The Miller & His Wife

THIS IS A MODERN MORALITY TALE ABOUT A PAIR OF INNOVATIVE EAST CAPE FARMERS WHO BROKE FREE FROM THE TYRANNY OF CHEMICALS AND SUPPLY CONTRACTS WITH PROCESSING COMPANIES.

WORDS KATE COUGHLAN  PHOTOGRAPHS TESSA CHRISP

BETWEEN THEM, Mike and Bridget Parker (pictured right), both second-generation Tolaga Bay farmers, have a healthy collection of innovative pioneering genes. Fortunately so, as fate did not hand them their living on a plate. Nor did it inform them how to conquer thistles without spray, fatten stock without drench or grow maize without fertilizer. They’ve had to teach themselves all that plus how to build a cornflour mill, grind polenta, grow basil without pesticides and export popcorn to Australia. The more they learn, the more they need to know. “Mistakes,” they report cheerfully, “are great. You learn an awful lot when you get it wrong.”

In 1991 Mike and Bridget purchased Broadlands, a 240-hectare farm on the coast an hour’s drive north of Gisborne that Mike’s parents had owned since the 1950s. Mike’s parents had drained the swampy land for a mixed-cropping regime. They were successful farmers but, like most of their neighbours, they were dealt a hell hand in the ’80s: three severe droughts; Cyclone Bola which swept 1560 of their sheep out to sea; the boom-and-bust cycle of the kiwifruit diversification experiment; the artificial propping of Muldoon’s Supplementary Minimum Price regime with its high interest rates; and finally the swift and undiscriminating knife of Rogernomics cutting away tax incentives and agricultural subsidies.

The horrors of those years left Mike and Bridget needing to buy Broadlands at market value. Bridget, with three small children, taught full time, her salary swallowed up by interest payments, and the farm provided a living of sorts. These were tough years. If it wasn’t the weather, it was the price of grain or lambs. If it wasn’t stock prices then it was a rum deal from the processing companies buying their crops on fixed contracts. They grew peas, tomatoes, maize, squash and sweetcorn, ran a Suffolk sheep stud and fattened beef. Mike and Bridget became increasingly frustrated at being unable to control the prices they were paid for their crops. “It’s a peasant life growing crops on contract for big companies,” says Mike. “You can’t budget, you can’t plan. You can only take the price you’re given.” “And, what was more frustrating,” explains Bridget, “we had no control over how customers received what we’d grown. It leaves your gate and that’s it, the last you hear of it.”

Mike and Bridget are not among life’s shrinking violets and into battle they went, taking one of the large processing companies to court following the dumping of their harvest without warning or payment. Mike won an Organic Farmer of the Year award at the same time as 380 tonnes of his crops were dumped. “Those companies say ‘Give us your crop, peasant, and go back to your paddock’,” he says.  So the peasant and his wife went back to the land, shut their farm gate firmly on the processing companies and continued with the organic and biodynamic practices they’d begun in 1991. “To be fair to Watties and give credit where some is due,” Mike says somewhat grudgingly, “they had supported several Tolaga Bay maize growers into organic trials and we’d done well and got on a roll with the organic way of things.”

Mike, (pictured right) who during his younger days had managed kiwifruit blocks at Te Puke and later his 16-hectare home-farm block, had been fully immersed in the chemical life – quite literally. The annual spraying cycle involved a rotation of 13 chemicals. He worked in a protective suit and needed a blood test every three months in case he was poisoning himself. The organic trials were a revelation and Bridget explains Mike’s conversion as little short of miraculous. “He’ll never blow his own trumpet but it was as though there was some knowledge deep in him that he reached for. It wasn’t easy to implement the organic regime, in fact it was a massive battle. But it seemed to come naturally to him as though he knew how to do it.”

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