Floris Niu never imagined herself as a farmer, but a series of stress-related illnesses saw her return to her family's land in Samoa in her late 30s and the move has brought both healing and success.
Niu, who grew up in New Zealand, is the founder of Ms Sunshine Organic Farms, which exports produce to New Zealand boutique chocolatiers and food manufacturers.
Her charitable trust is also running the first ever Pacific Cacao and Chocolate show, in collaboration with SPS Biota and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, in Auckland on 23 July, which she hopes will raise awareness of the cacao industry in the Pacific.
"It's a trillion-dollar business, the chocolate industry," she said, but the story of cacao in the Pacific was "not very well known".
"We use cacao in all of our different countries in different ways. In particular in Samoa we've had almost 100 years of incorporating it into our food system and into our recipes and our lives."
Niu said the show was an opportunity for Pacific cacao producers to tell their own stories.
"We want to put ourselves on the map."
She told Saturday Morning that her own journey back to the island of Upolu, where her family has farmed cacao for four generations, was driven by desperation when she found herself at the lowest point of her life in 2014.
"I actually went to sort of escape from life and the world and everything," she said.
Photo: Ms Sunshine Organic Farms
"I had had this incredible life in New Zealand, growing up and being educated and then travelling the world and then slowly, after getting married and having my first child and all of those things, life tends to happen to you."
Niu became a single mother when her baby was one and said she subsequently began working far too much, at the expense of her health.
In her darkest moments, she even considered ending her life.
"All of those pressures that life puts on us just kind of came to that culmination of wanting to dig yourself a hole and be down there."
She said she didn't know it at the time, but the family farm would turn out to be her rescue and refuge.
On a visit to her ancestral land, she remembers looking out on the light and seeing the cocoa pods on the trees.
"I felt this incredible warmth of my ancestors embracing me there and it was just so incredible to be in a place where you can feel absolutely yourself and grounded and that you can begin again."
Photo: Ms Sunshine Organic Farms
So began a fresh chapter in Niu's life, which has brought its own challenges but has also left her feeling more connected to her ancestors and empowered to encourage other women who work on the land.
She began farming two pieces of her family's customary land - a total area of about 70 acres. In her great-grandfather's time the same land housed a tobacco plantation and banana crops and was used to graze cattle.
Cacao was also eventually planted there, which is one of the crops Niu continues to farm today.
"There's incredible sweat and blood and tears on that land and I could feel it," she said.
"Literally, there were days where you sweat it out and then you start crying because it is really hard work and you kind of feel your ancestors then."
Not everyone was on board with her methods, she said, and she'd had to battle some ingrained prejudice against women being in charge, but her success producing quality, sustainable cacao was starting to change minds.
When she began her farming journey, she made a conscious effort to embrace organic farming due to her own ill-health.
"I wanted to eat good, honest, home-grown food that was grown organically," Niu said.
"I think the resistance really came in when I started to upset the apple cart and started to do things very differently from how they were doing it in the village."
There was also opposition to her success as a woman, she said.
"Much to their dismay ... I'm divorced and I'm a woman and ... I'm trying to do things - I'm going there on the land and holding a machete and a chainsaw and I'm doing things.
"There's this resistance of ... 'that's not your job - where is your husband?'" she said.
She acknowledged her family was unusual in that it shared its land, giving her more rights than many women had over customary property in Samoa.
"That is not normal and so people don't like it when I'm there and I'm doing things on my land ... but just, you have to stand your ground."
In fact, women had long been essential to Samoa's farming operations, Niu pointed out.
"It's nothing new; women have always been there working in the background and helping their husbands and mums and dads, but now, incredibly more so, they're on the land actually building an industry and building economies for themselves."
She said she was now connecting with different organisations around the world to empower other women in the jobs they did on the land.
And while upsetting the "status quo", could make some people feel threatened, Niu said they tended to "come along with you for the ride when they see you becoming successful".
"A lot of them do have a change of heart and I think that's the beautiful thing about humans."
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