('COUNTRY CALENDAR' THEME) - (WHISTLES) - Always a favourite on every rural road... (DOG BARKS) (SHEEP BLEAT) - First and foremost, I'm a farmer. - She needed a job, and they needed a farmer. - We didn't have a farming background or know what we were doing. - It was a little scary at first. - We are what we eat. They will eat the best of it, trample the rest of it. - Two brothers with a vision and a Kiwi with knowhow have created a Garden of Eden. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2024 - Planting these tulips was Jules Matthews' idea. - It was about bringing joy and that splash of colour ` and, you know, flowers are food for the soul. - Jules is manager of Mangaroa Farms, just a stone's throw from Upper Hutt city. - Mangaroa farms is 2000 acres, and we have a big block of pine trees... and some significant native bush ` and the rest used to be a dairy farm; now it's sheep and beef ` and of course the market garden here, and the idea is to create a local food hub. So, a kete for the local people, build some resilience and give us a little bit of security with our food and also build some nutrient density into the food that we're growing. - Jules was hired by two brothers ` American tech millionaires who came to New Zealand with a philosophy that meshed with her own. - I think there's a real need to have localised food systems to ensure some resilience in our communities, and, yeah, this is a place to really try that out. (SOFT MUSIC) - Just three years ago, this paddock was in pasture. Today it's a thriving market garden. - It is very new. We broke ground in... 2021, and in the autumn, we put in our first cover crop in this area. And then by January 2022, we had the greenhouse up in production, and the first of the six blocks we've got, the first one was in` the first two were in production. - Now there's a staff of three and a garden manager, Cameron Dixon. - This bed is gonna be direct-seeded, um, into salad greens, This bed is quite compacted, so we're aerating the soil with the broad fork ` so we're just lifting it without turning and breaking up soil structure. We're keeping that soil structure intact. If you think of it as a city, if you go and break it up, you're just destroying all the buildings and infrastructure in there. So your fungi is like your fibre optics and power, and then you've got the bacteria as living organisms in there as well. If you destroy that, then they've got to rebuild. (TILTHER WHIRRS) And then we'll make a fine tilth on top, just with a battery tilther, so minimal disturbance as possible so that seed can have good soil contact and we have a good germination rate. - Now that Cameron's looking after the garden, Jules can concentrate on the farm. Every day during lambing, she checks up on her expectant mothers. Jules has a farming background. - I grew up firstly on a dairy farm in Taranaki, and as a young child, I wasn't much of a talker, and in fact, I loved dogs and I barked a lot. And interestingly enough, you know, I haven't grown up to be quite a dog, but I've certainly grown up to be a bitch. (LAUGHS) And then we moved to a sheep and beef farm, and I just loved it. When I left school, I actually wanted to be a vet, but I had the belief that I wasn't particularly intelligent ` may or may not be true ` and so that's when I went into herd testing. And I was probably 21 when I approached my dad and asked if I could lease the farm ` he had it leased to a neighbour ` and he kind of chuckled and said, 'Oh, I'm keeping it for your brother.' There was one boy in the` in the whole family, which stung a wee bit. - Instead, Jules went off to the United States, where she started breeding sheep. Then disaster struck. - I had an incident where a couple of dogs got into the sheep. So, they'd just been shorn the night before ` the neighbour's dogs got into them. It was actually only two dogs, but in the end, I lost over 300 ewes and lambs from that incident. These ewes were a week away from lambing. - Then wild dogs, coyotes, attacked the lambs that had survived. - It was a series of cascading events that, um... really hit me hard, and I at that point sold all those sheep and walked away from being a sheep farmer, which, as you can tell was` still has a bit of an emotional charge to it. Yeah, it was a hard time. - Another spring task is feeding orphaned and unwanted lambs. - Occasionally, you'll have a ewe die, so you might end up with a spare lamb like that. Sometimes, you'll have a ewe that'll have two and she just doesn't want one, you know. She just won't accept it. So there's a variety of reasons you end up with the extras. - Dead lambs and ewes are a fact of life in spring. - You can get numb to it. And it takes a lot of... being present and, in some ways, a lot of courage to stay open to the loss and to the heartbreak, because things die, and things that you've done your best to keep alive, animals that you've taken through a whole year's cycle. - The land is owned by two brothers, Matthew and Brian Monahan. They live on the farm, and they're very involved in the new developments. - How'd the harvest go today? - Uh, yeah. Good, good. Just a shop harvest today, so not too big. Yeah. - Matthew moved to New Zealand with his brother 10 years ago. - We grew up in rural Southern Illinois. I went out to school to California, dropped out pretty early to pursue the entrepreneurial path. - By the time they were in their mid-20s, they'd moved to Silicon Valley and made a fortune in software. - We started a genealogy business in the States, and we ended up selling it to Ancestry.com in 2012. And so as a 20-something, being able to have enough resources to come here and acquire a farm was truly, um... fortunate, and we're very grateful. - They came without a plan, but with a desire to make a difference. - How do we best plug in on this question of climate change and sustainability? And we wanted to be alongside the farming communities. Agriculture is a huge part of land use on the planet, and so it's really