> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # New Zealand's Food Export Trade Began on This Land. So Did the South Island's Biggest Organic Market Garden. - URL: https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/new-zealands-food-export-trade-began-on-this-land-so-did-the-south-islands-biggest-organic-market-garden/ - Published: 2026-09-05T18:31:45.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-05T18:31:44.000Z - Description: Three owners worked this ground south of Oamaru, and one grower stayed through all of them. The last company was wound up this year, and nobody can tell me whether the certification survived. - Author: Luke Nicholas - Tags: organic, north otago, Vegetables, certification, Food History, growers In February 1882 a sailing ship called the Dunedin left Port Chalmers carrying about 5,000 frozen carcasses and 2,226 sheep tongues. Nobody had done it from this far away before. William Soltau Davidson, general manager of the New Zealand and Australian Land Company, had the ship fitted with a coal-powered Bell Coleman plant that cooled the entire hold to about 22 degrees below the outside temperature, and he had sent the company's local manager, Thomas Brydone, to Britain to study how refrigeration worked. Between them they froze close to 10,000 carcasses in two months, and it did not go smoothly. The crankshaft on the freezing plant broke during loading, and the carcasses already frozen had to be sold around Dunedin instead. The Otago Daily Times has put that number at about 640\. Whatever it was, it meant the first New Zealanders to eat frozen meat were Dunedin households, and the record says they were perfectly happy with it. Then, becalmed in the tropics, the cold air in the hold stopped circulating properly. Captain John Whitson crawled inside to saw extra air holes and almost froze to death doing it. The crew pulled him out by a rope tied round his ankles and revived him. Ninety-eight days later the Dunedin reached London. Every carcass but one was in good condition, and the meat sold at Smithfield within a fortnight for twice what it would have made at home. The sheep came from [Totara Estate](https://nzhistory.govt.nz/first-shipment-of-frozen-meat-leaves-nz?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz), a farm of nearly 15,000 acres just south of Oamaru, where Brydone had built the killing shed. Ninety-five percent of that first cargo came off it. A monument to Brydone stands on the hill above. At its foot sit 23 hectares that took their name from it. That is the block that was owned and eventually sold; over the years its various owners leased more ground alongside it, and published descriptions of the operation run anywhere from 23 hectares to 60\. Vegetables have grown there since the mid-1980s, largely without synthetic sprays since the end of that decade, and under organic certification since 1999\. This year the company that farmed them was wound up. ## The nurse and the mechanic In 1984 Sue and Lindsay Smith moved onto the block, which had belonged to Sue's family. She was a nurse. He was a self-employed mechanic. Both came from mixed-farming families, and neither of them was farming. They planted the entire property in barley, because barley was easy. It did not pay. So they switched to what everyone else in the district was growing, which was vegetables, and within four years they had both quit their jobs and were doing it full time. Then their sons arrived. Three of them, out on the farm with their parents, eating vegetables where they grew, and one of them with an appetite for the soil itself. The Smiths had always been uneasy about the sprays used in commercial vegetable growing. Watching their own children eat off the ground made it a different question. They started ringing organic growers and asking how you deal with pests without chemicals. By the end of the 1980s much of what left the farm was effectively spray-free, and they were not even marketing it that way. They just wanted to be comfortable feeding it to their own kids. Sue got interested in certification at the start of the 1990s, as [the BioGro logo](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/the-1941-gardening-club-that-owns-new-zealands-organic-logo/) began appearing on more products. She described it as the label that means a shopper does not have to worry. They contacted BioGro in 1991, started soil testing, found the process intimidating at first, and were in no particular hurry. Full certification came in 1999. It earned them a certain amount of flak, mostly from other growers. Sue told the Otago Daily Times that when the shop first opened people looked at them as though the family had come off the planet, and that somebody made the mistake of telling Lindsay you cannot grow an organic cauliflower. She noted that this is not a thing you say to Lindsay Smith. When the lettuce aphid arrived they were growing a lot of lettuce. Other growers sprayed. The Smiths could not, so they lost the crop, and later planted aphid-resistant varieties instead. Lindsay's summary of organic growing was that there are no quick fixes, and that by the time you have a problem it is already too late. They ran a five-year crop rotation and leased another six hectares to make it work. In the end they were brewing their own compost tea on the farm and adjusting the brew off soil and leaf analysis. One detail from that period has stayed with me. When they sold to wholesalers, they were expected to wrap their vegetables so that chemical residues from other growers' produce would not contaminate theirs. It did not seem to occur to anyone that the wrapping