ownership and employment dynamics.

That work transition in conjunction with an existing frustration with publishing’s lack of critical engagement with the food system led me to instigating and driving Stone Soup Syndicate’s magazine and events. Stone Soup was an experiment in organisation as well as publishing. In which the motivation to participate was agency rather than money. I’m proud of it having drawn so many to voluntarily contribute their skills and time to our food culture. https://stonesoupsyndicate.com/

The apple trees were the seed of local food for me, but it was politics that really got my hands in the soil. I came of age during the alter-globalisation / global-justice / Zapatista moment. I’ve documented protest for longer than I’ve taken photo’s of food, starting with marches against uranium mining on Indigenous land in Australian in the late 90’s.

As I read and learned, I engaged with concepts of participatory democracy, a theory of change that emerges from ordinary people at the bottom, and I discovered La Via Campasina and the concept of food sovereignty. It was a lens for the intersections between historic / racial / gender / social and environmental injustice and our food system that led me to build my first compost pile, and as much as I love building compost and growing food, I still believe in keeping the political horse in front of the composting cart. As Blain Snipstal says, “we can produce all the great food in the world, but if we’re not working to transform the very nature of relations of power in the food system, having good food will be null in void”.

Food and it’s intersections allow us to see the construction of our world very clearly, but it can also lead us on a path out of that construction. And so here we are, the proposition of a mycelial alliance. Not to propose that this wants to be the group, but an acknowledgment that there are heaps of amazing hopeful things going on at the ground level in this country, the groups already exist, the question is whether they might become more than the sum of their parts as a networked space of solidarity and mutual-aid.

“How can we have something better if we do not imagine it? How can we imagine it if we do not hope for it? How can we hope for it if we do not attempt to realise it?” Wendell Berry

Ngā mihi nui,

Aaron

p.s. I don't have a lot of capacity for this, I'm really busy, and I'm sure a lot of you feel the same way and are hesitant to take anything more on board. But many hands make light work, and nothing changes without broad movements. So I hope that some of you will jump in, even if your capacity to participate is very limited. That shouldn't be seen by anybody else as a reason not to be on the sidelines for the moment in which you might want to seek support or knowledge or to share a learning.

Beautiful @Aaron McLean 🙏

Atamārie koutou and thanks to everyone sharing so far… such rich and fascinating posts 🙏🏼

In the same spirit, a bit of background on me: my name’s Dan and I grew up in Wellington. I’m a 5th gen Pākehā of almost exclusively Irish catholic extraction and like Aaron said, a bit a scatterling in that regard, with what are now psychologically distant origins in Counties Claire, Mayo, Donegal and Cork. My ancestors settled in Tīmaru, Dunedin, Wellington, and the Manawatū, doing what feels like classic settler shit, working on farms and as maids in wealthy houses, eventually running pubs and hotels, having business start and fail and generally being assimilated into capitalism. But while the specifics of our Irishness are lost to time and colonisation, we’ve retained a love of food and family and I think that has helped to shape my interest in growing and the potential of food, not just as physical sustenance but a spiritual nourishment too, a way to weave to people and place.

My grandad managed a sheep farm in the Wairarapa but I grew up urbanised and it wasn’t until my early 20s that I really started to engage with food, pulled in and radicalised by first engaging with the climate crisis and then, slowly, starting to join dots and becoming more conscious to class, race and power. I learned to compost as part of job I was doing and soon found myself deeper, digging up my flat’s berm for what is, with hindsight, a pathetic attempt at protest but one that carries the seed of my work today. Fast forward some and I wwoofed in Europe and the US then returned home as OMG, a small urban farm in Tāmaki, was getting going, throwing myself into digging and helping with many others to transform that rock-strewn grass into the tiny oasis it is today.

