New Zealand: Pets or steak? The inside story of a bovine brouhaha in the suburbs

An urban farm in Auckland has been raising cows for meat for years. This time, they decided to involve the community in the process – but the backlash was so intense, the plan was canned.

Alice Neville
The Spinoff
June 14, 2019

Excerpt:

A sprawling, hippy-esque bucolic paradise surrounded by multimillion-dollar white villas, Kelmarna Gardens is a bit of an anomaly at the epicentre of one of Auckland’s most bougie neighbourhoods.

Covering four and a half acres of council land on the Grey Lynn/Ponsonby/Herne Bay border, it’s a city farm and organic community garden headed by a trust and mainly run by volunteers. In recent years, local chefs have got behind the gardens: you’ll see Kelmarna produce name-checked on menus all over town.

Ponsonby Rd eatery Orphans Kitchen has a plot at Kelmarna and chef/co-owner Tom Hishon is heavily involved in promoting the gardens and raising funds through events like the annual harvest festival. It was Hishon who suggested that when the time came, the meat from the three steers that lived on the farm be made available to restaurants in the community.

“I’d been promoting the idea to Adrian [Roche, garden manager at Kelmarna] and Andy [Boor, Kelmarna’s development manager] for a couple of years,” says Hishon. “They’ve always had livestock on the property and it gets processed anyway – the cattle have always been taken off site to be killed – so I said it would be great if chefs and restaurants then had access to it.”

Read the complete article here.