Ingleby Farms
Making Carbon from Sunlight
Regenerative agriculture shifts the paradigm of conventional farming to harvesting sunlight and increasing carbon in the soils. Ingleby Farms are an inspiring global company that is committed to a new approach to agriculture and land management, with a dedicated focus on regenerative, sustainable farming.
Their approach is completely in line with our own and we are proud to have partnered with them on developing Manuka forestry with superior genetics for high UMF honey. In this way we feel that we’ve played our part in putting New Zealand primary industries on the world stage and helped rear farmland that produces planet-changing vitality from the ground up.
Ecosystem: Manuka and mixed farming
Ingleby Farms is a family owned business, headquartered in Denmark, with a strong environmental ethos in its approach to food production. They own farms here and in Romania, Australia, California, Argentina, Peru and Uruguay and their core business is the production of organic foods.
In New Zealand they were keen to grow manuka for carbon sequestration and honey Ingelby’s approached Kauri Park for our manuka expertise. Manuka forestry fits well with their ethos as the health benefits of manuka are produced by the plant with almost no inorganic input. The manuka industry is a rapidly evolving industry with strong demand for the natural healing properties of manuka, with demand coming from within New Zealand as well as from overseas, particularly Europe, Asia, and the United States. Manuka also prove to be more lucrative than pine forestry with a far quicker return on investment.
Ecovitalism: Rolling honey on rolling hills
Kauri Park are at the forefront of Manuka forestry development, with a number of selections which produce higher levels of Methyl Glyoxyl activity (commonly referred to as UMF), higher volumes of honey and higher yields of oil. We grow these plants at a scale that means that we’re able to supply to landowners at a very competitive price.
We are also able to provide knowledge on land preparation, planting densities, and provide contract teams to plant the trees. We are continuing with our selection program, investing in research into the identification of superior characteristics to continue to improve selection techniques.
At Kauri Park we think like a plant and for this project we had to plan for plant survival in some testing conditions. That’s why for Ingleby we grew plants in a specialised tray that would produce a deep root ball that extends well into the sub soil at planting, giving higher survival rates. We designed a forestry grade plant size that had the right root-to-shoot ratio that will survive planting and be competitive commercially. We also planned for the competitive weed and grass pressures that follow from mixed farming with animals. Then there was planting it all – as we were planting on steeper land we deployed specialist health and safety processes for our teams to stay safe in these spectacular but tricky landscapes.
Ingleby is producing high quality, eco-vital and eco-delicious manuka honey for global markets and we’re proud to have been part of their inspirational sustainable farming ecosystem.
