About Veda Organics
What is 'Veda'?
The word Veda ("Vay-da") is from the sanskrit language (sorry, nothing to do with Darth Veda...), and translates to meaning something like 'inherent, timeless knowledge', or 'eternal wisdom'. This is the principle by which we try to run our farm, by harmonising our farming practices as much as possible with timeless natural wisdom.
This airy fairy idea has very practical implementation. For example, we include small herd of 'ahimsa' cows (and a goat with an identity crisis) into our growing cycle. These guys clean up crop residues, but get to live comfortably for their entire natural life, eating lots, and with no fear of a surprise trip to 'The Works'. And they leave behind plentiful cow patties with all kinds of microbes that add to the soil biota, which is essential for living, healthy soil.
It's a great system that has worked for farmers for millenia.
Because we grow a lot of crops, we also add composts and organic fertilisers and grow a lot of regenerative cover crops to put back what we take out of the soil, plus more. But we only use inputs that are up to organic standards, and those that we believe are ethically produced, meaning fairness to people, animals and the world around us. Sometimes these products can be a bit tricky to find, but we manage.
We also value our community of customers and try to make our products affordable and accessible. Quite often price and access are barriers to getting quality food, which is a very unfortunate result of the modern world. So we do our best to minimise this too.
Our Farm
UPDATE OCTOBER 2023:
We have recently moved our growing location from the Motueka Valley to nearby Mapua, still in the Tasman Region. We are establishing a new small farm at the new spot, again taking on a restoration project! We will be growing a smaller range of produce, but still always striving for quality and freshness.
Our farm is 12 hectares, plus a few hectares by the nearby river for the cows to have a holiday.
We grow about 3 hectares of crops each year, including a lot of potatoes and carrots, quite a lot of strawberries, and plenty of other crops like sweetcorn, pumpkins, squash, zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbages, beans, peas, beetroot, lettuces, celery, fennel, silverbeet and spinach. As well as the above, we have greenhouses and surrounding area producing salads, radishes, coriander, spinach, rocket, baby leaf spinach, and all those delicious summer vegetables in the warmer months.
And just for fun we have a small mixed orchard of around 300 trees, some of which goes directly to customers, or gets transformed into juice. Or we eat it and share it with friends and the cows.
We are a family farm, and we consider our staff like family too. Despite the regular challenges of running a small family business in an increasingly corporate world, we feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to have an ethical, worthwhile livelihood and lifestyle and thank those that support us in having it.
