The new faces of organic growing

Let’s start with the story behind your business name?

Our youngest son’s name is Fox and he was born with six toes on one foot. He was a surprise baby after we had planned to ‘get on with things’ once our second child was independent enough – so a bit of a spanner in the works! But it was obviously meant to be. When he was two days old I sat down to feed him and had the eureka moment of everything we were going to do and how we were going to do it. After having ‘preggy brain’ for so long, it just suddenly clicked into place.

I spent the next four months in between baby feeds and sleeps researching, business planning and networking.

How did you find land and get started?

We’d wanted to work for an organic business when we returned to the Bay of Plenty in late 2014, after a stint managing the Koanga Institute seed gardens, but found there weren’t any growers large enough to offer steady employment. We had this idea that we could kill so many birds with one stone – use permaculture design and holistic management to grow a business that would:

• have a positive effect on our ecology

• sustain us as a family

• nourish our community

• work within local economies and

• provide a place of training and employment for people who wanted to grow food well and had a similar vision.

Unfortunately we were on a single (horticulture!) income at the time, and renting, so working the land for a living seemed