The Transformative Power Of Urban Food Forests

Learning to garden changed University of Auckland professional teaching fellow Daniel Kelly – and he wants to spread the seeds of that change.

Industrial farms depend on fossil fuels – making them significant contributors to climate change, says University of Auckland professional teaching fellow Daniel Kelly.

He is researching ways to produce food without fuelling climate change, while helping grow a food forest at Papatūānuku Kōkiri marae in Mangere.

“Growing food has given me faith that humans can be a positive force for ecological restoration.

“There’s this narrative that being human means being an ecosystem destroyer, but that’s only a story about one type of human.

"Perhaps the biggest challenge facing us as a society is learning how to become another type of human, who cares for and enriches their place,” says Kelly, who teaches psychology and sustainability and is involved with the University’s Centre for Climate, Biodiversity and Society – Ngā Ara Whetū.

Kelly stumbled across gardening while flatting in his early twenties and became focussed on climate change while completing an environmental law degree.

Now 36, he’s trying to refine the art of growing food while sequestering carbon – and tackling social inequities in the process.

Five years ago, Kelly learned about syntropic agroforestry at a workshop at PermaDynamics in Northland. It’s a new technique for growing trees and food that is inspired by pre-modern farming in Europe and contemporary indigenous practices in Brazil.

Syntropic agroforestry is aligned with agroecology, a political movement that aims to hand control of land and food production back into the hands of ordinary people.

Agroecology aims to address hunger, food insecurity and ultimately social inequality.

In Aotearoa, food inequality disproportionately affects urban Māori and Pacific people, who more often live in areas with poorer access to healthy food and are less likely to be able to afford fresh fruit and vegetables, says Kelly.

“That can be traced back to colonisation and the large-scale dispossession of Māori land to support the establishment of European farms from the 1860s onwards.”

In 2020, Kelly started experimenting with growing a syntropic food forest at Papatūānuku Kōkiri marae in Mangere.

That food forest has become part of his PhD thesis on food system change - and from bare clay five years ago, it has grown 12-metre tall trees, berries, bananas, peaches, figs, pawpaw, peppers, and many other crops.

The bounty is distributed by Papatūānuku marae as part of its efforts to support people facing hunger in the community.

In syntropic forests, the ideal is to bring nothing in from the outside, says Kelly.

Fast-growing exotic trees, such as eucalyptus and poplar, are planted in dense rows.

In Kelly’s experiment, he planted two tree rows eight metres apart. In the alleyway between, a diverse range of shrubs, flowers and vegetables grow, protected from wind and temperature extremes.

The canopy trees are pruned in spring, providing a burst of sunlight to the vegetables and young fruit trees below, while the mulch from the pruned trees adds carbon and festilises the soil.

In contrast, industrial farms are dependent on fossil fuels, Kelly says.

Research in the United States estimates six tablespoons of diesel are needed to grow a single tomato, he says.

Fossil fuels are involved in making and running the machinery used to grow food on an industrial scale and to provide power for processing, storage and transportation.

In New Zealand, coal is burned to heat greenhouses growing tomatoes and capsicums, Kelly says. Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers are also made from fossil fuels.

Mining for phosphorous used on New Zealand farms has devastated landscapes in the Pacific, leaving some places uninhabitable, he says.

“Even though it’s delicious, supermarket bounty depends on impoverishing other places, because it depends on fossil fuels and exploitation.

“Harming another place to make your place better is at the heart of climate change, so that’s the thing we need to face.

“Finding ways to work with plants and people in your local place to produce what is currently provided by fossil fuels is a powerful way to start addressing climate change and social inequality.”

Kelly hopes more people will join the wave of regeneration, experimenting with new ways of growing and sharing food.

“We can be part of a future where known solutions, such as urban gardens, are proliferating.

“We can turn narratives of doom and gloom, fires and collapse, into stories of reconnecting and restoring some of what we’ve lost.

“We can also make something new”.

On 13 April, Kelly is holding a workshop on Tāmaki’s Urban Food Futures: How imagination helps address climate change at EcoMatters Environment Trust in New Lynn, Auckland.

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