Taranaki farming family finding success growing medicinal plants
Taking part in a trial growing medicinal plants on their whānau land looks to be the opportunity a Taranaki farming family has been searching for.
Rawiri Mcclutchie, together with his two sisters, two brothers, their mother, and their partners and children, have long wanted to work their own land at Pukearuhe, north of New Plymouth.
The family farm has been leased out for grazing since the mid-1990s, when changing industry conditions meant the 100-cow herd his parents were milking became unprofitable to continue.
“Prior to that, Mum and Dad were dairy farming, with a small number of sheep and beef,” Rawiri Mcclutchie said.
He said the land, Rehutai, where some of the family lived, had never been in European ownership.
“Mcclutchie whānau have been kaitiaki of their whenua, since the confiscation of Taranaki lands by the Crown in 1865,” he said.
“We are uri of North Taranaki iwi Ngāti Tama, and whakapapa back to the Tokomaru waka, which was part of the great migration over 700 years ago.
“At the time, the confiscation of lands was appealed by a group of Māori, and blocks of land were returned, this block being one of them.”
The family are looking forward to continuing to work it together, after the success this season of several crops they’re growing as part of Venture Taranaki’s Branching Out project.
There are 11 sites across Taranaki taking part in the trials, part of the project set up to identify and develop crops and products that can be produced commercially in Taranaki, to diversify the dairy-dominated region.
The Mcclutchie whānau are growing a range of cultivars of angelica and liquorice (gin botanicals), and medicinal plants ashwagandha and Calendula officinalis.
The warm weather over summer had boosted the plants’ growth, but also the weeds, so it was fortunate the family had plenty of hands on deck, Rawiri said.
“We have had really good conditions for crops, and for weeds, but now it’s getting to the point the crops are starting to suppress the weeds,” he said.
And they are excited by the results so far. “We have been through what we could do, and we thought this [the trial] was perfect. It’s new and it looked really sound,” he said.
The project identified potential demand and markets for all of the crops being trialled, including the medicinal and gin botanicals the family are growing.
“At the end of the trial, we want to get up and running, and potentially go commercial. We have some big plans,” Rawiri said.
“Our family history is that we were sheep and beef and dairy farmers. Now we are becoming crop farmers.”
They knew the trial would be likely to succeed because everything in his sister and brother-in-law’s garden grew well, he said.
Project manager Michelle Bauer said the first year of the trials had been a steep learning curve, but there had been some excellent results.
The ongoing work will help to identify the cultivars most suited to Taranaki, with between three and six different seed lines of each crop being grown at trial sites across South Taranaki, Stratford, New Plymouth, and North Taranaki.
It was hoped that triallists who were interested in continuing would be able to take what they had learned and take it forward at scale, along with other landowners, Bauer said.
Part of the project work included quality-testing the produce, and liaising with medium-sized and large gin distillers and wholesalers of gin botanicals, and similar work with the natural product industry, she said.
“There’s so much interest, not just from land owners but industry as well.”
Other crops being grown in the Branching Out project include a sustainable crop rotation involving four different crops, garlic being grown at eight different schools, hemp fibre for cement, and hops orchards at Tarata and Tikorangi.