Educating families on how to grow good food

Brad Harding, Rachel Yeats, Fox Harding (5 months). Photo/George Novak

It's not an earth-shatteringly new idea that fresh, nutrient-rich food is good for us.

But for many reasons, not everyone has access to it, or the skills to grow it.

Now a Western Bay of Plenty couple - Brad Harding and Rachel Yeats - want to address the social disadvantage in accessibility to healthy food and are ready to share their 20- plus years of knowledge to grow and change it at a community level.

They have just launched a PledgeMe campaign to raise funds to start their small-scale educational market garden, which will be dedicated to showing disadvantaged young people how they can earn a living growing nutrient-dense food in their own communities.

Called Grow Food Instead, the project has been 12 months in the making. The pair have land to farm, suppliers, local knowledge and customers ready. Now they just need the funds to begin their venture, which they're hoping the Bay community will help with.

Rachel and Brad worked at the heritage seed-collecting organisation Koanga Institute, but their workshops were prohibitively expensive for those who needed it most.

"We needed to figure out a way to get the education to them and it's taken quite a long time to figure out the model for that," Rachel says. The penny dropped at a workshop about sustainable funding.

"Lightbulbs started going off that if we could run it as a business, then the sustainability would be there - we wouldn't have to live off contracts and grants. Since then we've been making sure everything checks out," she says.

"Brad's passion is the growing and my passion is the helping people, so we've put those things together and this is what we've managed to come up with."

The pair believe that setting up small-scale market gardens around Tauranga is the first step towards regenerating a local food system, leading to increased food security and food sovereignty.

"Our current food system is unsustainable and disadvantages the people who most need access to healthy food. Grow Food Instead is giving that power back to those people."

The first step in their plan is to set up a small-scale, biointensive market garden in Te Puna. It will be an educational hub, providing community workshops, summer internships for high school students and paid apprenticeships for socially disadvantaged young people.

Once those youths are fully trained, Grow Food Instead will help them set up market gardens of their own so they can provide food for their local communities.

"That's the long-term view, but we won't be directly feeding the community for about two years, because that's how long it will take to train the apprentices up," says Rachel.

They aim to sell produce direct to restaurants, consumers and local food distributors, with the money ploughed back into the enterprise.

Our current food system is unsustainable and disadvantages the people who most need access to healthy food. Grow Food Instead is giving that power back to those people.

Brad Harding

Already 30 per cent of the $10,000 they need to cover startup costs has been found. "That's given us heaps of confidence because we've been pushing for it really hard because we want to get it off the ground."

The funding will cover things such as pumps and irrigation, tools, cloches, seeds and washing stations.

Rachel and Brad are calling on everybody who has something to give, whether that be in funds or spreading the message.

* To help visit pldg.me/ growfoodinstead