Everyone knows that food prices have shot up with the current rampant inflation. Add to that the climate crisis, cyclones devastating Poverty and Hawke’s Bays, our major food-producing regions, disruption to supply in the South a few years ago from the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes and Covid, and the current egg shortage.
There’s certainly a demand here for locally grown food. Growers bring tonnes of fresh produce to the Saturday morning Otago Famers Market at the Dunedin Railway Station and sell out every week.
Nevertheless, since the market started 20 years ago there’s been a background fear that there would not be enough local primary producers to keep up supplies as older ones retired, so the market began a "Grow the growers" initiative encouraging and supporting new growers, according to Kate Vercoe, a former market manager and now project co-ordinator for Our Food Network (OFN).
For 10 years the network has been working to enable people to grow and access local food but now, instead of something that greenies espoused, she thinks it’s becoming more mainstream. We are vulnerable down here.
"I believe there are only three large-scale vegetable growers left in Otago. We get most of our produce from Canterbury and, I guess, Nelson, so natural disasters can impact on that quite readily. We are at risk of being cut off from the rest of the country and not having enough fresh food."
Resilience is a major aspiration of OFN’s work, encouraging families, whanau groups, and communities to grow food.
"It’s going back to that era of having big veggie gardens at home but not everyone can do that. A lot of people don’t own their own land, people are busier, everyone has to work, so moving from the back yard into the community is really growing. Now a younger generation of people is interested in coming to the working bees."
There are many community gardens around the city, but it takes a core of passionate people to keep driving them and showing others how to grow and harvest food. But it’s also a space where children can learn and younger people and families are becoming involved, she said.
The Garden to Table organisation supports programmes in primary and intermediate schools where children plant and look after vegetable gardens, learn to harvest and cook the produce which they then share. However this requires resources and volunteer support.
"OFN currently works in three low-decile schools, Halfway Bush, Brockville and Bathgate Park, building gardens and working with the kids to grow, look after, harvest and cook the produce. Unlike some higher-decile schools who might have parents able to volunteer time and expertise, these schools wouldn’t be able to run these programmes. It’s not through lack of interest, it’s through lack of resources," she said.
Lack of resources and know-how is a widespread problem for many families wanting to grow their own food.
The ground might not be suitable, it may be contaminated or too hard, or have a high water table and people might not have tools. She heard of someone trying to dig a garden with a teaspoon! However, now some tool libraries were being set up in parts of the city, she said.
A pilot project last year was working with 10 different whanau groups in community housing, mostly people who were unwell in various ways. In the main it was successful, but the facilitators had to be social workers and counsellors as well as gardeners, she said.
However, health and social organisations saw the therapeutic as well as the practical benefits of growing food and were starting to provide resources.
"That is a systemic change, recognising the benefit to people in community housing as well as providing some food."
Some of the social housing groups were former refugees who might be good gardeners but had no resources. OFN helped set them up with raised beds, hungry worm bins, and encouragement to grow food they liked to eat.
The network also partners with a project planting fruit trees around south Dunedin and organises a community fruit harvest, picking unwanted fruit and preserving it, which was set to rescue well over a tonne of fruit this year, she said.
Some young people also wanted to grow food if they could find suitable land at a reasonable price or lease, but there needed to be somewhere like a co-op where they could sell or swap excess produce if they didn’t have the scale to sell at the farmers market.
One of the network’s members, a keen gardener, reached out to her community, dropping flyers around her neighbourhood to invite people to share what they’d done and swap seeds and food. Six keen gardeners turned up, followed, soon after, by another six as others saw what was happening and didn’t want to miss out.
"That’s a neighbourhood network," Kate said.
However, sometimes organisations received funding to start a project but unless they could transition it into community ownership it could lapse.
"That’s very important to Our Food Network. This is about growing communities and growing capability within the community to look after this stuff," she said.
"We have these utopian visions of people in retirement villages growing seedlings on their windowsills that can then go into school gardens, and all that sort of stuff, but wouldn’t it be cool if we could actually make it happen!
There’s lots of vision, but it’s then down to the grass roots of how do you make it happen," she said.
"That’s what I value about OFN, we don’t lose sight of the vision but we are actually doers."
The network currently has four part-time contractors but is waiting to hear about further funding which will determine what they can do this year. It’s very hand-to-mouth, she said.
Funds come from such organisations as DCC, Lotteries, community organisation grant schemes, Ministry of Social Development.
Some of the hardware chains help with timber for raised beds or hungry worm bins but OFN is also looking for sponsors who can align with their values.
"We are grateful for anything. It’s important to have a diverse funding stream so we are not reliant on just government and local councils."
OFN also has a committee of volunteers and about 450 members.
It would love to encourage more gardening mentors, especially retired people who still had a tonne of energy and knowhow - like the SuperGrans.
It also needs the next generation - the 35-55-year-olds - to help get things off the ground, she added.
"It breaks my heart that there’s such a lot of old people who become invisible and they have such a wealth of knowledge around these things - and they are lonely."
She believes there is now a good understanding of where the local food scene is at and where the weaknesses are and what needs to happen. The DCC has worked on an investment logic map, recognising the risks and come up with 11 different solutions for local food security, she said.
"It’s a really good document, a driving document, but it’s quite aspirational and now we need to make that operational."
