Urban New Zealanders who enjoy shows like Country Calendar should get out and see farming first-hand, says Farm To Farm Tours managing director Ross Macmillan.
Rangiora-based Macmillan is a former farm consultant who has forged a business out of arranging and conducting agriculture-themed tours, both incoming and outgoing.
He was speaking at the end of a two-week “Mainland Muster” tour for a group of about 20 mostly regular customers, taking a look at our primary production throughout the South Island – as far south as Wakatipu.
The tour – which Macmillan conducted personally – and two shorter tours of Southland, are the first activity for his company in about eight months following the Covid lockdown.
When Covid hit, Farm To Farm Tours had to cancel about 10 overseas tours and several incoming jaunts.
Macmillan told Rural News they spent the first couple of months of the lockdown in the “slow and depressing” business of refunding people and recapturing money from airlines, then the next six months “readjusting” his business. They also had to lay a few people off.
“We’ll have a few more tours next year, but it’s nothing like the scale of business we had previously,” he says.
“We’ve been going 33 years, and this is the first time we’ve had any dramatic shock like this so we decided do a few tours for our New Zealand clients and anyone else interested.”
Among the Mainland Muster group was a couple who took the tour because Covid had forced them to cancel a Farm to Farm tours to UK and Scandinavia.
Along with regular tourist attractions, the group visited a sheep and beef stud at Cheviot, a merino wool operation in the Awatere Valley branching into merino lamb, mussels at Havelock, and intensive horticulture around Nelson. On the West Coast they saw dairying, gold mining and sphagnum moss.
Around Wanaka and Wakatipu the tour took in fruit orchards and the burgeoning cherry industry, a deer farm that also runs as a hunting safari park, and the historic Walter Peak Station. They also visited a farming/rail-trail tourism venture in Maniototo. At Oamaru, the group visited Top Flite, a cropping outfit which has forged a niche as pet bird and other pet feed suppliers.
“I’ve watched that expand over a couple of decades from a farming business to an added-value business that’s doing very well,” Macmillan says.
Back inland to the Mackenzie Country, the group visited a 19,000ha merino station using a variety of the area’s iconic lupins – which grow on high-aluminium soils in the district toxic to other plants – as stock feed.
The last day saw visits to Bill Davey’s extensive cropping operation near Rakaia and also to one of the top dairy farms of the district.
“One thing that came through to me was these are all top farmers doing wonderful jobs and looking after the environment. They are highly productive and keeping their country afloat in many ways,” said Macmillan.
“I think more people should actually see these sorts of things – not just other farmers, but also people from urban backgrounds.”
Macmillan believes business will pick up very swiftly when the borders re-open and vaccines are available.
“You can’t clip the wings of people and they will still have an inquiring mind about the rest of the world and there’ll be even more intense interest in New Zealand from abroad, because the way we’ve handled Covid,” he says.
In the meantime, MacMillan is enjoying showing Kiwis some amazing places and farmers doing amazing jobs.
“People have perhaps forgotten about farming a wee bit or pushed it aside saying we’ll be right,” he adds. “But, basically, it’s what’s keeping our economy going at the moment, particularly without the inbound tourism.”