might be the other growers' job. ## The hall The Smiths sold vegetables at the farm gate from early on, but most of the crop went to wholesalers and into supermarkets, where they watched it get marked up and sit on shelves losing freshness. They wanted people to eat it at its best, and they wanted to break the idea that organic has to be expensive. Then the old Totara Community Hall on their boundary came up for tender, because the district could no longer afford to maintain it. This was one day after the Smiths had been granted consent to expand their existing farm shed shop. They won the tender and opened in the hall, stage and all, keeping the building much as it was. Their own sons worked on the farm, and so did other young people from the district. Secondary school pupils worked in the shop, learning to clean and to talk to customers, among them Cathy Watt's grandson Jack. Cathy is Sue's older sister. She worked in that shop from the day it opened until the day it closed, 23 years later. Sue sold both the farm and the shop in 2008, then bought the shop back in 2012\. It ran as Brydone Wholefoods until the end of May 2025, selling certified organic, spray-free and local produce alongside groceries, household goods and healthcare lines. Through the Covid lockdowns it was an essential business and stayed open, with family roped in for deliveries, and after the panic-buying stripped the shelves they simply went back to selling fruit and vegetables, because that was all they could get. Looking back on the whole thing when she closed, Sue told the ODT she would do it all again and would not change a thing. You can [read Sally Rae's piece on the closing here](https://www.odt.co.nz/business/vege-shop-closing-after-23-years?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz). The farm, meanwhile, went to Marty Quennell and Cushla Brophy, who bought it in 2008 and ran it as Brydone Growers for eleven years. Potatoes were what it became known for, and the Jersey Bennes especially. ## The man who stayed Around the turn of the century a grower called Nigel Clark started work on that farm. He was still there when the Smiths sold. He was still there eleven years after that. Alison Lambert, who knew him through the Otago Farmers Market, once wrote that you would not pick him for it on sight, with the unruly hair and the black V8 Holden ute. She asked him why he grew organically. He said it was a simple choice. It also meant seven days a week. Doing it without Roundup costs labour. You turn the soil over far more, and in July and August you feed the ground a pungent mix of fish and seaweed to push the plants along. Supply is a juggle, because winter into spring is simply how vegetables behave when nothing is artificially driving them, and every season lands differently. At potato harvest the crew went from about half a dozen to thirty-six, because the local Pacific community came and picked, singing while they worked. The same ground that Chinese growers first turned into market gardens. Clark's reason for doing any of it was not about soil. [It was about honesty](https://www.whitestonegeopark.nz/post/oamaru-organics?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz). Plenty of operations say spray free, or free range, and his point was that a person trying to eat well needs to know the claim is actually true. He also once wrote off the man who kept turning up to buy his vegetables as a fly-by-nighter. That man was James Porteous. ## The man who bought his own supplier James Porteous spent more than twenty years in Tokyo working in IT. He came home in 2014 because he wanted his children to grow up in New Zealand, bought a failing Thai restaurant in Frankton off Trade Me, and then did something unusual with it: he turned the whole chain organic. His vegetables came from Brydone. When Brydone came up for sale in 2019 he bought it, for $1.7 million, with his friend Marc Lanson in Sydney. Clark stayed on as head grower and took a small stake, which he said was a good opportunity that worked out well. They renamed the farm Oamaru Organics. Nearly thirty crops, mostly brassicas, lettuces, cabbages, potatoes and yams, on what the Otago Daily Times then called the biggest organic market garden in the South Island. Porteous was blunt about why the deal worked: Clark knew the ground, and he would not have bought the farm if Clark had not been willing to stay. Lanson, announcing the purchase, said it came down to doing the right thing. What Porteous did next is the part I keep coming back to. The Thai shops delivered meals to people's doors in electric vehicles. A chilled truck ran from the farm to Central Otago carrying organic vegetables, organic milk and organic meat. He built a large-scale worm farm at Arrowtown, sent all the business's waste to it, and sold food waste management to Queenstown hospitality businesses on the same system, so that what the restaurants threw out came back to the paddock as compost. The most telling decision was the least visible. Across the roughly sixty hectares they were farming, about forty-five went into organic vegetables and fifteen into organic baleage. Baleage is animal feed. Porteous wanted certified organic meat in his Thai shops, which means traceability all the way back to what the animal ate, and there was no organic pork in New Zealand at the time, so pork came off the menu. Rather than shrug, he started growing feed so that other farmers trying to convert had somewhere to buy it. That is not a margin play. That is someone trying to close a loop. He also got the ownership structure wrong. Lanson's Australian company held 49 percent