Over that period I went back to university and am now in the thick of a Phd focused on the challenges and potential of community food production as a social movement - something I’m researching through a community psychology lens with all its emphasis on systems thinking and grassroots action. Over the practical phase of this research I’ve worked with a number of different groups, from backyard growing collective Open Homes and their radical framing of a totally de-commodifed food sovereignty through to projects with varying degrees of market relations, most specifically OMG’s use of CSA and Val and Lionel at Papatūānuku Kōkiri Marae’s aspirations for sustainable, whenua-enriching jobs. I also ran my own planting project last summer, helping people to organise into groups and work to convert their lawns to food - with mixed success I should add! Nothing trickier than the human dimension… Which more or less brings me to here and the various relationships that have pulled me deeper into this work, a big mihi to you all 😊

Bit of a essay lol but one last point worth stressing is my interest in education and sharing the basics of agroecological knowledge in free and accessible forms - something I personally would love to see and be involved in in the context of this alliance. The origins of ecological practices like polycropping have many diverse indigenous origins and in some ways can be considered the common inheritance of humanity writ large, so I find it frustrating to see how quickly they have been privatised and enclosed and, in my own small way, have tried to counter this trend, fuelling an unholy obsession with syntropy into an open source guide, available free at https://ateneoroa.home.blog/2022/05/16/open-source-syntropy-a-guide/

That’s it from me; here’s a pic of the syntropic alley crop trial I manage at PKM in Mangere, sparked by Aaron following our Permadynamics indoctrination and supported by Val and Lionel there and the many others who have helped out at different points. Thanks for reading and look forward to seeing where we can go together 😊🌱⚡️

Kia ora @Dan K ...I really enjoyed hearing some of your journey to this point. I look forward to travelling alongside you for some of the steps ahead 🙏

Tēnā Koutou,

Ko Mauau te maunga,

Ko Wairoa te awa

Ko Rangitoto te waka

Ko ngati Pākehā te iwi

Nō Ingarani ōku tīpuna

Ko Daniel Morrimire tōku ingoa

Ko "Morri" tōku ingoa karanga

Kia ora all, my name is Daniel Morrimire but I'm known by everyone as Morri. I am lucky enough to be the coordinator of the Manawatū Food Action Network, which is part of Environment Network Manawatū. I am continuing with the mahi that the amazing Helen Lehndorf started in our organisation, and also work with the hugely knowledgable Phil Stevens on occasion. Lovely to read about the backgrounds of many of you, and I can see a lot of connections I would love to make, but first I will share my own story.

So a bit of my background: I grew up on a kiwifruit orchard in the small town of Te Puna in the Bay of plenty, and was lucky enough to grow up surrounded by amazing fruit trees and a family garden. I joined the Air force once out of school and trained as a qualified avionics technician. After seven years in the air force I met my now wife Leith who, being a pacifist, convinced me to leave and start afresh studying at Massey. Over the next few years I alternated being a stay at home dad with studying, and completed my BSc in Zoology and Ecology in 2013, and then did a diploma of teaching (primary) the year after. Up to the start of this year, I had spent the last 4 and a half years working as an ECE teacher at an enviroschool Montessori here in Palmerston North, and then got my current job in January this year. Whew!

I am now living with my wife and 4 tamariki in a tiny(ish) house on the family farm in the foothills of the Tararuas here in the Manawatū. We have aspirations of being mostly self sufficient, but are still a long way off! We have a couple of milking goats, chickens, raised gardens, a growing orchard around our house, as well what might be described as the beginning of a small food forest. We have just this year had a go at growing rice as an experiment (We harvested a bit more rice than we sowed 😆) and try incorporating permaculture principles into our gardening. We have recently been introduced to syntropic agriculture as a concept and would love to learn more about this kaupapa.

On the work side of things, the organisation I am part of (MFAN) is a collective of social service and environmental organisations (and other community stakeholders) working together to increase collaboration, education and awareness to benefit our local community around issues of food security, food resilience and food localisation. Some of our current projects include providing small planter boxes to Kainga ora tenants as a first step in growing their own food, creating a "Manawatū food rescue declaration" (that would be a framework for local industries to sign up to in order to reduce food waste and direct usable but unsellable food to communities for free), and providing free fruit trees to some of the more deprived neighbourhoods in our region. We also support various community gardening endevours in the city, and I am the current kaitiaki of a small māra kai at one of the local marae, and my colleague Dave Mollard is kaitiaki of the Awapuni Community Gardens (which are an allotment style community garden). My keenness for composting almost certainly exceeds my knowledge, and I am hoping to help support the uptake of composting systems in both community gardens and individual households in our region.

