Feel the need to contribute to your urban Kiwi whanau who might be doing it hard this Christmas?
Then now is your chance. The Big Feed, to be held this Thursday, and based at Lincoln University, is asking for donations of produce.
The Big Feed is New Zealand’s first rural telethon and is calling for farmers and those involved in the primary sector across the country to donate some of what they produce.
Farmers grapple with problems and challenges that seldom, if ever, bother city Kiwis, but putting nutritious food on the table isn’t one of them. The same can’t be said for some families in our towns and cities – especially around Christmas time.
In one day, the event – live-streamed across Facebook and YouTube – aimed to raise one million ‘meals’ which would provide foodbanks across New Zealand with milk and mince for their food parcels.
For the past two-and-a-half years, the Meat the Need charity has brought together farmers with families doing it hard.
Farmers could donate their milk or pledge livestock (sheep, beef and deer).
Others without livestock could donate virtual animals online and farm staff could donate money through PaySauce. One hundred per cent of these donations went into providing mince or milk to families whose budgets were stretched.
The Big Feed kicks off Thursday at 6am and runs for 13.5 hours till 7.30pm.
It would be live-crossed to over 100-plus farms, business, clubs and foodbanks across New Zealand.
The hosts were farmers and comperes Wayne Langford and Matt Chisholm.
Right from the get-go when Siobhan O’Malley and Langford launched Meat the Need, the drive was the belief that no-one in a country like ours should go hungry.
Keep in mind that food parcels from foodbanks were not handed out willy-nilly, they were given to families with a real need.
On Thursday, farmers could head to the Meat the Need website to ‘pledge’ an animal donation.
This meant when they next sent animals to the works, they would be sparing one or two of these for Meat the Need and the organisation would make the process as easy as possible.
For dairy farmers, the sign-up process to donate milk was simple – just head to the same web page.
The form allowed them to choose how many litres they wanted to donate and it was a one-off donation.