Fresh thinking
Meet the urban farmer who’s helping drive a food revolution from his quarter acre market garden in New Plymouth.
“A lot of the farmers I talk to have had a tenfold increase in the interest in their vege boxes, and we all saw shelves emptied of seedlings prior to lockdown. So I think change is possible and I am hopeful.”
When I first visited Carl Freeman’s urban market garden Freeman Farms in suburban New Plymouth six or so months ago, the jovial Australian-born farmer was there to show me around. It didn’t take long since most of his farm is situated on the quarter-acre section around the ex-state house where Carl lives with wife Kati and their five-year-old son River (he also has a small plot at a nearby community garden). Here, in his mini market garden, Carl grows more than 25 types of fruit and vegetables in 50 vegetable beds, producing honey from beehives and collects eggs from chickens. The produce is sold at the city’s farmers’ market every Sunday, “although with Covid-19 we had to pivot and started home-delivered vege boxes too.”
The urban farm was part of the Taranaki Sustainable Backyards Trail which runs alongside the annual Taranaki Garden Festival in spring and I was there with photographer Sally Tagg who was shooting some gardens in the region for me.
As we drove away, Sally and I were discussing something that Carl had said. He had told us he thought it would be possible, in the future, for food to be produced in a hyper-local agricultural system. Farms like his would be dotted throughout New Zealand’s suburbs, roadside honesty boxes a common sight along country roads and farmers’ markets vibrant with local producers. He said it would be possible to have one small, highly productive space for every 30 or so families – or, as he put it then, a farm on every road.
I remember talking about it with Sally and we agreed it was an amazing version of the future and interesting as a theory, but for such a radical change to food production to occur in any meaningful way, there would need to be some cataclysmic and potentially catastrophic event which made people suddenly and shockingly aware of the vulnerabilities that existed within the industrial food system.
Nek minnit, as the kids say.
It’s true, Carl says when we spoke more recently, the real and perceived logistics breakdowns in the food chain that occurred during the days immediately prior to the recent lockdown “brought into focus for a lot of people” some of the possible problems that existed within the current system: one where the bulk of the fresh food that most Kiwis consume is produced on a limited number of industrial scale farms which funnel their harvests through a complex, often roadbased, logistics network into the big supermarket chains. “But these are not new problems,” Carl says. “Many researchers have been pointing out that current industrial food system is very unstable, for some time.”
Concerns around the existing model have driven a surge or interest and innovation around regenerative agriculture, nationally and internationally, over the last few years. In New Zealand, Freeman Farms is just one of the many small and medium scale initiatives where people are trying to find new and better ways to grow food – on farms, in market gardens, on marae and in community gardens – in order to build better local food security and climate change resilience. Carl is part
“We have transformed a quarter acre around an ex-state house into a market garden that supplies 30 families with vegetables and provides me with an income and a job.”
of the Urban Farmers Alliance, a collection of around 25 such operations across the country, and the coordinator for a Taranaki network of small-scale urban organic market gardeners,
Farm Next Door. Last January, in partnership with Massey University, Farm Next Door was awarded a $100,000 grant to fund research into the benefits and barriers to hyperlocal community agriculture.
But while all this has been happening on the fringes for a while, it’s fair to say that these issues were under the radar for a majority of people. Until recently that is. “This Covid-19 crisis has opened a lot of people’s eyes.”
Carl first became interested in gardening and growing when he was offered a job on an organic farm in Melbourne that supplied produce to restaurants.
“But I think it was possibly in my blood as it felt very right, right from the start.”
He started watching online videos about food production and urban farming in which people suggested it was possible to make a living growing crops intensively on a very small piece of land. So when he and Kati decided to move to Taranaki in New Zealand (where Kati had been brought up), they looked for a home with a big enough section that he could put those theories to the test. “Now we are in year three, and I am well and truly willing to back the model and encourage other people to do it.
“Me, with our quarter-acre garden and one little plot in a community garden, and only working part-time, I am able to bring in a good income.
“Like any business it takes a couple of years to find its feet, but it gets easier and easier, and makes more business sense as we go along.”
The community-centred model increases food resilience by introducing more diversity into the system. It’s a high-employment model – data from the US suggests that fruit and vegetable farms focusing on local and regional markets employ more than four
times as many FTE staff than fruit and vegetable farms that are not engaged in local markets (and UK data suggests consumer spending in small independent local food outlets supports three times as many jobs as spending at national chains). Farm Next Door and Massey scientists are trying to find out the equivalent figures for New Zealand.
But also, and perhaps most importantly of all, Carl says, it is just a really nice way to live.
“I don't think we need to only start creating these systems with disasters in mind.
“What I do is about food resilience and the big political picture. But it’s also that quaint notion of the good life. It’s having your hands in the soil, connecting with neighbours, eating delicious food. It’s nice to do something that you believe is creating a better world that’s also joyous and abundant and really fun along the way.”
Small scale community-centred agriculture isn’t a replacement for larger scale producers, he says.
“It’s not an either-or thing. The two are really connected. But a strong local food ecosystem allows for food production in New Zealand to focus on food production for export and that’s what they are projecting will be needed in the coming while.”
Plus, he thinks, having this vibrant story to tell about local food production in New Zealand will make New Zealand products more attractive in overseas markets too.
But is such a significant change really possible, I ask.
“I am hopeful,” he says. “Tipping point studies show only 3 to 5 per cent of the population need to change the way they do something to create real change.”
The Covid-19 crisis means people are likely to be more aware of these issues and more open to change than they ever have been before.
“So I think it’s worth doing some really wild thinking now about what is possible. The current system isn’t working for a lot of people. So let’s try and create something else.” ✤