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Sweet, sweet memories (Photos: Don Rowe; collage: Tina Tiller)
Sweet, sweet memories (Photos: Don Rowe; collage: Tina Tiller)

PartnersJune 17, 2022

Pretty big country: reflections on an EV odyssey

Sweet, sweet memories (Photos: Don Rowe; collage: Tina Tiller)
Sweet, sweet memories (Photos: Don Rowe; collage: Tina Tiller)

In his final story from the Electric Highway, Don Rowe looks back on his journey and finds a good few things to be optimistic about.

There’s a saying I love, one used by hunters and trampers both. Looking at a map, or reaching the top of a hill, they’ll put their hands on their hips, take a deep breath and summarise their feelings with a grammatically questionable, yet somehow profound, “She’s pretty big country, mate.”

To be totally honest I don’t really know what it means. But travelling around Aotearoa in the BMW iX this past summer, it came to my mind a lot. Lake Wakatipu? Pretty big country. The Cook Strait? Pretty big country. Post-hike beers on a glacial riverbed? You know it, pretty big country.

Our correspondent cools off, mountain-style (Photo: Don Rowe)

In literal terms, we do live in a pretty big country. According to this map, tweeted out by aunty Helen Clark, the distance from Kapowairua in the Far North to Rakiura in the south is roughly comparable to the distance between Copenhagen, Denmark, and the foothills of the Pyrenees in France. There’s a lot to see – white sand beaches, temperate rainforests, alpine deserts, roaring coasts, ancient glaciers, pumping surf breaks, penguins, seals, the almost definitely haunted Otira Stagecoach Hotel.

This story from the Electric Highway is brought to you by BMW i, pioneering the new era of electric vehicles. To learn more about the style, power and sustainability of the all-electric BMW i model range, visit bmw.co.nz.

It doesn’t always feel that way. Over the last two years our geographic and psychological isolation has shrunk our collective world, emphasising the distances between us. I saw that in Franz Josef, where the traditionally buzzing hostels were empty, the ghosts of the pioneers on the walls were somehow a little more frightening than usual.

There’s another saying I like a little less, just on an aesthetic level, although I understand and agree with its premise. You will have heard it: “Do something new, New Zealand.” While admittedly jarring at a time where doing something as new as buying the fancy-pants tinned tomatoes feels difficult, the beauty of this place is that you can do a lot with a little out on the road.

The country is riddled with DOC campsites, like at Hans Bay on the West Coast, where for $8 you can wake to the sound of weka tearing into last night’s sausages and smoked fish. I slept on the ground in my one-man tent, on an old opshop duvet, but it wouldn’t take much to do it better. Hiking up Roy’s Peak, or surfing at Raglan, or dragging yourself across the lunar dunes at Te Paki, there is no charge for some of the more stunning experiences in Aotearoa. And as chronicled in this series, these days you can even do it without spending a cent on petrol.

It’s hard to rank the stories I heard over summer. And it’s probably unnecessary. Everyone I met on the road restored my faith in our collective worth at this particular point in time. Far from the ugly scenes on Parliament’s grounds, Aotearoa is still a fundamentally good place full of good people, doing what they can to make life a little bit better for each other – giving away food, caring for the land, searching for ways to prepare for a rapidly changing world. 

Aotearoa: quite lovely (Photo: Don Rowe)

It was a valuable reminder as a journalist; nobody in this industry is immune from internet-poisoned cynicism, a “seen it all before” attitude or the nonsense conviction that you alone have the true pulse of the country, that you know How People Really Feel. We all know that social media, and the media more broadly, doesn’t always reflect reality. That’s true here, with the exception of the landscapes. Aotearoa really does look as good as we think it does.

This was evident crossing the Cook Strait on my way back to Wellington. Stuck in Picton with no booking, I lined up outside the Bluebridge office at five in the morning, trying to talk my way onto the boat. I wasn’t alone; a group of imam, young labourers, seasonal workers from Fiji, a couple of old hippies with a bus growing moss. There are a whole range of different people in New Zealand, living their lives, moving amongst each other more harmoniously than you’d expect from watching the news. Sailing through the Marlborough Sounds at dawn, with dolphins and penguins alongside the boat, it wasn’t hard to start feeling a little bit kumbaya.

There was real pain in returning the iX. My own car, bought when I ran home from London with Covid on my heels, is worth roughly 2% of the value and feels roughly 2000% more garbage. I’m a student again now, so an upgrade is about as far in the future as cars that fly, but the project did sell me on the possibilities of electric vehicles. And I’m not alone, the boom is undeniable – walking to university, it feels like every second car is electric, and an increasing chunk of the buses. Ownership of a car is an inherently consumeristic choice, but I’m optimistic that this shift towards electrification is at least in part a true reflection of the real desire we have to do better.  

So while my rust bucket might be parked in the driveway, and my trip an increasingly distant memory (albeit one with a decent scrapbook), it’s still good to be home in this pretty big country.

