organic
In 1976 a Lincoln lecturer who researched herbicides started an organic plot and borrowed a British name for it. Fifty years on, the Biological Husbandry Unit is still there, and it's throwing a free party.
organic
Buying organic isn't one decision, it's two jobs. Working out whether it's worth the money, then finding somewhere that sells it. Neither costs money exactly. Both cost hours. An economist in 1899 worked out why that's the part nobody counts.
Food System
Trust in news, government and supermarkets has taken a beating since 2020, and the packet won't tell you what's in it either. Trust didn't vanish; it shrank to people we can see. That's the grower at the stall, the farm gate, and the back garden.
Election 2026
Organics Aotearoa New Zealand put the same seven questions to seven parties this election. Two didn't answer. Here's where the other five actually stand.
Fruit and Veg
The spear you buy this spring was powered by last autumn's fern. Here's what else went into it.
International Organic Day
This goes out at the exact minute of today's equinox, the same instant Europe marks its Organic Day. New Zealand's own organic reform just closed for submissions. No ceremony. Just a SurveyMonkey link and an inbox at MPI.
Organic farming
A Herald column used Sri Lanka's 2021 fertiliser ban to warn New Zealand off organic farming. The Sri Lanka facts hold up. The comparison doesn't, and the column's author sits on the boards of a fertiliser co-operative and DairyNZ, which pays for content on the same platform.
Politics
In August, the organic sector told every party the same thing: nobody has a policy for us. On Sunday, one of them finally did.
beef
Underground Festival is moving to a Waikato farm that raises, kills, butchers and sells its own animals without any of it leaving the district. That chain is rarer than it sounds, and the gap it closes is the same gap that keeps the word organic off good meat.
Events
Aotearoa's soil, food and farming festival is leaving its North Canterbury home for a regenerative farm in Te Miro, Waikato. Here's what's confirmed so far on dates, tickets and speakers.
supermarkets
"National wants to split Pak'nSave from New World. Vegetable growers say the real squeeze is happening one step further back, in the wholesale market nobody's proposed fixing.
government
"Just buy organic." That's the government's answer when people worry about gene-edited food losing its label. New Zealand already ran this exact experiment, on alcohol and pregnancy, and it took nine years and a body of research to prove it doesn't work.
