Over twenty years ago Dave and Kathy Goodwin decided they did not want to bring up their two small children in New Zealand's capital city, Wellington. They brought a small lifestyle block in the heart of kiwifruit country, liked what they found and moved to their current kiwifruit orchard. Looking back now, they are slightly amazed at their boldness. "I wanted to be self employed, but it was quite a big leap to go rural," Dave admits. "I couldn't tie a piece of wire, put a post in the ground. I knew nothing. But at the time, it just didn't seem that big a decision."

While they waited for their vines to start producing, Dave diversified by buying into a kiwifruit packhouse. It was to be the first of several, and his introduction to organics. "We were the first packhouse that packed organic kiwifruit for ZESPRI and the first that ZESPRI exported organic through. So we knew it could be grown to export standards with no more defects that a class one standard, and we started to go green ourselves."

When one of their partners in the packhouse turned to growing organic, the Goodwin's followed. "It wasn't just waking up one morning and deciding we would do it," Dave remembers. "It was an evolution, both of some of the things we did and some of the things that were going on around us."

Kiwifruit is an industry with strong cooperative principles running through it. The Goodwin's had been helped during their early years by peer support. Once involved in organic production, Dave and his packhouse partners instigated and funded discussion groups for all their organic clients. Today 50 to 60 people attend the monthly meetings.

"If you'd said to me 15 years ago that I would become an organic grower, I'd have laughed at you and said, 'I just can't see that ever happening'," Dave says with a smile. Long lines of vines stretch away from the back of their house, beyond a broad wooden deck and swimming pool. Inside this garden room walled with tall shelter hedges, the hot afternoon sun feeds vines and their fruit. Dappled light filters through the vine canopy on to a tangle of grasses and other plants. Once, say Dave, the orchard looked like a city park, mown and weed free. Now that pristine tidiness seems ugly. Being organic has not only changed how he does things but the way he looks at them.

"I guess for me, it's the natural aspect of things. The fact that we haven't fiddled around in any of the processes of producing the fruit. I've seen the building up of that other life that goes on within the orchard. There's all the cobwebs and insects and bees creating a natural environment. So to me, an organic kiwifruit is actually capturing those qualities within a skin and putting it onto a plate.

"I would find it very hard now to walk away from being organic. It's such a nice environment to live in and to work in. There's an elusive feeling inside the orchard that's difficult to put into words - peacefulness, tranquillity, an essence that is the sum of the environment."

You can look at Tim Oliver's orchard two ways. Standing above it, looking across a canopy of kiwifruit vines to glimpses of the lake beyond.

Or from beneath it, underneath it really, 20 centimetres or a metre down through the dark topsoil into the sand and gravel sub-soil. Above ground is a typically peaceful rural landscape. Below, if you listen to Tim Oliver's descriptions, is a seething heaving mass of life packed more densely than Manhattan at rush hour.

Any tour of the Oliver's Waikato orchard includes a spade. It is over a decade since he started producing kiwifruit organically. The effects of that change can be seen in the wedge of soft dark topsoil he digs out of the ground beneath the vine canopy. "What we're doing is putting life back in to the soil," he says, breaking apart a clod laced with earthworms. It's the healthy soil - healthy food thing: healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy people. Everyone eating up the chain is healthy. One gram of that healthy soil contains about 8 million bacteria, a few hundreds of thousands of protozoa and a few thousand nematodes."

The real gold for anyone growing organically is humus, what Tim calls capital in the bank. It's the ultimately best thing you've got in the soil, the real life blood of the soil. That's what you're striving for. It's the humus that will give you these nutty little crumbs in the soil." The rich earth breaks up easily in his hands.

Above ground in dappled sunlight grow grasses and clover, dandelions, docks, forgetmenots, thistles, wild strawberries and a whole range of other plants. Some are self sown and others companion planting Tim has done to help open up the soil and make deep-lying nutrients more accessible to the vines. They are all part of a living natural system that organic growers like him try to work with. He talks of harnessing the energy forces coming from outside to help grow healthy fruit and vines. "What we're doing," he says, "is we're trying to farm the sun."

This combination of natural systems and energy forces has produced a new tranquillity and peace within the orchard...and, he says, fruit of exceptional quality and goodness.

A country lane outside Te Puke bears the family name. The Roderick's have farmed here since the 1930's. In those days the land carried dairy cows. But in the late 1970's, Jeff Roderick and his brother Barry began putting in kiwifruit vines on their adjoining orchards. Then a few years ago they planted some of the new ZESPRI® GOLD Kiwifruit. Always "soft option farmers," they were also among the first mainstream kiwifruit growers to go organic.

Jeff and Shirley Roderick's lawn behind their home looks out onto the elegant fronds of great tree ferns. At the back of their property in a deep gully is a triangle of dense native bush, and at night they can hear the distinctive cry of the morepork, the small New Zealand owl. For some years now, they have been replanting it with native tree species as part of a beautification and regeneration process. "It is part of the diversity we talk about in organics," he says. "And when I want a change from the orchard, it is a wonderful place to come and just spend some time."

