By Lauraine Jacobs

uring the lockdown, many of us stopped at home with little else to do but cook, eat and celebrate our amazing New Zealand food (and be thankful for our valued essential workers). The joy we found in our kitchens was on public display, with copious proud socialmedia posts of exciting dinners and homebaked sourdough breads.

For 150 years, New Zealand has steadily developed an economy focussed on the production, consumption and export of delicious food. However, the dark underbelly of food insecurity was also revealed during COVID-19. While more families than ever before cried out for food parcels and assistance, food was spoiled and wasted through inadequate distribution systems, small producers were shut out as farmers’ markets and small food stores closed and our vast hospitality industry was shuttered. Food exports thankfully continued to roll on, promising economic lifelines for the next few years.

With such attention turned on our food and its possibilities, we asked

“If people knew how some of their food was grown, they wouldn’t eat it,” she says. “But there are many good food stories out there as hundreds of common-sense farmers who care about the land like we do want to farm in a manner that ensures the land will be productive for many generations to come.”

With the COVID-19 shutdown, her little store had to close, along with small butchers and many other excellent businesses throughout the country. Bayliss still hasn’t re-opened (at the time of writing); stumbling blocks include myriad regulations that are imposed on the food system, including farms.

“The big industrialised farm systems may need these rules, but they just don’t work for the small farmer, the good, honest guys and farm heroes like my dad. There’s no such thing as one system that suits all farms.”

Bayliss thinks that the COVID-19 lockdown made people more aware of their food, gave everybody time to think and to appreciate the calm without the constantly busy, rushed lives we were living. She knows that if our systems are to change, they have to be consumer driven.

It is important we all seek healthy, nutritious food – food that’s produced directly for the consumer, without all the layers of ‘clipping the ticket’ that raises prices to unaffordable levels.

There’s hope, she points out, as she’s intent on solving small farmers’ problems such as sending small numbers of animals to the works through a system that demands and benefits those ‘ticket-clippers.’ It broke her heart to see just one or two of her animals loaded onto a truck, taken away to the works and then killed and processed by others.

She’s been working with the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) to approve a mobile abattoir for the farm and has found a mobile meatpacker. From July she will be able to supply her lovingly raised beef, aged for at least two weeks, direct to caring and conscious consumers. Her next challenge may be distribution: it will be easy enough to deliver meat around the Waikato, but not so simple further afield.

What needs to happen next in the New Zealand food story? presents views of the future.