At 21, with no farming background and a chemical-engineering scholarship behind her, she threw a tarp over a paddock and started growing vegetables. Six years on, Nadia Pavlovich of the Young Organic Growers Alliance can feed 80 families a week from her Whangarei market garden, selling everything direct to consumers.

Each Sunday she emails her customers and grows to their orders, leaving wholesalers and supermarkets out of it.

“We set our price, and it means we can run a really efficient business on a smaller piece of land,” she says.

She says the early doubters came thick and fast.

“I most commonly got ‘Where is your husband?’, followed very closely by ‘Farming’s really hard work, and you won’t last more than a year doing it.’”

Pavlovich took that story to a Parliament breakfast last week, marking 2026 as the United Nations International Year of the Woman Farmer.

“Women are capable of really hard things, so we are definitely capable of being farmers.”

See Nadia’s page here.

CountryWide CONNECT with Andy Thompson & Sarah Perriam-Lampp is our daily rural show livestreamed from 11am-1pm. Visit country-wide.co.nz on how to watch/listen or download the CountryWide CONNECT mobile app, available on Apple iOS and Android.