Cultivating and Capitalising Corn: How Generations of Māori Income is Being Threatened
If you’ve ever gone for a drive along the coast in the summer, you’ve probably spotted Māori farmers decorating the side of the road with beaten-up trucks and trailers overflowing with sweet corn. They advertise their produce with hand-painted signs, humour their cousins as they haggle a bag of corn for $5 down to $3, and teach kids how seeds can be saved for next year.
These roadside sellers are a familiar sight for locals, and the goods they offer are consistently trusted to be of high quality. But as the years have gone by, the amount of corn being sold at the roadside has steadily decreased.
Each summer, there appears to be one less seller than there was the summer before. This is a troubling sign that more Māori are being forced to leave the livelihoods they have taken decades to establish. And in abandoning their way of life, they are forced to slowly forget the teachings of preserving and saving that have fed Māori for centuries.
Māori’s history in farming fruit and vegetables stretches back to our ancestral roots in Hawaiki. Early Māori developed special methods to preserve kumara, hue (gourd), and kamokamo. In doing so, they ensured that the plants could be grown into future crops. When they first came to Aotearoa's shores, they brought great stocks of root vegetables and seeds with them to last through harsher times when food was scarcer. Māori would continue to propagate food in this manner long after the first pakeha settlers arrived. They would only adjust their methods to include the introduction of vegetables including maize corn.
Maize corn was adopted quickly and avidly by Māori, who would cultivate and preserve it similarly to their own introduced crops. This style of farming has continued through centuries and is still common to this day, with Māori families still teaching younger members how to save seeds for the next year.
Today, corn is the most common vegetable grown and sold by rural Māori families, followed closely by watermelon and kamokamo.
But what happens when the product can’t be replanted?
The dangerous fluctuation of the world’s climate, the cost of living, and the fickle nature of modern-day corn seed have shaken the stability of roadside sellers. Early last year, Te Ao Māori News investigated the conditions that roadside produce sellers in the Bay of Plenty region experienced. When the head of Matata’s Produce Patch, Briton Williams, was asked how his crops had been affected by the weather, he told the interviewer, “I’m so disappointed with my sweetcorn patch I want to set fire to it.” In the Bay of Plenty region alone in 2023, production was reportedly down by 60% due to an overflow of rain and a shortage of sunshine. Those that were able to muster the crops to drive out and set up shop had little produce and poorer quality overall.
To make matters worse for Māori farmers, supermarket chains quickly swooped in with their own corn. Currently, you can buy corn from the supermarket for anywhere between $1.49 to $3.49 for a single cob. While this price might not raise immediate red flags for the average buyer, just a few years ago Māori farmers were consistently selling their produce at $1 a cob for their highest price. More so, they would often compromise to lower prices for familiar customers.
However, these prices are no longer sustainable for most independent farms, as farmers have had to switch from the centuries-old maize corn to the more modern sweet corn. Unfortunately, this switch has rendered Māori methods of preserving seeds for the future utterly useless on a commercial scale. Sweet corn gets its superior taste from controlled hybridization and genetic modification. Rest assured that the final product is both perfectly safe and delicious to eat, but the issue with it lies in the fact that it will not produce the same plant upon further replanting. Instead, the already inbred sweet corn mutates even further, and often these mutations result in either a poorer quality crop or little to no yield.
CropLife Australia, a branch of one of the world's largest agricultural trade associations, admitted that one of the only ways farmers could ensure consistency within their crops would be to buy new seeds each year. This cost is steep on a good year. An ex-employee of the Whiritoa Gardens told Massive the farm spent approximately $22,000 per season on seeds alone for their 15 acres of farmland.
Many Māori farmers who attempt to maintain the fair prices they have held for decades are forced out of the farming business entirely, while others are forced to match market prices for vegetables that are often less than satisfactory. Already the number of vegetable farmers present at markets such as those in Auckland is steadily dropping. Farmers from distant towns used to drive in droves to sell at the Otara Flea Market, but this year there were none to be seen.
As Māori stalls slowly seem to disappear from the side of the road, I can’t help but worry that a greater loss of life is at stake. Every family that gives up on their farm leaves another generation robbed of lessons and methods that have fed Māori through centuries of struggle. With conditions like these, the only thing that is properly cultivated is the inevitable destruction of community relations and Māori independence.