I look forward to learning and getting to know all of you on here, and sharing resources/contacts/ideas that progress kaupapa such as (but not limited to) food security and food sovereignty, composting and promoting healthy communities.

He mihi mahana ki a koutou!

Nā Morri

021 457 069

[email protected]

Kia ora @Daniel (Morri) Morrimire ....great to welcome you into this space and to hear your story. Continuing on the excellent of MFAN is a great journey to undertake....I look forward to learning from you in the weeks and months to come :)

Kia ora Morri, sorry for the tardy reply.. Nice to hear your story and inspiring to hear about the work of MFAN.

Kia ora Koutou, my name's Ruth. It's great to have the resurrection of this online space - thanks! I'll try focus on the mahi and doing because I think that's important more than ever ~ I live with my family at Hāwea Flat, near Wānaka - me, husband Jeremy and 4 kids. We run a commercial micro-bakery from home and have done for 10 years in January, making sourdough grinding grain we buy mostly from local, South Island farmers. Our model has been to stay small to be realistic about what our personal energies can cope with (arguably ironic as we are the only workers and it's hard work :), NZ spray-free/organic grain supply, an ethos around 'having enough', staying connected to our product as artisans, and because we think that not taking up or gunning for all the space allows for diversity in the market, just like mono-culture versus agroecology, etc. Our microbakery has supported us until recently with inflation and house prices, so I also work in another role co-organising our region's arts festival. I can weave food into that role too in the area of performance which is interesting and adds to raising local food values and profile to the wider community.

I'm a keen supporter of our local food resilience community, mainly under the awesome 'Grow Wānaka' initiative. Grow Wānaka is a community garden supported so well that there's an over abundance of volunteers which raises the issue of finding more space to grow. The current space is privately provided by friends of ours near the outlet, or the head of Mata Au - Clutha river. We plan to move our bakery there, or close to it, along with another friend's business who make dehydrated meals - (big culture for that down here with the mountaineering folk) who support local and organic. This growing of community and raising profile of grass-roots growing is especially important here as we face unprecedented growth in our region. I really want to be a part of ensuring food growing and food resilience at the base/grass roots is valued in our community, along with what most people value in their daily lives down here. Imagine if we can increase more doing, growing and sharing, rather than buying, earning and hoarding... Grow Wānaka provides food for its vols, and the Community Hub that helps people out with food boxes, and the wider community through produce stands that are dotted around the area. Hopefully Emberly who founded Grow Wānaka will jump on here as well and say more. She is also part of the Upper Clutha food security network working group and with the local council they are currently creating a food resilience plan for the district. Exciting times down here being able to map out a plan for the growing town. We had Grow Wānaka's 2nd birthday celebrations recently and watched the Happen Film's, 'Together We Grow' doco. It was cool, inspiring and its true, together we can grow :-).

Kia ora @Ruth Heath ...sounds like things are going swimmingly down in Wanaka...your story is just the boost I needed this morning. Ka rawe!!! Looking forward to connecting with you deeper soon...and hearing more about your amazing mahi...🙏

So great to hear about the work down south :)

Also, wanted to add that the Aotearoa Food Action Alliance primer is great, thank you @Michael Reynolds and to @Aaron McLean and @Dan K for putting that into words. Can we please share this freely and with those who might be keen to join and contribute?

The short answer is please share and put this on people's radar that you believe will share and benefit...we are getting close to capacity for the group, which we are discussing how to deal with :)

Thank you for your gratitude 🙏

I'd second that. No fences. Share and invite. We aspire to a convivial space of connection and sharing, and we need people to do that with, so welcome all comers. As Michael said though, this loomio group is almost full with participants from the earlier group, so there needs to be some discussion about how to make space for those keen to gather around this renewed kaupapa.

