Foodscape: The Farm as Ecosystem

Kōtare Vale doesn’t look like any farm I’ve ever seen.

I will admit that some of my wonder might be simple disorientation. I’ve flown from Fairbanks Alaska, where it has been nine below and snowing since September, to Christchurch New Zealand, where the weather is like a fine spring day at home: 50 degrees and overcast. This contrast, along with my stopover in perennially-tropical Hawaii, has completely scrambled my sense of the seasons. To confuse the matter further, New Zealand’s kind climate allows for bizarre bedfellows. Collected in the average suburban yard are temperate trees like oaks and maples, subarctic species like pine and birch, and a few sub-tropicals, not to mention every possible shrub and herb. My first sight outside the Christchurch International Airport is a palm-like native cabbage tree right next to a bushy blue spruce. It looks like horticultural heaven.

In spite of this exotic potential, the drive through the Canterbury Plains might be a sojourn through any agricultural scene from Minnesota to Missouri, composed as it is entirely of flat square fields and overhead irrigation scaffolding. There are hints, though, that I am in unfamiliar territory: a glimpse of hazy rugged mountains off to the West reminds me more of Alaska than the Midwest. Even more tellingly, large paddocks full of belted Galloway and Hereford cattle betray a beef production system based on open space and green grass, rather than the nightmarish feedlots common in the U.S. Things are definitely different here.

Vale, of course, means valley, so Kōtare is obviously not one of these flat Canterbury farms. The terrain soon rises into the steep, crumpled hills of the Banks Peninsula, a folded lump of volcanic land jutting out into the South Pacific. This area was once covered in thick native forest, but that was before New Zealand became the “island of the large white crowd,” as a friend from Christchurch once euphemized. (It’s a play on the meaning of the North Island’s original Maori name, Aotearoa, which translates as “island of the long white cloud.” Even the white folks are sardonic about the impact of colonization on this country.)

As has happened elsewhere in the world, the totalitarian agriculturalists industriously set about removing the lush undergrowth, chopping down kanuka trees too wide for three people to get their arms around, and converting a thousand-species community into a simple, people-centric food chain.

Where before there were kiwi and weta and wild fuchsia after colonization there remain only sheep for the people to eat, and grass for the sheep to eat.

A few plantations of exotic pines have sprung up in the last 30 years, but most of the Peninsula is essentially sheeply today, with the ugly addition of multitudinous land slips where the pasture roots have failed to hold on to the fine loess soil during heavy rains. The land that has become Kōtare Vale used to be pasture as well, but Martin Tickner is not your average stock farmer. Utilizing knowledge gained during his formal education and long career as a conservation expert in Britain, he is shepherding these 18 hectares back toward something more like the kanuka-dominated ecosystem they used to be. Gentle, well-planned additions to the wild template allow him to make a living from the patch without greatly compromising its intrinsic functions. For income and sustenance a mix of maturing hazelnut, walnut and fruit trees share the slopes with native species and other useful perennials, and small beds of annual vegetables and semi-wild ferns are tucked into the little corners of the landscape.

Walking the farm reminds me of wandering through a large and comfortable cottage. The forest canopy provides protection against the harsh winds and hot sun, and lessens the impact of raindrops on wet days. The narrow dirt trails lead like a series of hallways through room after outdoor room, each with its own particular lighting and humidity, influenced by the closeness of the vegetation and the varying turbulence of two small brown streams. I have seldom been so perfectly comfortable outside, even in adverse weather, so that at the end of a day of work I feel refreshed and reluctant to go inside, rather than ready to escape the sensory overload that can sometimes occur in exposed fields.

The advantages of this style of land management are far from purely aesthetic, however. A diversity of plant species means better utilization and improved cycling of valuable nutrients, and it also gives the environment resilience to disasters such as those heavy rains. Because of the robustness of native tree root systems, there are few land slips inside Kōtare’s fences. The area also provides space and resources for rare native species, including the farm’s namesake, the New Zealand kingfisher. The birdlife is so prolific that I can’t even wander up to the eel pool without being followed by a pair of resident fantails. These tiny native birds have big showy tails, and though they seem uncannily friendly, their boldness is due to their habit of feeding on the insects disturbed by larger species (people) moving through the brush.

