Reflections from the Aotearoa Growers Hui
June, 2026 – we headed to Rotorua for the Aotearoa Growers Hui, a three-day gathering at Tangatarua Marae, Toi Ohomai. About 120 farmers, growers, and food champions travelled in from every corner of the motu, joining together with a commitment to building food resilience in their own regions.
Our GM Sarah presented in the Business Models session, sharing Kelmarna’s story and what it actually looks like, day-to-day, to run an urban community farm. Plenty of good conversations followed.
It was a wonderful reminder that Kelmarna isn’t working away on its own. We’re part of a much wider movement shaping how Aotearoa thinks about food, community, and resilience, and being in a room with 120 people doing similar mahi in their own patch was genuinely uplifting. We left feeling full of hope for where some of those conversations might go next.
Why local food matters now more than ever
A lot of the kōrero at the hui came back to the same uncomfortable truth: Aotearoa still doesn’t have a national food strategy. There’s no guiding vision – designed by citizens or government – for how this country actually feeds itself. In a time when global supply chains are looking more volatile and unpredictable by the year, that fragility is becoming harder to ignore, and so this work has never felt more urgent.
The numbers back up what we’re feeling on the ground. We’re a country that produces enough food and fibre to feed 354% of our own population, yet relies on imports for around 64% of what we actually eat, and one in three households here experienced food insecurity in the past year. That’s not a supply problem, it’s a design problem.
Angela Clifford of The Food Farm has been writing about this with real clarity on Substack, including pieces on what happens when we can’t eat our own food and on investing in Aotearoa’s food security. Worth your time if you want to understand the shape of the problem.
Where the answer lies
When the problems feel this big, this systemic – local can be where the answer lies. We can build the system we want, piece-by-piece from the ground up – in our local areas.
And yes, this alternative is already being built. In gardens and farms and community spaces right across Aotearoa, people are growing food, sharing knowledge, rebuilding connections to whenua, and quietly proving that a different way of doing things isn’t just possible – it’s already happening, and it’s gaining ground.
Kelmarna is part of that. Here on our 4.5 acres in the heart of Tāmaki Makaurau, we’re growing organic kai, running a therapeutic gardening programme, bringing tamariki onto the whenua, and working alongside hundreds of volunteers. We’re not just feeding people – we’re demonstrating, every single day, that a resilient, local, regenerative food system isn’t a nice idea for the future. It’s already working, right here. And we’re staying connected to the wider network of growers, advocates, and organisations doing this work across the motu, because that connection is part of what makes the movement real.
How you can help this take root
By supporting Kelmarna’s work – by making a donation, by shopping in our farm shop, by attending our workshops, by subscribing to our composting services – you’re helping sustain and grow an important part of our country’s food network.
The appetite for change showed up in a wharenui in Rotorua that week, and it shows up every time someone picks up a trowel at Kelmarna, or a spade in their own backyard, or chooses to back a local grower over a supermarket shelf.