Excellent @Dan K ...sounds like a good way to continue with the kaupapa of a flat collective decision making structure. I second Thursday 22nd 7pm, as I am limited in my ability to join in the first half of the week (parenting)...I can also offer to use my unrestricted Zoom account to host the zui.

Hi I am Tes Rae.

I moved to Hauraki, Thames 3 years ago, there are various people and small groups here working with this community around food access.

I am a gardener at home, for my job and in my community.

I would like well grown poison free food to be growing everywhere and accessible to all.

I would also appreciate everyone doing this type of work to be paid properly, my experience is that gardeners and community organiser types are not valued and I would love this to change.

I am curious about what this group is and Id like to continue following.

Thank you.

Kia ora @Tes ....great to be walking this journey alongside you...and as someone who works at the coalface of community food sovereignty mahi I totally understand your wish for the importance of this work to be recognised. I see this as part of the work of solidarity, as systemic change comes through the power of relationship.

I would love to know a little more about what is going on in Thames....so please don't be a stranger...this space is the sum of what we all contribute to it - exactly like the ecosystem of any garden 🙏

Totally agree re the need for community garden coordinators etc to be paid... lots of good research on just how important that is for those spaces reaching their potential. Would cost so little relative to what is spent in other areas too....

Kia ora @Tes I too aspire to well grown poison free food to be growing everywhere and accessible to all. Food is a human right, sadly we don't treat it as such. Hopefully we can advocate for that here.

Kiaora everyone. Hi. A little about me: I've grown up on Waiheke and Te Tai Tokerau/Northland and split my time between those two places and Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland City. I've studied rural sustainable development, conservation, horticulture, permaculture, te reo and rongoā (traditional plant medicine) many of those studies are ongoing. I'm very interested in urban rewilding, guerilla gardening, the commons, food forestry, māra kai and māra rongoā. Always excited about these learning spaces and this growing collective of people. Like to bounce back and forth between praxis, practice and theory. Look forward to meeting more people in person and over kai in the coming years. Cheers Dan, Michael and Aaron for getting this going. Cheers everyone for the mahi you do. Thank you mana whenua and kaitiaki for the wisdom and guidance you carry. Ngā mihi.

Kai ora Tāne....

So great to have you in this space...we have had some good yarns recently and I look forward to what cold transpire in here.

Kia ora @Tāne Feary , nice to have you here. I hear you re praxis and theory, a constant juggle in my life, although sadly the book pile is a bit neglected at the mo.... grateful for podcdcasts where I can engage with critical thought whilst planting trees.

Kia ora everyone,

I'm Sheldon. Pakeha of mainly Irish decent, born and raised in Ahuriri/Hawkes Bay. I moved to Wellington in 2012 to start a molecular pharmacology degree, but found I couldnt reconcile the moral dilemmas of the industry and found myself on a wayward path leaving uni. A neglected compost bin the backyard of a flat perked my interested and started me down a track of falling in love with all things soil. I found myself helping to begin building Kaicycle (Community Compost & Urban farm in the heart of Wellington), where I stayed for 5 years developing systems and beginning to learn how to produce food for a small CSA.

A little over a year ago, myself and 3 friends took the plunge to begin our own farm in Te Hupenui/Greytown, Wairarapa. We are fortunate to have a friend that purchased some land many years ago, understands the inherit problems of the food system, and believes in a different future. We are co-designing a co-operative land sharing model where we receive as much security as possible, and ass a collective manage the ecosystems on the land (us, Vagabond Vege, lease 2/3 of the property with the other 1/3 either in Justins care, or in collective care).

As a small scale vegetable grower, I find alot of my thoughts and aspirations forming around too main things: 1) How do we produce high quality, agroecological food, and ensure we can earn enough money to cover our monetary needs, without making the food we produce inaccessible. 2) What legal and social frameworks need to be modeled to create opportunities for young (or old) growers to begin farming in ecologically sounds ways without needing to purchase land.

