Coastal Gardens
Melissa Holmes
Regenerative Food Systems
Rebecca Algie | April 2021
Melissa has an audacious approach to pursuing her strategic plans for a successful market garden, and the progress she has made within a short time frame is a testament to her planning and implementation abilities. She has a strong focus on regeneration of soil health, enhancement of her infrastructure and constant refining of harvest to market processes.
Melissa Holmes and her husband gave up Auckland city life in December 2015, and moved to a five acre coastal block just south of Oakura. What was once a home to succulent plants, palm trees and grazing cows that compacted the soil, is now a small scale market garden surrounded in fruit trees, flowers and shelter belts. The motivation for Melissa to grow her own food came from memories of her parents and grandparents working the land and producing food for their own table. The vision she has for earning an income by growing nutrient dense and affordable food for her community has come to fruition in the last 12 months. Starting five years ago with an area of bare land that had depleted soils, Melissa has constructed a productive edible wonderland. She sells her chemical-free produce at local farmers markets in New Plymouth and Okato on a weekly basis.
Melissa’s key driver is growing food that she likes to cook and eat herself. The thought of growing an abundance of produce that is not accompanied with the knowledge on how to prepare it, is quite foreign to her. Importantly, this gives her the ability to connect with her customers and to promote healthy and diverse eating habits within her community. Our practices as eaters have been dictated for a long time by what is available from sellers who are enmeshed in a food system that operates at a national and international scale. This removes knowledge of what is seasonal, what is local, what is good for us, and what is good for our environment. Instead, we are too often provided with the convenience of mass production and mass distribution. Melissa’s endeavour stands at the forefront of eat local, eat what is good for you, and eat what is good for the environment. Her small scale farm enables her to pivot quickly, be responsive, capitalise on what works well in Taranaki, and lead a productive life as a gardener of high quality, nutrient dense produce. Seminal to this, is the need to improve the soil which is free from harsh chemicals. This resonates with the regenerative agriculture ethos and the prioritisation of nurturing what is below the earth’s surface to maximise all that is above the surface.
Unlike sustainability, which literally means to sustain; a regenerative approach is to create a system that aims to create a net-positive impact on a continual basis. The future of small-scale farming which is ‘fit for purpose’ has the ability to contribute to improving our food systems. In relation to the future of food systems, Melissa's approach and philosophy to farming and food production aligns well with this perspective. Growing produce from regenerating soils, and the localisation of the supply chain reduces food miles and the carbon footprint, but also helps to reconnect people to what they eat.