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HOW DID YOU GET INTO ORGANIC GROWING?

Before taking the leap of faith into full-time organic market gardening, I (Dom) was a climate scientist at NIWA and Jeanette a physiotherapist. We both had a passion for sustainability and organics, and the more I saw how regenerative farming can reverse climate change, the more I wanted to step out of the lab and onto the field.

I’m a third-generation market gardener. The Ferrettis have green fingers in their blood – my father and uncles were conventional market gardeners in the 1930s, lured into the quick promises of chemical farming, but my grandfather, who immigrated from Italy to the Hutt Valley in the early 1900s, was an organic farmer by default – collecting seaweed from the coast, manure from local stables and Wellington Zoo. My cousin Brent Ferretti has been growing superb organic veges for over 30 years for the Nelson market, and my cousin Megan Ferretti