These questions are largely leading us to looking at forming 1) A growers co-operative that acts as a wholesaler to the grower, and a CSA to the consumer. By collectivizing the costs and overheads it should be possible to compete with the supermarkets on price, while providing a better price to the larger growers -- one grower not far from us produces cucumbers and sells for $0.2/ea to the Auckland Wholesaler, were as in a CSA share with a short supply chain, this could be greatly increased. I also see a potential for a model like this to pull in growers trapped in high quantity economics, providing them better returns, and allowing them to remove some land area from intensive production etc. This is especially true for milk & protein producers -- some regenerative sheep farmers in the area are fed up having to supply their animals to the meat works, but the regulatory frameworks in place make it prohibitive to supply their products directly to consumers.

2) A agroecological land trust. This is a much harder more complex beast, and is very early days. There are many examples around the world, and a few attempts have been made Aotearoa also.

Bit of shpeil, and excitied to expand some of these ideas in this forum overtime. Although we are focusing explicitly on our bioregion, it will be interesting to see how a model can be developed that can be moved easily to other regions with different pressures, growers and aspirations.

It's heartening to read everyone's stories, and look forward to more. Happy growing. Now to skin this high tunnel......

Ngā mihi

Sheldon

A photo of the western part of the whenua, taken last summer.

Absolutely gorgeous @Sheldon Levet !!!

I really love what you are doing with Vagabond Vege and am very interested in your systems thinking approach to solving distribution related issues for small scale growers. Some of the issues you are alluding to is why I set up Toha Kai.

Looking forward to some systems focused yarns...🙏

Kia ora @Sheldon Levet, Have been watching your journey at Vagabond Vege via Instagram, all looks amazing, rocks look like a challenge though. Excited to think we could all dig into those lines of thinking together: Cooperatives, land trusts... the social structures ad movements required to get there. An uphill battle in such an individualistic culture that sits on a foundation of private property, but an essential one. And the thing that excites me about the prospect of building some momentum in this space, between food system thinkers and doers across the country, is the prospect of being in action physically in our bioregion, but connected with others in their regions, where skills / knowledge / ideas / frameworks can be shared to inform ourselves or help inform others.

P2P thinker Michel Bauwens talks about Cosmo Localism, where 'what is heavy is local, what is light is global'. The tree root attached to the Mycelium...

Ngā mihi,

Aaron

All sounding great bro. Looking forward to hearing more about the cooperative of small scale growers taking on the supermarkets! Rates for growers are so punishing (and supermarket profits so inflated) that it seems like a really promising angle for drawing people over into a different but still viable economic space x

Tēnā tātou, ngā mihi o te wā. Thanks Dan, for adding me to this group. My name is Urs. Our family lives in coastal Taranaki - te pito o te ao! - and we work somewhere in the space of activism-communitydevelopment-conservation-tinorangatiratanga-marketgardening. We live on a two-acre lifestyle block (although I have started to call it a farm lol) where we grow lots of veggies for the local market and experiment with various low-tech and low-till market garden techniques as well as syntropic agroforestry attempts (there is a website for this https://pungarehu.wordpress.com/). We are also active in the Parihaka community. This year, I have got some paid hours for the first time in the garden, maybe about 15hrs a week. We grow on around 2000m2 - veggies for the marae and Pā residents. Goal this year is to grow about 2 tonnes of spuds. And 250kgs of kūmara. Fingers crossed (there is a FB page: https://www.facebook.com/ParihakaPKRauFestival). Politically, we are active with the group Climate Justice Taranaki which we founded in 2010 (http://climatejusticetaranaki.info/). Early on, our focus was opposition to the expansion of the oil and gas industry in the region. Recently, we have shifted our focus more on the dairy industry (I am currently running for the regional council pushing ideas such as regenerative ag, diversification of production (as well as public transport etc)).