about ` how do we eat in harmony with nature? And so we didn't have a farming background or know what we were doing, but we felt like we needed to be alongside that community in that journey. - Whitemans Valley, north of Wellington had instant appeal for Brian. - I love this place. It's such a` It reminds me a lot of the place where we grew up, Matthew and I, a small town in America on the banks of the Mississippi River ` and this valley has a lot of that, but it's also got the beautiful mountains and the bush, proximity to the capital city. Yeah, it's just got the best, I think, mixture of things of any place in the world, as far as I can tell. - Once they'd bought the land, they needed a manager. - Yeah, it was funny. The first time I met Jules, she said, 'I'm a farmer without a farm.' And I said, 'Oh, well, that works, cos we just bought a farm, and we're not farmers,' and so it was a perfect match. - JULES: It struck me as being a really unique opportunity, and one I felt like I'd waited my whole life and worked for toward that my whole life. (CALMING MUSIC) (SHEEP BLEAT) (CHILL MUSIC) - The market garden at Mangaroa Farms near Upper Hutt is now three years old. Farm manager Jules Matthews has been happy to hand over the garden to supervisor Cameron Dixon. - We harvest pretty much every day. Some things are every day, like zucchinis, cucumbers and tomatoes. - Cameron had been running his own market garden in Cheviot, supplying restaurants, but Covid killed demand. - This job came up, and it was perfect ` pretty much exactly how I was growing ` and looking at growing nutrient-dense food to feed people and medicate people pretty much through healthy eating. - We are what we eat. So if we can grow food that is rich in not just your base nutrients, but your phytonutrients and everything that goes with that, metabolically, we will be healthier. - The most recent addition here is the shop. It sells the farm's meat and veg, as well as produce from other local growers. - Is that everything today? - That's everything, thank you. - Yeah. That is 41.40. - For owner Matthew Monahan, looking after the neighbouring community is key to a sustainable enterprise. - Our focus is local food ` growing, preparing, harvesting, selling it here in this place. To us, it just makes sense. It's fresher, it tastes better. You don't have to deal with all the chemicals, preservatives, shipping logistics, extra packaging, and it's more resilient for the community, as we learned during the Covid pandemic. It also brings together growers around the farm and the local community, and what we're seeing is it's a gateway drug into these broader conversations about watersheds, land use, forests, conservation, wetlands and so forth. It all starts back here in the garden. I'm not suggesting it's easy to compete with industrial agriculture and all the mechanisation and subsidies and chemicals and all of that; but at the end of the day, we're just gonna do what we can in this place for the people who live here, and we trust that others are doing their bit on their lands. And I think ultimately, that's our best collective response to the climate and ecological crisis, is everyone doing what they can where they live. (COWS MOO) - Jules Matthews feeds her stock using a system she calls high-density grazing. This paddock has been locked up for a year, and now cattle are grazing it again on high rotation. (COWS MOO LOUDLY) - Come on, girls. They will eat the best of it, trample the rest of it ` that acts as a mulch ` and combined with their urine and faeces, which is an inoculant, we're really feeding the soil biology to enhance our soil function and structure. At the moment, when we're doing something like this, we're moving them anywhere from two to four times a day. Some people will do more than that, but what you want is a lot of animals, small area, quick, fast impact. They're taking the best and trampling the rest as a mulch. - To test the effectiveness of high-density grazing on the soil structure, Jules is conducting an experiment. - What we're doing here is we're doing a water infiltration test. So what we want to determine is if we get an inch of rain, how quickly is it gonna be absorbed into the soil? What's the soil's capacity given the various management structures? So I'm going to set my timer, put it into water in here and time it. This paddock has been fairly traditionally grazed. You know, we allow it to come up to 2500 KG's or 3000 KG's of dry matter, graze it down to about 1800. The other paddock has been deferred, so it's been left for several months to mature. So what we're looking at is what difference has that made to the soil's ability to absorb water? That was two minutes and 43 seconds, so not too bad. Anything under 12 minutes is what we're looking for. Otherwise, our water cycle is broken. - Now she's going to repeat the test, this time in a paddock that's been high-density grazed. - OK, so, that's nine seconds as against two minutes 43. So what that's telling us is the soil can so much readily` more readily absorb a vast amount of water quickly. What does that give us? It gives us the ability to hold water in the summertime, which is drought mitigation; and also in the winter time, we can hold more water, so flood mitigation as well. So how can we as farmers, through our management, really improve our ecological function? Lots of ways, but a bit of deferred grazing is a great tool to have in your kit. - Jules mixes her own fertiliser. Regenerative agriculture needs its own special ingredients. - The mix today is a little bit of fulvic acid, wee bit of molasses, we've got some fish hydrolysate in there, we've got a little bit of seaweed, and we've got a product called EMs, which stands for 'effective microbes', and then, believe it or not, there's also a little bit of nitrogen in there. - For some, nitrogen has developed a bad reputation. - I don't think anything is good or bad, and I think when you're working with a natural living system, it's a