For The Love Of Bees

Our Vision

For the Love of Bees invites you to imagine Auckland and Aotearoa as the safest place for pollinators and humans alike.

Our vision is for urban New Zealand to have a Regenerative Organic Urban Farm within every kilometre, making Aotearoa the safest and most connected place in the world for pollinators and people alike.

How We Create Change

We do this by creating models that demonstrate optimistic & regenerative, climate-change mitigating responses to climate change.

Our work is centred around OMG, our model Regenerative Organic Urban Farm at 257 Symonds St, Auckland. The farm is designed and run to prioritise and demonstrate:

• Climate Change Mitigation through Biology-First growing, growing soil, sequestering carbon and enabling biodiversity
• Community Healing and Building through the engagement of locals and citizens as volunteer farmers, learners, composters and customers
• Food Production of the highest quality vegetables Growing Radical Hope Through Food.

OMG is tiny with only 311 square metres of the garden bed, but we employ two urban farmers at an above living wage and sustain the project via CSA-model sales of the vegetables & seedlings we produce.

OMG serves as the base for the development and running of our Earthworkers: Regenerative Horticulture 101 course that trains practitioners to establish their own regenerative urban farms. The course takes place over several months, totalling 50 hours of direct teaching time which is accompanied by and followed up with ongoing mentoring, support and peer-connection via Whatsapp.

We run several Community Composting Hubs in Auckland and are about to establish our first precinct-covering Community Composting Cluster of hubs in the Wynyard Quarter on Auckland’s waterfront. There are now more than 60 community compost managers nationwide being mentored via our UFA platform.

We have also established and manage Pasture Paintings & Beehives at several locations around Auckland. The Pasture Paintings provide foraging for pollinators (every hive needs a billion healthy flowers to sustain it over the course of a year) and we collaborate with Awhina Mai Tatou Katoa collective (AMTK), engaging a community with lived experience of homelessness in Bee-Keeping practice (as well as assisting to help enable carving activations by AMTK, such as the Pou at OMG and at the Daldy Street Community Garden we facilitate).

We have established, run and fund the Urban Farmers Alliance, connecting, mentoring, supporting & assisting horticultural practitioners throughout Aotearoa to achieve climate change mitigating Regenerative outcomes. This has us in constant contact with approximately 135 different practitioners nationwide via our Composting and Farming whatsapp channels.

We have also activated and informed and connected the regeneratively community Auckland and nationwide also via our Regenerate Now: Farmers In The Field series, see here.

We are also active Promoting Ecosystem Wellbeing advocating for an environment that is safe for pollinators.

Our most recent action was to prevent the roll-out of Glyphosate for Weed Control Auckland-wide; driving, co-ordinating efforts to resist the unnecessary use of pollinator-harming toxins with protests, advertising, marshalling stakeholders and pulling together a protest action all within the narrow window between the publication of the report and its scheduled adoption. This followed our prior action to steer Councils towards Composting instead of carbon-emitting Bio-Digestor technology.