Their commitment to growing their GREEN and GOLD Kiwifruit organically, and the meaning of organics for them, are also elegant in their simplicity. "Organics is about letting the soil and the plants and bio-life work for you," Jeff says.

"It means a healthy lifestyle - we're looking after what we're living on, and hoping our girls will do that too...in whatever lifestyle they choose," continues Shirley, broadening her definition to include the whole family.

Organic production is labour intensive, particularly for GOLD Kiwifruit, and the Roderick brothers carry more permanent orchard staff than many growers. Some have been with them for 10 to 15 years. Worker numbers double come harvest time. They run a picking gang that goes out in April and picks other people's orchards and finishes early in June. Some time during the season they will spend three weeks harvesting their own fruit. Running the gang provides the pickers with a solid season's work and gives Barry and Jeff greater quality control: "It gives us the ability to choose when to pick our own fruit, and how we pick it."

Certain harvest traditions have also developed. Jeff's and Shirley's mothers always provide cooked morning and afternoon teas. Lunch is there for whoever is around. The same picking staff return year after year, bringing with them husbands and sons who take time off from their jobs on the water and out fishing. "It's a traditional harvest situation and people like it," says Jeff. "It makes a big difference. And the family has always worked with them in the orchard."

Harvest's end has its own ritual, begun by four Maori women from Mount Maunganui. They were the ones that organised the first end of season hangi for the workers - a traditional feast cooked in a Maori earth oven. "About 50 people come to it now," says Jeff. "Whoever's not working on the last morning digs the pit and gets it ready. They've got it down to a fine art. They bring their own hangi stones and we provide the vegetables and meat. The food is always delicious and it is a nice way to finish."

The Roderick family photo albums record nearly 20 years of this celebration to the bounty of nature, and the 12 months' care and growing that preceded it.

Over twenty years ago with Dave and Jane Church purchased 23 hectares (57 acres) of surplus dairy land inside Tauranga's city boundaries, they weren't sure what they wanted to do with it.

It was its location that sold it to them says Dave Church, then a rural valuer. They brought a house for $100, moved it onto the land and began planting kiwifruit vines.

Today they look down on their old home from a site cut out of the curved hillside that cups the western edge of their property. The new house is built of bricks made from clay removed in the levelling process. Laid out beneath them, under a hot late summer sun, are the orchard blocks enclosed by their dark green shelter belts and a whole range of ecosystems.

When they first arrived, there were no trees, except for two stands of native bush with kauri. They have planted many more, including black walnut and liquid amber. "It's aesthetics. It's just beautification of the land. It's trying to make the best use of it and its contours," says Dave. Included in that best and diverse land use are organic sheep and organically raised cattle, a wetland specifically for bird life, and a herd of goats used solely as week eaters on the rougher paddocks.

Dave Church was the first post-harvest operator to become involved in organic production when the packhouse and cool store he owns in partnership began handling organic fruit at the beginning of the 1990's. Today Centre Pac is 100% organic; but back then his decision to make his orchard organic was met with scepticism. Attitudes changed when organic kiwifruit began to come through the packhouse. "They couldn't believe their eyes. They couldn't tell them from a non-organic crops," says Jane. On the home orchard she noted changes as she worked among the vines. The orchard has always been unmown, but now she could hear a difference - "The sound of it, the birds, the insects. It seems really alive down there."

"We're working alongside natural processes and that's a good thing," continues Dave, who has watched many organic practises adopted by other growers. "We are modern day innovators of our forefathers' management methods."

In the intervening years, the packhouse's nucleus of organic growers has expanded many times over. What they have in common, he says, is natural instinct. "They'll always make good orchardists because they've got green fingers. They're good at it, and they're observant and interested. They're the ones who enjoy just walking through the orchard, seeing how things are going. They want to produce the best."

When Leo Whittle was a little boy, he grew the family vegetables and, he say, he had a pretty good vegetable garden. The secret was compost and he is still making and using it today.

He likens compost makers to home brewers. "We get a lot of pleasure out of making our own brew and making a good one. And when I decided to become an organic kiwifruit grower, I had no doubt it was possible. I'm an organic man from way back. You could say that growing this crop has been a confirming experience of all I already knew."

Leo and Diane Whittle grow organic on an orchard at the end of a long driveway that curves into the hills just outside New Zealand's kiwifruit capital, Te Puke, in the well named Bay of Plenty. The fruit hang in clusters from the underside of their leafy canopy in the smudged yellow light of late afternoon. There are also a few remaining birds nests of the hundred or more built in the vines at the start of each spring. Diane say one of the pleasure of an organic orchard is all the life inside and around it, especially the birds that come chasing bugs, fluttering often between her face and hands as she works on the vines.

Now it is only days from the autumn harvest and while many people presume the grower's sole focus is the fruit, Leo has also been concentrating lower down.

"I put all my energy into building the bio-life in my soil. Compost is not to feed the vines, it's to feed the microbial activity in the soil. We look after the soil and the fruit looks after itself."

And when the crew come in to pick, the crop will be ready to meet very exacting standards. "It has to be just as perfect as any export fruit," Leo confirms, "and we can do that...no problem."