I am particularly interested in regenerative food production systems within a community setting (like Papatūānuku Kōkiri Marae in Tāmaki) and how to navigate the intersection of social enterprise and capitalist realities with communalist aspirations of community-sufficiency, mutual aid and regenerative practices. And also, how to navigate the end of the dairy industry in our region (which is inevitable, 95% is currently exported - how we we get out of industrial dairy is probably the key to significantly lowering this country's emissions) - particularly, we are currently interested in supporting Māori whānau who still collectively own a few acres here and there that are leased out to industrial ag in re-occupying their lands as islands of biodiversity and regenerative, human-scale agriculture (see https://www.maorilandonline.govt.nz/gis/map/search.htm for how little land is left in Māori ownership).

If there is a hui on Thursday, I will try and make it.

Nā

Urs

Tēnā koe Urs, rawe tō mahi and great to have your experience here - 100% in on the [just] transition away from industrial dairy and towards ever-increasing pockets/islands of biodiverse and socially accountable production. I know the phrase 'banana republic' has a bad rap - rightfully, reflecting the US-govt led coups in central America that were instigated to establish US ownership of banana production and horrific levels of worker exploitation there – but when I see your photos of the bananas growing in Taranaki and face the truth of our warming/disrupted world, I get excited about a different sort of banana republic: one that puts community food sovereignty and the re-powering of mana motuhake Māori at its heart, supported by those wonderful and self-propagating plants...

Ātaahua mahi Urs....super excited about all of this!

Definitely agree on the industrial production of dairy...and feel that could be applied to most commoditised items. Your approach seems to align nicely with @Mark Kroening pockets of aliveness PhD...

Looking forward to a kōrero soon...🙏

All sounds and looks amazing Urs, looking forward to chats about communalist aspirations.

Kia ora Urs, great to have your experience and insights in this forum. Feeling a similar vibe over here in the Wairarapa, seeing more and more acres converted to intensive dairy each year - late stage dairy is fierce. On the māori land and growing kaupapa, a similar idea has been talked about for the land surrounding Papawai marae here in Te Hupenui. One of the iwi members is looking to transition some of the acerage from conventional dairy to regenerative systems to show another path. He also mentioned the many many small blocks the iwi holds and their potential for small holding agriculture. I'm sure I could connect you if you want to have a yarn with him. Good luck with the council 😀 Hope the bananas are still growing strong 💪

Hi Michael,
Sorry will not be able to make this as pretty busy.
Hope all is well!
H

Just wanted to follow up on the poll by adding that this is just the first online gathering, we plan to discuss creating a monthly space for people to gather. The idea being that not everyone needs to turn up every time, one just shows up when you can and you will be welcome. We also plan for there to be a sharing of some minutes/notes taken during these gatherings to allow those keen but unavailable to catch up on what was discussed.

Here are the Zoom details for the kōrero this Thursday:

Topic: AFAA Online Kōrero

Time: Sep 22, 2022 07:00 PM Auckland, Wellington

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81596682450?pwd=bmZsVFZCQ2lkOFRkNUt6MkFHNmJBQT09

Meeting ID: 815 9668 2450

Passcode: 527048

We've just enjoyed a heartwarming evening with the first online kōrero for the AFAA...

I need to do things when I remember to do them...so we loosely committed to meeting online on Zoom on the 3rd Thursday of the month at 7pm...that way it is easy to weave it into our lives...

Here's your invitation to the next one...

Topic: AFAA Online Kōrero

Time: Oct 20, 2022 07:00 PM Auckland, Wellington

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83373691471?pwd=N0dkOXNmQU5CcmJXN1B4YjBQUlNLUT09

Meeting ID: 833 7369 1471

Passcode: 519469

So wonderful to hear! I wonder if anyone who was able to attend last night, would be open to dropping in an emotion or key insight/takeaway into this thread? Tēnā koe.

Hi Mark - just finished writing up the minutes. In the interests of keeping this thread focused on introductions, I've posted them in the 'organising hui' thread :)

It is so exciting to read about all the things people are doing and thinking about - I'm excited to be able to talk more and work on these things together. Thanks Aaron for including me in this group! 

