Business North July / August 2021

New Zealand is a land of milk and honey. The story of our country owes a great deal to its food producers. Before Captain Cook’s arrival, New Zealand M ā ori were successfully cultivating crops transplanted here from across the Paci c, and the arrival of European settlers meant the conversion of marginal land for sheep, beef and dairy cows. But over time we’ve grown disconnected from the source of our food. While parts of Aotearoa remain traditional agrarian communities, fewer and fewer of us have real-world encounters with the farmers, shers, growers, beekeepers, processors, and support people who feed us. In the 1880s, almost three-quarters of New Zealanders lived in these food growing rural communities. By 2020, more than 85% of us lived in cities. As our connection to our food sources has become more tenuous, the role of the local grocery store in our lives has grown. The trust we place in them is huge: they have become the gatekeepers of what is good, safe, and delicious in our homes. This is why it’s so signi cant that Farro has remained committed to supporting local, higher welfare and delicious products as best they can for more than a decade. When Freedom Farms was getting off the ground, many considered us mad to hope that New Zealanders would be willing to pay a little bit more for food that was farmed ‘the Freedom way’ – on farms that were kinder to their farm animals and took it easy on the environment. The butchery aisle at supermarkets was a sea of polystyrene trays, with few hints about how or even where the products in them farmed. The bacon aisle was equally disheartening. Our search yielded a handful of pig farmers at the foot of the Southern Alps who had shunned the use of crates and cages in favour of a farming system that allowed the pigs to practice all their natural behaviours without wreaking havoc on the environment. We worked with the SPCA, and then later AsureQuality, to independently audit the farms, ensuring they met our expectations for welfare and careful environmental management. We cosseted their bacon, ham, pork and sausages in our bright sunny packaging and took it out to consumers. Shortly after we added eggs to the agenda, sourcing independently audited free-range eggs from a group of lovely little farms in sunny Horowhenua. Farro has been a supporter of Freedom Farms from the outset. And in the midst of increasingly complex conversations about what the future of food production looks like globally, the team at Farro have stuck to their guns as steadfast supporters of a wide range of local New Zealand food producers working to build a resilient food system we can all be proud of. It’s pretty unlikely that we’ll get back to a point where we all know our farmers in a real-world sense. But it’s comforting walking into our local Farro knowing that they do act as a connector between producers and consumers, and as a gatekeeper both parties can trust.