Anthony Taueki is Ngāti Kahungunu and grew up in Maraenui in Napier. He started at Mr Apple in 2009 pushing a broom in the Whakatū packhouse, moved onto the orchards, and worked up through orchard hand, RSE supervisor and foreman with Mr Apple and Orchard Investments. A mentor on the orchard put him forward for leadership courses along the way. He placed second in the Hawke’s Bay Young Fruit Grower of the Year in 2018 and 2019, and third in 2017.
He moved from growing fruit to training the people who grow it. Since 2020 he has been kaiako and regional coordinator for Te Matau-a-Māui with Fruition Horticulture’s Tū Te Wana programme, which takes rangatahi aged 15 to 19 through NCEA level 2 alongside health, wellbeing and whakapapa. He built the Hua programme with New Zealand Apples & Pears, iwi and government, chaired the Hawke’s Bay Young Orchardists, and sits on the Food and Fibre Youth Network council, the Tū Tangata Maraenui committee and the Henry Hill School board. His argument was that vocational pathways had not kept up with an industry now running on technology, and that the unit standards behind apprenticeships no longer described the work.
He applied to Nuffield for that, and was the first in his family to leave New Zealand. He travelled to seven countries, spending much of the time with indigenous communities, among them growers in Hawaii and Fiji who farm as a continuation of what their ancestors did rather than for the return alone. His report, published in 2023, argues that industry, iwi, government, schools and vocational providers have to work from a shared understanding of where things stand, and puts pastoral care at the centre rather than at the edges.