I'm Hollie, I grew up in Aparima/Riverton in Southland, alongside my family's small forest garden, and among the community of the Riverton Organic Co-op and the Riverton Organic Growers Group and a lot great potlucks. I was lucky to work in Riverton at the organic co-op, and to be able to be employed to coordinate the community Heritage Harvest Festival for three years. These roles led me to work at organic stores and co-ops in Dunedin and Portland Oregon, and to an agroecological apprenticeship with MESA at a large organic cooperative farm in Oregon. My partner Rebecca is from Oregon, and has been an organic market gardener since finishing University in 2012. She has been an apprentice and farmer on small organic vegetable, fruit and livestock farms across the US, and most recently has been employed by a small high school in Riverton to develop a market garden and established a permanent market gardener position on the school's staff. Together, we ran a small market garden in Riverton, Woodsorrel Farm, with a small CSA. We have recently moved to Otepoti/Dunedin where Rebecca is working on a small organic market garden in Purakaunui. 

We are both a part of Village Agrarians, a group of people working to support cooperative systems for agroecological growers, advocate for landless growers, and offer community based training in agroecological growing. So far, Village Agrarians programmes are mostly based in Southland and Otago, which is where most of board members are living.

This winter, in partnership with the Riverton Environment Centre, Village Agrarians began a 5 month, collaborative market gardening training based around the Longwood Loop in Southland. With funding from MSD we were able to offer this training for free and pay growers across Otago and Southland to lead most of the workshops and farm visits in the training. We are now establishing a role for someone to be a collaboration facilitator for this group and for other small growers around the Loop. The goal of this role is to set up cooperative marketing and distribution systems (in addition to the Loop system itself) for the growers around the Longwood Loop and help growers to access resources and a community of support. It's been exciting to see systems of support are already coming out of our Southland training program, ideas of communal marketing and transport, bulk buying, resource sharing etc.

For the last year, we have hosted land-sharing listings on the Village Agrarians website and helped connect some land seekers with land holders. We are currently developing a land access guide to create resources to strengthen these relationships and support landless growers to advocate for equitable arrangements. We are also excited to be in conversation with Dunedin City Council right now about council land and opportunities for growers in peri-urban areas around Otago and about the importance of larger co-operative systems of wholesale and distribution into urban spaces and the systems of support that local growers will need if councils and communities are wanting to realise local food resilience. 

Village Agrarian's final programme is a community-based, regional, agroecological internship programme for new entrants into agroecology. Our pilot internship will run this summer on market gardens in Otago and we hope that our first cohort will be beginning in spring 2023.

I've loved reading everyone's stories, and looking forward to being a part of some great conversations in this group!

Yay...so exciting to have you in here @Hollie Guyton :)

Village Agrarians is a super important aspect of the mahi that Aotearoa needs...as is all the magical happenings in Aparima...I am very keen to wander down and take in the magic of the food forest and Longwood Loop :)

Hi Hollie, really nice to see you here and I'm looking forward to you being part of those conversations. Inspiring stuff above - much respect!

Kia ora, Hollie, so great to read your stories and range of activity and your relationship currently with Otepoti council. I wonder how many food growing initiatives utilising council spaces there are working at local council level around NZ? Especially as a blueprint of what can be. It's really inspiring and gives so much hope for the future.

Kia ora Ruth...

Roimata Food Commons in Ōtautahi is on council land... :) Local council land activation could be one element of a directory...?

We really need to figure out ways to inspire local councils to be more proactive in this space....and a shift towards allowing production focused activation would be brilliant. We have been talking to Christchurch City Council about potentially leasing red zone land for an urban farm, a long-ish road ahead though.

That's great, I guess as we are inspired by stories, Councils would be inspired by other council's successes and what they are proactively doing? For example, Hollie's stories, plus Grow Wanaka, yours, etc, etc... Our local council is currently working on a food resilience strategy for the district and the Upper Clutha food security network (with Grow Wanaka) are also going to put one together to nest under the council one to coordinate and capture all efforts for greater impact. I wonder if all councils are engaged in creating a food resilience strategy?