Keep going!
A thriving banana plant, on Aotearoa’s East Coast (Photo: supplied; additional design: Tina Tiller)
A thriving banana plant, on Aotearoa’s East Coast (Photo: supplied; additional design: Tina Tiller)

PartnersJune 9, 2022

Gisborne growers want to bring local bananas to the table

A thriving banana plant, on Aotearoa’s East Coast (Photo: supplied; additional design: Tina Tiller)
A thriving banana plant, on Aotearoa’s East Coast (Photo: supplied; additional design: Tina Tiller)

In this story from the Electric Highway, Don Rowe learns about an East Coast effort to change how we source one of our favourite crops.

From the dry Canterbury plains to the sodden West Coast paddocks, through the arable central North Island, up the west coast and onwards to the Far North; as I travelled the country in the BMW iX, one thing was very clear: there’s a hell of a lot of farmland in this country. Cows, sheep, deer – the odd bloody old alpaca – animals line the roadside through every region and every climate in New Zealand. Behind them, the orchards: avocados, apples, berries of all stripes. But conspicuously absent from almost the entire nation is one crowd-pleaser of a crop. 

Bananas are far and away the most popular fruit in New Zealand. Supermarket figures show that 80% of customers going into the fruit and vege section will buy bananas – apples are a distant second around 60%. The country is one of the leading importers in the world. But the vast majority are imported from places like Ecuador and the Philippines, with huge costs environmentally and to the lives of the people who produce them. Workers in the Philippines can spend their whole lives on the plantation, suffering gruelling conditions, low wages and exposure to harmful pesticides in order to feed Kiwi customers.

This story from the Electric Highway is brought to you by BMW i, pioneering the new era of electric vehicles. Keep an eye out for new chapters in Don’s journey each week, and to learn more about the style, power and sustainability of the all-electric BMW i model range, visit bmw.co.nz or click here.

So why don’t we grow them here? It’s long been assumed that producing bananas commercially is not possible in New Zealand. But Trevor Mills, Tai Pukenga banana project manager, argues that’s no longer the case. The warming climate and further research into the viability of banana crops is seeing a boom in production across the motu.

In fact, proof of concept has existed at a hobbyist level for almost 70 years. “We’ve got photographs from the mid-1950s of a full-page pictorial of this guy out in Ormond growing all these tropical fruits and bananas and all sorts of other things. A local guy Roger Bodle is a hobbyist in his 80s now – and he’s been growing bananas in Gisborne since he was given a plant when he was 13.” 

“And as the climate becomes more tropical, tropical fruits are going to really enjoy it. On the flip side, if there is an accelerating change to a more tropical climate as it looks like we’re seeing, crops like grapes and kiwifruit and apples could struggle.”

“Bananas Thrive at Ormond” – a local plantation in the 1950s (Photo: Gisborne Photo News)

Banana farmers could also avoid the huge licensing costs seen in other fruit, says Mills. Gold kiwifruit growers pay around $800,000 a hectare, he says, with another $100,000 per hectare outlaid on netting to protect the fruit. Bananas almost propagate themselves, says Mills, with a single plant potentiating many more – and quickly.

“The planting rate that we calculate is about 500 plants per acre, or 1,000 per hectare. If you put 100 plants in, within 18 months you’re going to get up to five or six suckers, or second generation plants, growing around the original plant. That’s when your total number of plants from the original 100 can get up to 400 or 500 by the second generation.”

“Thirty years ago a place like Turkey barely had a single banana growing. Now they’re exporting 800,000 tons of bananas per year. Why couldn’t we do the same thing?”

Approximately 35,000 cartons of bananas arrive in New Zealand every week from South America alone, says Mills. The fruit is still green and must be sprayed with ethylene in order for their skin to turn yellow. But internally, they remain a substandard product. “We’ve proved with our trials that we can produce a superior product here in taste and sweetness and flavour, without the chemicals.” 

Mills says banana crops are an increasingly attractive possibility for Māori incorporations, creating employment and a more productive and less intensive form of farming than running livestock. “I’ve been in talks with Te Puni Kokiri and they’re keen to motivate a number of Māori incorporations from places like the East Cape right down to Masterton and Wairarapa in the south. They can see the potential that horticulture has to create more employment for Māori, more investment and more productive use of the land, rather than just having a few sheep on land that is tailor-made for horticulture.’

In 2019, Tai Pukenga received around $94,000 through the Vision Matauranga Capability Fund, which was used to grow a trial crop of bananas at Ormond. The money also funded the creation of a method of producing banana plants through tissue culture methods for the first time in New Zealand, greatly diminishing the time it takes to cultivate banana crops. Crown Entity Plant & Food Research have also expressed interest in bananas, says Mills, with development managers set to visit the area in June. 

Further south, NIWA scientist Bernard Milville has established a plot in Nūhaka, utilising his background to locate a site he believes is suitable for growing bananas and other tropical crops – at the moment he’s cultivating everything from red pineapples to mountain paw paw. 

“That will really be a demonstration to the local farmers that there is potential in growing tropical plants and tropical fruit. And that grassroots development is the secret I think. If you get the right sort of people pushing the right sort of vision, it’s amazing. Northland growers have got a three to four-year head start on this, and I know one grower up there can take 100kg of bananas to the Whangarei farmers market and sell them in half an hour at $8 a kg. 

“People will pay that, no questions asked, because of the superior product that the bananas are. The possibilities for farmers and the environment are massive.”

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