Growing local food futures with Roebuck Farm
A shared eating experience, talk + tasting connected to the Rescue exhibition
This participatory session begins around the table. Through shared eating, tasting, and storytelling, Growing local food futures with Roebuck Farm invites participants to explore food security as something lived, felt, and practised, through the body as much as through ideas and practice.
Puke Ariki is delighted to welcome Jodi and Tanya Roebuck of Roebuck Farm for a lively gathering examining how small-scale food production can support resilient local futures in Taranaki. Grounded in the question; What does food security mean in Taranaki—and how might local food systems sustain communities through climate uncertainty, economic pressure, and change? This session takes a broad approach to the themes ignited by the exhibition Rescue. Here, rescue is understood not as recovery after loss, but as an ongoing practice of care, preparedness, and reconnection—across people, whenua, food systems, wai, and local ecologies.
Drawing on their experience as award-winning growers, Roebuck Farm will share practical tools and lived frameworks that make farming economically viable while remaining responsive to ecological limits, climate volatility, seasonality, place, and community need.
*This programme aligns with Puke Ariki’s Kai series, where bodily knowledge - tasting, sensing, and shared experience - is central.
Bio
We are Jodi + Tanya Roebuck and we developed Roebuck Farm, an intensive 2/3rds of an acre market garden HERE growing + delivering produce into restaurants + retail in all within a short distance from the farm.
We are proud to be an award-winning small-scale intensive market garden and recognised for our commitment to sustainability + mentorship of other growers.
We specialise in fast day-to-maturity crops and same-day harvest + delivery. It’s a model that can work for everyone + really supports both farmers + the community through increasing changeable weather challenges and pandemics.
We love what we do. We are passionate about growing food sustainably and profitably.
We know what we offer is unique + we would like to encourage others into building the bridge back to local + sustainable food systems.
Photo: C Rutherford