Kia ora Ruth, agree with what you’re getting at here, but unfortunately recent research shows many councils in nz have no policy in this space - so lots for us to work on! Link here if you’d like to read the paper 😊 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1177083X.2021.1996403

Kia ora tātou, this is certainly a wonderful ecosystem of voices and action coming together. I have met a couple of you, but I'd love to meet more of you some day in person (this internet thing has some severe limitations!).

I am an Austrian Pākeha, born in Vienna to an Austrian father and kiwi Irish mother, having moved back to Aotearoa aged 3 years. I spent my early years growing up in Ngongotāhā, Rotorua, on my Irish grandfather's sheep farm where my mother carried on the tradition of vegetable gardening learned from her parents, an unbroken transmission of cultural know-how from Irish ancestors since before recorded history. My father's ancestors are wine growers from South Tirol.

I studied ecology at the University of Auckland and graduated with an MSc in Environmental Science. I also have BA in Latin American Studies and Māori Studies. I worked as an ecologist for several years in NZ, mainly surveying indigenous vegetation. I've had a lot of global adventures (too many to go into), including being employed to monitor Leatherback sea turtles in Costa Rica and volunteering in human rights observation in Chiapas, Mexico to protect the rebelling Zapatistas from paramilitaries. I've been in the Green Party since 2006 and I try to be an activist in every way possible, personally, in my family, in my community and nationally. I mainly believe in positive action, although sometimes peaceful protest and defiance are totally necessary.

At this point in my life (44 yrs old) I find myself leading a small organic market garden business in Ngongotāhā (Lux Organics), which for the last 6.5 years has provided the main income for our family of four (Richard, myself and two sons aged 12 and 14 now). It is also our home and the place where we have achieved our highest level of family food security so far, through establishing a permaculture orchard and annual food gardens in addition to our market garden. We have a CSA of about 45 households, as well as supplying an organic co-op, a few organic shops and several restaurants and cafes. In the busy season our business employs 3 FTE on 1 hectare (myself full-time, four part-time employees for a total of 85 hours), and there is scope to do so much more if we could deal with the complexity of stacking more activities in the still developing ecosystem of the farm. My mother gardens with us for free, I must add. She's the hardest worker out of all of us, aged 74.

I teach yoga at the local school hall, which is very fulfilling and fun.

I'm also currently the Deputy Chair of the Soil & Health Association of NZ, one of the oldest organic organisations in the world, and I am on the board of BioGro, which is owned by Soil & Health. I also sit on the National Coordinating Committee of Organic Farm NZ. There's a ton of work on at the moment with new organic regulations going through government. My goal is just to represent small organic growers to government and to be a link between those who see themselves as "organic" and those who use other descriptors in the rest of the diverse food growing community in our whenua.

I hope to have the time to connect with all of you soon.

Kia ora Jenny, so much respect for your politics and mahi - fascinating to hear more details too! Thanks for sharing 😊

I’m particularly intrigued by the Zapatista link… look forward to chewing your ear on it one day.. from my reading there’s loads to be learned from their strong focus on local autonomy and consensus decision making but sounds like you were right in the thick of it - rawe! x

Kia ora @Jenny Lux, Agree this internet thing has severe limitations, especially for a group of people who have their hands in the soil rather than attached to a keyboard. This space has however allowed me to learn all of that about you, and much about others in this group, so I'll take that as a positive part of the ecosystem of a fledgling collective... but hopefully all of that can result in some real world interactions between us as individuals and a group as we move forward.

Zapatismo is a big influence on my political philosophy, so like Dan I'm looking forward to hearing more about your experience in Chiapas. "Asking we walk"....

Big respect for all of that other mahi!

Aaron

Wow, Jenny, it seems you've packed several lifetimes into one; what an inspiration! Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed introduction. That's so great that your CSA has engaged 45 households plus wholesale supply; what an epic effort. I really appreciate all the different 'hats' you wear...lots of perspectives on the same space. & Thanks, too, for your service in sitting on boards and taking up voluntary governance positions. Amazing work.