As my time in New Zealand has drawn to a close, I took some time to reflect on the moments and experiences that helped me learn and grow over the past several months. When I look back over all of the different people that I met and farms I worked on I am filled with gratitude for the wide range of experiences I had. Below is a short list of some of the more impactful moments that stretched my understanding of our agri-food system.

• Culling a Rooster Flock: When I started traveling I decided that I would take a hiatus from being a vegetarian given that most of the meat that I would be eating would most likely be raised on the farms that I was working on. During my first farm stay when the farmer mentioned that he needed to cull his rooster flock (culling a flock means thinning out or killing some of the roosters) I offered to help. I think that if I am going to eat meat then I should be able to kill the animal and recognize it as a living being. This was a defining moment for me very early on in my travels in seeing the work and both mental and physical energy that goes into killing just one chicken on a small property. This process opened my eyes to the importance of recognizing meat as the animal that it comes from and understand where and how that meat was raised. Some people have asked me if it made me want to go back to being a vegetarian, in some ways yes but in some ways no. This experience made me want to support farmers that raise animals in ethical and humane ways from paddock to plate.

• Seed Saving: Another topic that I learned about on the first small vegetable farm that I worked on was seed saving. This farm bought a fair number of their veggie seeds but they also let some of their vegetables go to seed and dried them, sorted them and saved them for the next season. While the methods used were far from perfect, and likely caused lower germination rates among the seeds, it was an important process for me to learn and think about. Before this I had never focused much on the seed. I always just thought about the plant. Learning this process made me ask questions about where our seeds are coming from, genetic diversity and breeding for local climatic conditions.

• Milking Cows: While I only spent one short week working on a commercial dairy farm, I learned so much about the complexities of pasture management and caring for dairy cows. During my time on the dairy operation, New Zealand had also just released new legislation on their carbon emissions legislation and its impact on farmers. It was incredibly insightful to have conversations and get my hands dirty on a dairy operation that is doing the best they can to protect the environment while still being a commercial dairy farm. It was great to have insight into the real impacts of environmental legislation and do the mental gymnastics to think about how to achieve agricultural systems that align with the nature.

• Food Foraging: During my time living in an eco-community on the North Island, I spent a lot of time wandering the gardens and property for my next meal. I improved my plant identification skills and introduced herbs and foraged plants that I had never previously eaten into my diet. Spending a month going “shopping” for my next meal by wandering the property shed light on just how different it is to go into the supermarket and purchase the food that we eat. 

• Shifting Livestock: The three weeks that I spent on a regenerative livestock operation taught me so much about soil, thinking in systems, and animal husbandry. I thought a lot about the realities of balancing the profitability of a commercial livestock operation along with the health of the soil and the natural environment. Before working on this farm I thought of agriculture and farming as an extractive process and only taking nutrients out of the soil to grow crops. Seeing how this farm used livestock to help manage the land and how they thought about caring for the soil through the animals opened my eyes to the world of regenerative grazing. 

I will take all of these experiences and more with me as I forge ahead on a journey of learning and discovery about our agri-food system.