matter of what do we use, when do we use it to promote life? And a little bit like ourselves, you know, if I'm really ill in hospital, OK to use antibiotics. Am I gonna use antibiotics every day? Am I going to use them in large quantities? Absolutely not. We're always looking at ` what does the system need? And it's the dichotomy or the paradox of trying to balance what you're doing with the potential downstream negative effects, and, yeah, believing that nothing's good or bad ` it's just being responsible for any unintended consequences as you go along. (BIRD CRIES) (IDYLLIC MUSIC) - When the Monahan brothers bought a rundown dairy farm and some lifestyle blocks and Whitemans Valley near Upper Hutt, they also bought a pine forest. It's ready to harvest, and Brian Monahan has a vision. - Our plan is to convert this from a pine forest to a productive native forest that is rich in biodiversity, that connects the community to the forest ecosystem and that ultimately produces useful products for our community, such as wood, medicines, recreational opportunities, and most importantly of all, clean, healthy water, because the ecosystem of the forest here in the catchment has a huge impact downstream into our farming ecosystems and the Mangaroa, which is the core of what we're all about. - They've brought in Chris Upton to manage the harvest and the reforestation project. - That's what we're really excited about ` what we are looking at doing is creating really tight pest control and looking at how do we actually create an environment where we can plant and replant native trees and bring, I guess, this forest back to what it was originally? (TRANQUIL MUSIC) - Another of Brian's ideas is now a reality ` a public walkway. - The footpath is an opportunity to connect to the local community and the people who live around the farm, and invite them on to the land to interact with the animals and the river and the trees and the things that we're doing here at Mangaroa Farms. - The river is really a jewel of this land and of this property. It runs right through the farm near the gardens. It's the character of the walking trail, and it really is the centrepiece and the lifeblood of the community and of the farm, and so we thought it was really the appropriate namesake for Mangaroa Farms. - The brothers make a good team. - Brian has always been the source of a lot of our greatest ideas, and so, you know, I really get to ride his coattails in that regard. And I tend to be a bit more operationally focused, and he gets to benefit from that side of me. - He's organised, he's dependable. He's exactly the kind of person you'd want alongside you if you were tackling a difficult challenge together, or if you ever had problem, the person you'd want in your phone is Matthew. - As well as being an ideas man, Brian is a performance poet. - RAPS: # Yo, I'll grab the beat and turn up the heat, # because today I'm here to rap about the food that we eat, specifically meat. - Brian's subject is land use and the bad rap that pastoral farming has been getting recently. - # We edit genetically, fertilise synthetically, thinking that we better, but we cheat. # You see, cows and sheep precede humanity by a million years at least. # So it's insanity to blame our calamity on the cute baby lambs running free. # On the other hand, the land bleeds. # If we don't treat her right, there's no peace. # So either plant or beast, let's plant the seed as we plan for a better way to be. # Aight, let's eat # regeneratively. Peace. # (WATER BABBLES) (GENTLE MUSIC) - Having bought the farm, forest and adjacent lifestyle blocks, the Monahans have now given them away. They've put all the land into trust for New Zealand. - We really see the charitable trust as the most appropriate way to steward land like this, and I think it provides the community with a sense of assurance that this is really a project for everyone, and it's more than just being generous; it's also to bring more people into the project and to look after the land. - It was a little scary at first because, you know, owning this farm was a big part of our family's... wealth, and we were really` It's less generous of us and our generation, but really thinking about the kids and their inheritance. But ultimately, the inheritance that we want for our children more than financial wealth is community, healthy food, healthy ecology and a value system that honours these things, and we felt that was best achieved inside a charity rather than as private ownership of land. (INDISTINCT CHATTER) - Well, we're having a barbecue with the neighbours, and, yeah, fortunately, this is a pretty regular thing these days. - I think any time you go somewhere new or you're new in the community, there's a period of people doing the dance, getting to know each other. But Matthew, Brian and Catlin definitely part of the community now and have been a huge contribution. - It's super sweet to be in a village, if you will, you know, like to get to know your neighbours and just to be in a place that feels safe and welcoming and to have the kids running around, it's... yeah, it's really special ` no matter where you are in the world, I think. And for here, it's perfect. - As well as the local community, all the staff and their families are here. - What's the old proverb? 'If you wanna go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.' It's a team effort. We all have different skills and supports. We all have different things we bring to the group. And together we can be, you know, the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts and do something that none of us could do alone. (ALL CHEER, LAUGH) (WARMING PIANO MUSIC) ('COUNTRY CALENDAR' THEME) - Next time ` (BOTTLES CLUNK) they're family winemakers harvesting by the moon. - We've got these beautiful bunches, really thick skins this year, though, lots of colour. I can just look at the grapes, and I can just see what a fantastic vintage this has been. - That's next time on Hyundai Country Calendar.