Peihana Farm
Maria Lempriere
Growing and delivering for local communities
Heidi McLeod | Jan 2021
Maria’s evolution as a grower has developed over three years. She concentrates on diversifying produce for eating or medicine, supporting a domestic food sector in Taranaki, and motivating the productivity of other like-minded growers. She has a 3-hectare lifestyle property in the settlement of Urenui with her partner, dog, and a small number of livestock.
I trek around the farm with Maria in late January 2021. It's been seven months since I last visited, and the farm has developed more growing beds and a tunnel house filled with heritage tomatoes. Maria farewells a friend who comes once a week to help rehabilitate from illness. The friend helps for a few hours and takes vegetables home in return. Maria gets company, which is rare on her property, as well as much-needed labour.
Maria and I explore the farm discussing what is growing, experimental crops such as loofah, or her three sisters planting methodology. Her various growing zones do not represent the formulaic approach most market or organic gardeners tend to use. While the traditionalists' rows are optimised for crop production, accessibility and weed suppression, Maria's are more free-ranging. These zones reflect her approach to business too, varied and springing into life where opportunities exist. We sit down at her dining room table, and I interview her about her journey into full-time gardening.
I learn that Maria has a background of training and experiences both here and overseas. Serendipitously, this has led to her current ventures. Maria's journey has taken her from naturopathy workshops, Royal Horticultural Society studies, temping and waitressing in London, to celebrity speaker management. She did marketing for a software management company, handled international and community art collections, worked with plants and food, but it is people who have always been central. Storytelling and the ability to make connections with people appear to be the inherent character traits of Maria. She is a connector and networker in the region, and her ability to see the bigger picture or curate the story of what something ‘might be’ makes her an effective collaborator. I found that at any event to do with small-scale growing, sustainability, RA, initiatives around seed saving or crop swaps, Maria was always connecting people to people and people to ideas.
The 2018 Just Transitions project in Taranaki acted as a catalyst for Maria. From this conference, she was motivated to gear up her home garden with a view to selling healthy and varied produce. She formed the Growers & Producers of North Taranaki Facebook group in 2018. From this interaction, she began a Saturday market in Urenui. When the first COVID-19 lockdown occurred, the market shut down, but Maria's relationships with buyers naturally progressed to a direct-to-consumer sales model. She created a spray-free grocery box delivery service, and the concept worked well. Drawing in several of her neighbours, Maria includes their produce into her grocery boxes. Maria did not return to the market model. There are several reasons growers opt for this approach, she said, and this was verified by another box delivery operator. Maria explained that the value of knowing what and how much to grow regularly to sustain your boxes is vital.
The Farmers’ market model requires a bountiful and appealing display to entice buyers, but this creates unpredictable demand levels, as experienced by several Taranaki growers who sell at the Taranaki's Farmers' Market. If excess produce is not sold, this benefits food recovery operators or free community pantries and pātaka kai, who the growers frequently pass their excess on to, to avoid waste. However, it represents labour and produce that has not materialised into profit. While growers have different perspectives on profit compared to those involved in large-scale market gardening or mainstream farming, SSGs still want to cover their costs and/or pay themselves an income.
In January, when I visited, Maria worked with 14 local growers and producers to create her grocery boxes and aimed for orders from 10 families per week. This, I noted, is the physical scale at which she can manage her gardening operation despite having a substantial available amount of land to utilise. If she had more customers, she would need to grow more produce, which would require more labour. She admits the workdays are long and typically seven days a week. Nevertheless, she enjoys this way of working. She knows each of her customers, and they purchase because they want "real food with dirt on it". Fresh food, grown locally, where you know how it has been grown and by whom. Some of her customers are from overseas and familiar with this way of purchasing local food direct from a grower, and others are parents at the new Green School who have an environmental philosophy synonymous with Maria's practices. Interestingly, I noted on her Facebook page that in November 2021, she was reaching out for more help on her farm, as she was now supplying 25 families weekly. This substantial increase in her productivity shows how a hyper-local business can stimulate economic activity within a community.