Rural Delivery - Series 10, Episode 19

Our vision here at Smedley is to produce future leaders, and I think, you know all the staff here, we're there to challenge the boys, to always challenge them as to what they're doing. We have a session every lecture day as to what's happening in New Zealand's primary industry, so they're reading the papers and, we want them to get involved...

– Smedley Station tutor Tom Goodger, on the aims of the agricultural school

...when we started on this journey there was no real demand from the market at all. In fact I think that back in say the year 2000 if you visited some of our customers overseas and started talking about sustainability or the environment, they'd probably fall asleep on you . . . "just tell us about the wine...we don't want to hear that stuff". I'd have to say right now when we go overseas and talk to our customers, they say "well tell us how [do] you make your product? Is it ethically produced, is it sustainably produced?' So there's definitely a market driver now, but it wasn't something that we thought of at the start of the journey.

– Executive Director Fabian Yukich on Villa Maria Vineyard's organic and sustainability journey