Wild species might seem like a “waste of space” in spite of these very real positives, especially to those who are consumed by fears of worldwide food shortage and obsessed with “efficiency” of agricultural output. By talking up the native ecosystem, I risk transgressing into the mushy and easily-dismissed realm of a feel-good, nature-for-its-own-sake, barefoot-hippie-style argument. This is a real working farm, though, not a half-cocked back-to-the-land experiment. And it is a real working farm in one important way that every monoculture of pasture or wheat is not:

Martin and his WWOOFers live from this land, not just on it. Our salads and stir-fries are picked from the garden beds and wild stands just before mealtime, and even the exotic ingredients for Friday night pizza are harvested from the property or the nearby ocean. Believe it or forget it, but pickled walnuts, bull kelp and nasturtium seedpods make for one delicious pie!

This farm is a true ecosystem, in which the people who steward it are also an integral piece of the biological puzzle, not just managerial overlords who buy all their sustenance with the proceeds gained from selling the land’s products. It is a farm like our very first attempts at agriculture thousands of years ago, a modification and enhancement of a complex system rather than a complete uprooting and replanting. Rather than the “waste” we fear, the primary characteristic of this sort of management is abundance and synergy. Hen-and-chicken ferns, grown for their tender, sweet fiddleheads, simply would not survive as a monoculture, because they require the shade and protection of an intact canopy in order to thrive. Gourmet mushrooms like oyster and shitake need the forest both for this shelter, and also to supply the raw logs on which they grow. The trees themselves even prove useful.

My first task upon arrival (and one of my main occupations during my time on the farm) is to build trellising for a dozen varieties of rare beans Martin plants out for the local seed exchange network he administers. I have some experience with trellising, having constructed pea fences both in my mother’s garden as a child, and on a much larger scale two summers ago while working at Rosie Creek Farm in Fairbanks, Alaska. At first I give a little interior groan at the prospect, since trellising has usually meant hammering large, heavy metal stakes into the ground, and then wiring fencing or netting to the stakes, followed by careful training of the pea tendrils, which I can never do fast enough to satisfy the boss. It’s a loud, frustrating, repetitive job, but I am acutely aware that it sets a bad precedent to object to the very first task I’m given as a WWOOFer, so I smile and agree.

Rather than leading me to the expected pile of stakes and tangle of wire, Martin gives me an elegant little Japanese hand saw and directions over the bridge and up the bank, where I am to cut kanuka deadwood and haul it back to the bean bed, to make the main supports for a long wooden tipi-like structure. I also get similar directions to a number of large willow trees with suckers ideal for secondary poles, instructions on how to break thin pine deadwood for training sticks, and a coil of wire with which to make the whole thing hang together. Everything but the wire has grown within a short walk from the bean beds, entirely without human intention or intervention. A fanciful mind might well conclude that the ecosystem had foreseen our need for vine support, and contrived to give us exactly what we needed to make it. Of course this is nonsense, but the reality is even better, because intact ecosystems yield such a myriad of materials that with only a little human ingenuity and sweat, need-specific structures can be easily created. Problems of support are almost miraculously solved.

I also find that I enjoy the process of building with wood much more than with metal. The gentle snick of the saw is infinitely preferable to the ear-splitting clang of hammer on stake, and climbing a ladder to do the pounding is nowhere near as fun as scrambling around in willow branches over a bubbling stream. At the risk of overemphasizing aesthetics, I have to conclude that the result is also rather more attractive than a bare and boring pea fence. As Martin reminds me, anything that’s not exactly straight is “artistic,” making it unique without compromising the function of the structure. And rather than needing to be taken down again at the end of the season, this trellis will stand until the wood decays in four to six years. I’m quite proud of it, actually.

It’s not a perfect endeavor, of course; I wouldn’t want to gloss over the discomfort involved in manual labor. My arms are sore the next day from sawing above my head, and my inherent clumsiness means that I am soon suffering from a minor injury on almost every finger, the result of malicious wire ends, sharp bits of wood, and slicing myself repeatedly with that sweet little saw. Still, my body feels better than after any day spent sitting at a desk, and when Martin asks for a second trellis two days later, I’m instantly thinking about which trees might render a few more straight poles. Rather than my initial reluctance, I experience excitement at the prospect of getting back to building. That, I think, is the real advantage of an intact ecosystem: it is a genuine joy with work with.