Face to face

‘Get close to your customers!’ screams every marketing guru ever. For the team at Streamside Organics, there’s no closer than face to face, kanohi ki te kanohi, at the local farmers’ market.

The certified organic market garden near Leeston, on the outskirts of Christchurch, grows its produce using organic and regenerative farming techniques. With no previous farming experience, Dominique Schacherer and Logan Kerr started growing vegetables on just 1 acre in 2014. Since then they have expanded their operation to 50 acres. The team, also now much larger, supplies produce to cafés, restaurants, wholefood shops and supermarkets. Weekly vege boxes are delivered to homes around Christchurch and surrounding areas.

It’s a diverse mix of markets, ideal for surviving these testing times. But at the beginning of it all there was just the one outlet – the local farmers’ markets. “They were our first sales outlets when we first started up and have been a main source of consistent income right through the past 8 years,” Dominique says. “Farmers’ markets have allowed us to build relationships with our customers and share our story. It’s allowed the connection between customer and farmer to happen.” Does she have any advice for growers or producers thinking of setting up a trestle at their local farmers market? “Go for it!” Dominique says. “Building relationships with customers and telling your story is key.” For Dominique and Logan, the story began with that 1 acre in 2014. After 3 years they moved to a 5-acre property in Tai Tapu, then in 2017 to their 50-acre site in Leeston. The name Streamside Organics refers to Irwell Stream, which forms part of the Leeston property’s boundary. Neither have farming in their background. Dominique confesses to a childhood dream to grow her own vegetables and “have a cow”. After a long OE in Europe she returned to New Zealand and went ‘wwoofing’ in the North Island, keen to get her hands dirty. Logan was training to be a chef when he got the bug – his boss got him to grow heirloom varieties of vegetables for the restaurant. They still supply him now. Any romantic notions of an idyllic life on the land were soon dealt to when the work began. “It’s been hard yakka,” Dominique says. “If you prefer a 9-5 type job it won't be for you.” Over the years land to lease was hard to find, particularly as the couple wanted a longer lease to make it worthwhile converting the property to organics. Having initially leased it, they have since bought the Leeston property. The team at Streamside Organics now numbers 20 including part-time staff, or 21 if you count baby Arli, 3 months. They are a diverse bunch – the thing they seem to have in common is that they have all done lots else in their lives. There’s Brenna, former welder and fine arts student; Kyle, who once biked through Africa; Roberto, the Italian te reo student; Andy, the former radio announcer… Organic farm, organic culture – for Dominique and Logan the key thing they look for in a new crew member is how they gel with the team. There’s a strong team culture and a good fit is important. So is being OK with working outdoors in all weathers and coping with the physically demanding work. The couple's organic values flow through to their relationship with staff, with Streamside Organics being Living Wage-certified. Farmers’ markets gave them their start but diversifying has helped Streamside Organics weather the turmoil of the last few years. COVID-19 controls meant their market and restaurant sales stopped overnight. This would have ruined them but for the fact they were already selling boxes of vegetables online for home delivery. “With lockdown, our home-delivered vege boxes took off like crazy. Some of our wholesale customers managed to continue buying from us as well. This was so important in allowing our

| The hard-working team picks in all weathers. | Having started out leasing, Dominique and Logan now own the Leeston block.

regulars to continue having access to our fresh organic veges,” Dominique says. “If we hadn't been able to do the boxes, our income would have halved at least. If we’d had farmers’ markets as our only outlet, we would have been really stuffed.” Diversity has worked for Dominique and Logan when it comes to team members and markets so it’s natural they see strength in growing a diverse range of crops. “We have just put up a large greenhouse so this season we have branched into a range of red and coloured cherry tomatoes, red and green peppers, telegraph and lebanese cucumbers and strawberries outside,” Dominique says. “We are hoping to establish some more perennial crops over the next couple of years like raspberries and asparagus.” They use cover cropping year-round – legumes to fix the nitrogen; sunflowers for their deep tap root that helps break up the soil; buckwheat and phacelia for beneficial insects. Having based a successful business on hard work and a passion for organic farming, Dominique and Logan have also built enduring relationships with customers, many of whom have been with them from the start. “I guess in the early years our customers could see how hard we worked. I remember when we finally took a 2-week holiday, one gave us a $100 tip to treat ourselves. That was so special and meant a lot to us. I guess it showed the value this customer found in what we offered,” she says.

SALUTE TO BOB

Dominique and Logan belong to the next generation of organic farmers finding a supportive community in the Leeston area. That community is the legacy of Professor Bob Crowder, founder of Lincoln’s pioneering Biological Husbandry Unit (BHU). From the 1970s pressure started to build on New Zealand’s agricultural training organisations from prospective students wanting to learn about sustainability and organics. Their pleas found a receptive ear in then young Lincoln University lecturer Bob Crowder, who was himself starting to question the path agriculture was taking towards greater mechanisation, the use of more and more pesticides and herbicides and increasing environmental degradation. In 1976, in response to those student demands, Crowder established the BHU. The unit began offering courses in organic agriculture and Crowder also turned some of Lincoln’s supporting farmland into an organics research plot to test out the ideas in a New Zealand context. In the grey, conformist New Zealand of the 1970s, Crowder and his unit were dismissed by many as “muck and mystery” merchants and he was considered eccentric by some colleagues. But by the early 1980s that was changing as big players such as Federated Farmers and the Ministry of Agriculture began to see merit in organics as a profitable niche in an otherwise undifferentiated international marketplace for agricultural commodities.