of Organic Solutions when the farm settled, where the limit for an Australian buyer of New Zealand land over five hectares was 25 percent without prior consent. He said neither he nor his lawyer knew the rule. The company was fined $20,000, the consent was granted after the fact on the basis that the breach was inadvertent and voluntarily self-reported, and Porteous reckoned the whole oversight cost about $50,000 more than doing it properly would have. He and Lanson flew to Wellington to apologise to Land Information staff in person. Then Covid closed most of the Thai restaurants, and the farm was left carrying a company that had been built around them. In August 2024 Porteous took over farm operations himself, cut staff from nine to one, mechanised, and lifted revenue per hectare by 39 percent. He moved onto the farm. It was not enough to clear what had already accumulated. He had sold the family home by then. Brydone Wholefoods closed at the end of May 2025\. Organic Solutions went into liquidation on 31 May. The two sat three hundred metres apart on the same road, and the shop had sold the farm's vegetables for years, right through the change of ownership. But they were separate businesses by then, and the endings were not connected. Porteous had first sat down with an insolvency practitioner ten months earlier. Sue Smith closed because she had decided to, at 23 years, and she was pleased the old hall would go on to something else under new people. That is the difference worth noticing. One of them got to choose how it ended. ## Six years to the day On 11 June 2019, a fortnight after buying the farm, Porteous posted to tell people where they could still get his vegetables in Oamaru. Brydone Wholefoods had been selling them for years, he said, and from tomorrow Real Food Pantry in Eden Street would stock them too. He thanked both shops and signed off wishing everyone a healthy organic life. On 11 June 2025, exactly six years later, Amore Food Shop and Cafe in Timaru posted that with Brydone Wholefoods closed and Oamaru Organics liquidated, it was getting a lot more enquiries from North Otago and South Canterbury, and that it could send fresh produce boxes north on chilled freight for $16 a banana box. That is the shape of the change. Not a shortage, and not an empty town. Real Food Pantry is still trading in Eden Street, though its website has gone and it now runs through a Facebook page, and it stocks organic lines alongside ordinary groceries rather than being an organic shop. For a box of organic vegetables, though, you now order from Timaru. [Amore Food Shop and Cafe](https://www.more2u.co.nz/organicsprayfree-fresh-seasonal-amore-food-produce?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) on Sarah Street runs twelve box options, from $48 to $134, made up each week from whatever the country can supply and sent north on chilled freight. The example box on their website runs to avocados, oranges, pears and a bunch of bananas. And the produce is a mix of certified organic and spray-free rather than one or the other. What the district has lost is narrower and harder to replace. Not access to organic food. A dedicated organic shop, and a commercial organic grower. Shops can be replaced by freight. Certified ground with a grower on it cannot, because certification is slow and the person who knows the paddock leaves with what he knows. ## What happens to the soil now The property has been sold to a neighbouring farming family. That is the good outcome available here. It did not go offshore and it did not go to a fund. It went next door. But a certificate is held by an operator, not attached to a title. When the company was wound up, its certificate went with it, and a new owner would have to be certified in their own name. How much of the ground's history counts toward that, and whether decades of clean management shortens or removes a conversion period, I could not establish from anything the certifiers publish. So I went looking for whether anyone had re-certified. I could not find that out either. There is no single public register of certified organic land in this country. There are several certifiers, each with its own directory, in various states of currency, and no way to search by title or by paddock. If a property changes hands and the new owner does not re-certify, the fact simply stops appearing anywhere. There is no record that it ever did. That gap is part of what the Ministry for Primary Industries has been [consulting on](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/the-10-000-line-that-decides-which-organic-growers-get-checked/), including a single national organic mark. Full compliance with the new regulations arrives on 31 March 2028. Until then, here is where it stands. Land below a monument to the man who started New Zealand's food export trade. A nurse and a mechanic who planted barley, gave up, and spent forty years building soil instead. A couple who took it on and grew the potatoes people queued for. A man who came back from Tokyo and tried to turn a restaurant chain into a circular food system. And through all three of them, one grower, who worked that ground for twenty-six years and thought the whole point was that the claim on the label should be true. Whether the paddock they handed on is still certified organic is not a matter of public record. --- **Before you go** If you want more of this, [subscribe for free](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/#/portal/signup). If you want to help pay for the digging, you can [leave a one-off tip](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/#/portal/support).