The Mayor Who Wanted Christchurch to Be the World's First Organic Garden City

In December 1994, the world's organic movement came to Canterbury.

The 10th international scientific conference of IFOAM, the global federation of organic movements, was held at Lincoln University. More than 800 delegates came from around the world.

The official opening was at Christchurch Town Hall. According to an extract from Matt Morris's biography of Bob Crowder, Mayor Vicki Buck told the room she hoped Christchurch could become the world's first organic Garden City.

It's a good idea. It's still a good idea.

How Lincoln got the world

The conference was Bob Crowder's doing. Crowder, the Lincoln lecturer who started the Biological Husbandry Unit in 1976, was elected to IFOAM's world board in 1989 and served until 1998, according to historian John Paull's review of the biography. He was elected in absentia and reportedly missed most of the meetings.

Paull says the book calls bringing the conference to Christchurch the pinnacle of Crowder's organics career.

Crowder aimed high for the opening. Prince Charles was due in New Zealand in February 1994, and at a Government House reception Crowder invited him to open the conference. The Prince declined. He sent a message instead, endorsing organic farming as the thing closest to sustainable agriculture.

He had form. His own Home Farm received full organic status that same year.

The week itself had an Organic Fayre in Victoria Square. The entertainment included the Lincoln Tussock Jumpers, Crowder's own Morris dancing side. The global organic movement's big moment in New Zealand had bells on its ankles, and I find that oddly reassuring.

Crowder was an outsider in more ways than one. He was gay, in a country where homosexuality was illegal until 1986, Paull notes. The extract says he dealt with homophobia, and with being labelled "eccentric".

The conference speakers included Helen Browning, Erihapeti Rehu-Murchie on sustainability and spirituality from a Māori perspective, and Professor Lloyd Geering. The extract calls it a tremendous success that put New Zealand in the international organics spotlight.

Meanwhile, back at Lincoln

Not everyone at Lincoln was celebrating.

By the 1990s, the biography extract says, Crowder's relationship with some of Lincoln's academic staff had soured, while others backed him publicly.

In 1993, a Growing Today article by Roland Clark reported that Crowder was selling BHU onions to a city supermarket for three to four times what conventional growers got. The same article said Lincoln's world-class animal scientists had never trialled the BHU's pastures.

The book has Crowder describing ridicule and animosity, and saying he felt marginalised by Lincoln, according to Paull. The criticism didn't all run one way. One account quoted in the book blames his "often abrasive and dogmatic attitude towards anyone who does not agree with him" for costing him support in the industry.

Meanwhile the unit kept growing things. Its orchard held 80 apple varieties that had gone years without artificial inputs, and at least six of the old varieties were described as unblemished.

I was a student at Lincoln from 1989 to 1992. I'm fairly sure I wandered into those orchards, picked windfalls off the ground and made cider with them. Nobody mentioned they were part of a long-running experiment. It wasn't great cider. It was early days in my fermenting.

Who gets the credit

The 2024 biography has started a smaller argument of its own.

Writing in the New Zealand Journal of History, Paull calls the book's suggestion that Crowder founded organic farming in New Zealand "pure puffery, a case of historical amnesia". He points to more than 50 years of organics advocacy in New Zealand before Crowder arrived.

He has a point. The country's oldest organic organisation started as a gardening club in 1941.

What happened to the Garden City

The council never declared Christchurch organic. It came closest in two other ways.

In 2014 it wrote a food vision down. Its Food Resilience Policy says "Christchurch is the best edible garden city in the world." It covers community gardens, productive soils and local food. The word organic isn't in it.

Then, in March 2016, the council voted to cut glyphosate back to sites closed to the public and to pest plants with no practical alternative. By 2017 its parks teams were spraying a weed killer made from pine oil and fatty acids, certified organic by BioGro. Residents complained about the smell.

Vicki Buck was back on the council by then. In 2019, with glyphosate still on most of the footpaths, she told 1News: "I would like it to be quicker, clearly, and I think it's taken a while."

In 2020 the council floated going back to more glyphosate to save about $3.5 million. After public consultation, it dropped the idea.

Where it grew instead

The organic Garden City didn't come from the council. It came up around the edges.

Untamed Earth grows fruit, vegetables and herbs on 60 acres of market gardens in Christchurch, and describes itself as certified organic. It sells through its farm shop, veggie boxes and the Lyttelton, Ohoka and South Christchurch farmers markets.

Inside the city, you can do a full organic shop on foot in one suburb.

And a lot of the people growing it learned at Lincoln. Under the BHU's stepping stone programme, graduates lease land on the farm and sell their own crops before going out on their own.

30 October

The BHU marks its 50th today. It's free: a community feast at the Lincoln Event Centre from 11:30, a symposium at Lincoln University from 1:45 to 4:30 with three panels including one on food resilience, and an after party with farm tours at the BHU from 5pm.

Penny Platt, one of the three people behind Untamed Earth, studied at the BHU in 2010. She now chairs its trust.

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