Sprouting a bright idea
- April
- 20
4:38 pm Live Window
Riding the boom was Jeremy Howden, the son of Wairarapa farmers, who, in 1990, cashed in his holiday pay as an advertising representative for the local paper and bought the sprouts business of a Chinese greengrocery.
New Zealanders fascination with ethnic food, encountered on their mandatory OE, had already seen the rise in main centres of restaurants with European, Asian and Middle Eastern themes. With the creation of fusion cooking by Kiwi chef Peter Gordon - a selection of all these food styles - in the 90s this began to filter out into the wider population.
Meanwhile, country people were making their own changes. As interest grew in organic farming, small food-producing businesses sprang up on farmlets. At the same time, a trend toward low-fat diets and healthier living was reflected in cafe menus in newly discovered lifestyle country, like Wairarapa.
Sprouts, the early curly stages of pulses - beans, peas and lentils - were essential ingredients of this new eating experience. Crispy, crunchy with a faintly earthy flavour and high in protein, they had an exotic appeal.
Mr Howden was in the right place at the right time with the right product.
He had grown up on his parents sheep and beef farm at Te Wharau near Masterton in the 60s and 70s. It was a returned servicemens ballot farm, studded with the areas ubiquitous rocky Taipo land formations, and had been rejected by the first ballot winner as too difficult to farm. His father Peter, a former prisoner of war, now aged 90, imparted to his son a love of the land. In the mid-60s, at a time when many remaining pockets of native bush were being cleared on farms, he covenanted 160 hectares of bush under the protection of the QE2 Trust.
Mr Howdens mother, Sylvia, was an Otago University-graduated home scientist - a combination of todays dietitian and nutritionist - and he was brought up with a sound understanding of food nutrition and quality.
She converted the family to organics when her home garden was accidentally destroyed by a neighbours herbicide spray.
It made her realise how powerful modern chemicals had become, how they were now part of our diet, Mr Howden recalls. She knew this could not be good for peoples health.
Conservation and healthy food were essential elements of his life growing up. Im the product of my upbringing, he says. I dont see myself as a greenie as such. Im a green farmer. Its part of my life, more than just a tag.
In the 80s, he spent three and a half years travelling in Europe, North America, India, the Middle East and Africa. The memory of the foods he tasted then stayed with him when he returned to New Zealand.
After a disastrous brush with the Angora goat boom he turned to selling advertising. One of his clients was a Chinese market gardener who wanted to sell his greengrocers shop. Mr Howden turned down the offer but later had the proverbial bright idea. I asked to buy the sprouting business, which came with a network of Chinese restaurant customers. I thought there was scope to grow the business.
It was also a return to a form of farming that would allow him to use the marketing and business skills he had picked up.
He began by sprouting mung beans and alfalfa in a shed on his fathers farm.
It was 1990 and a rejuvenated restaurant and cafe culture was reaching out into the countryside. He quickly went from working two days a week to fulltime and then to employing two other workers. His business doubled every year for the next seven years. Sprouts also became an essential ingredient in home salads and he began supplying them to supermarkets.
HE expanded to sprouting snow peas, lentils and chick peas. At its peak the business was selling 5000 of 100-gram and 300-gram packets of sprouts a week before sales plateaued in the late 90s.
By then he had made an important discovery. I realised I was in a good position to offer my customers add-ons. Chefs were becoming more adventurous as diners tastes changed and they were looking for different, more interesting ingredients.
So he began growing such vegetables as the first coloured lettuces, fennel bulbs, celeriac, and radicchio, an Italian chicory.
Now a certified organic farmer on a 20ha block closer to Masterton with a purpose-built sprout house, he says he has deliberately kept the business a small regional producer to the lower North Island. He says the concept of food miles should apply even within New Zealand and he has passed up opportunities to sell elsewhere.
He also runs a few steers with the intention of developing an organic beef business. His latest move has been into brassicas and he has discovered his stony, well-drained soil is suitable for growing a winter cauliflower. He is trialling varieties and growing techniques.
The stones keep the soil warm and frosts enhance the caulis flavour. Its an example of the terroir winegrowers talk about, he says.
It also applies to vegetables. The flavour of the vegetables grown in the conditions they perform best in can be as specific to a region as are varieties of grapes.
Its something New Zealanders dont appreciate, but each region has its special strengths in climate and soil type.
The chemical-free organic farming methods bring out even more flavour. Without exception, organic vegetables are much more tasty than conventionally grown vegetables, he says. They are not forced to grow too quickly and their cell structures havent been expanded by too much nitrogen.
He says his farming methods are an example of biodiversity. The waste from the sprout house is fed to the cattle and the manure from the cattle adds to the biological activity in the soil.
Paddocks are put in crops for two years before spending three years in a pasture ley - his own mix of lucerne, chicory, plantain, prairie grass and ryegrasses.
Chemicals and other inputs are not the answer to promoting soil fertility, he says. Too much acidulated fertilisers are making our soils sick. Fertility doesnt come in a 50kg sack, it comes from a natural exchange of biological activity.
Once we get that right, animal and plant health problems disappear, and a healthy crop means healthy people.
He is pleased that some conventional farmers are waking up to this and using more organic practices. But they have to fully comprehend what they are doing.
You cant be green unless you are totally aware. You have to question what you are doing and why you are doing it.
You have to live it, feel it, believe it.
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