Country Life: Could small-scale farms be the best way to feed the country?

Small farms on the urban fringe could be the answer to improved food security in New Zealand, benefiting the environment and the community at the same time, farmer Alison Bentley said.

However, she has found small-scale farmers need help if they are to avoid burnout while paying the overheads and practising kaitiakitanga.

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Bentley has run several trials and projects on Tikitere Farm, seven hectares of rolling paddocks and an orchard on the northeast flank of Lake Rotorua.

In addition, her small block has become a kind of petri dish for some of the in-depth research on small-scale growers which she undertook in 2023 for the Kellogg Rural Leadership Programme.

Her study looked at small-block farmers' contribution to New Zealand's food system and food sustainability into the future.

Among her findings - food growing is "planned out" of urban development, while 10 percent of lifestyle block owners, on a total of 148,000 hectares, had a "genuine intention to produce food from their land."

"Keep the food out growing on the farms and transport it into urban people [is what happens currently]. Now, with greenhouse gases, everything about that is so wrong," she told Country Life.

"As we go into the future, we need to shorten our supply chains for a whole raft of reasons."

Designing food "into" urban areas - using the peri-urban space - would make a huge difference, she said, as well as having two systems of food production. This would benefit local consumers and underpin New Zealand's more industrial large-scale export-oriented farming system.

New Zealand needs large-scale farming to be fiscally stable, but "our domestic food system has really got drowned in the wake of that," Bentley said.

"We've got food deprivation and food insecurity in New Zealand, like not many people would understand. So, we really need to view our domestic food through a completely different lens."

A "magnificent amount of food" can be produced from a very small area, she said.

"The ecosystem and the diversity can produce more food from a smaller footprint than large scale, heavy machinery, high input type of systems."

As if to illustrate the difficulties small farmers face, her project selling beef directly to customers from a small herd on regeneratively grown pasture at Tikitere has come to a "natural end".

With compliance more suited to long-supply chains and larger farming systems, as well as other challenges, she said "it's like pushing s*** uphill."

"It is extremely difficult to maintain a profitable, small-scale, independent primary industry business without extra assistance, without burnout, while paying all the overheads involved and prioritising environmental stewardship.

"Collaboration and diversified cooperative frameworks would be more sustainable options for small growers wanting to serve local communities."

Bentley is continuing to develop other projects, including "land sharing" and a hazelnut orchard, planted as part of a healthy catchment-related trial to get animals off the land.

While her hazelnut yield from the seven-year trial was not quite enough to rate as a profitable use of land, it was still deemed successful.

With a little more research, that yield could be significantly improved, she said.

In the meantime, food is not sparse in the Bentley household. The nut harvest is underway, 100 jars of preserves are on the shelves, about 10kg of berries are in the freezer, tomatoes, cucumbers and beetroot are yet to be processed, apples are ripening and the kumara, feijoa and tamarillo harvests are still to come.

All on seven hectares. Enough to feed a community really.

Learn more:

• Learn more about Alison's hazelnut trial here

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