Hayden Richardson - 2025 Study Tour to New Zealand

New Zealand, New Zealand.

Where does one begin!

I would spend my exchange in the Waikato region of New Zealand, besides humans there are two things in the Waikato, cows and maize! If you are not looking at a paddock of maize, I can nearly guarantee you’ll be looking at a paddock of Friesian cows. 

My first week was spent with the Morrinsville-Nagura Young Farmers Club, and my host was Carla de Wet. Carla is a dairy share farmer just outside of Te Ahroa, as well as being the chair of Morrinsville-Nagura club. The first thing I noticed immediately about the area was the lack of irrigation, especially since most dairy farms in Tassie have some sort of irrigation system. However, the average rainfall in the Waikato is around 1200ml so in an average year the high rainfalls negates the need for irrigation. This season has been drier than usual and there is little grass around which means farmers are leaning quite heavily on their supplement feeding programs.

Heading into my first weekend in New Zealand I caught up with a couple of local agricultural contractors Kyle Selman and Jacob Klaus. I spent the afternoon of the Friday touring around Matamata with Kyle checking out one of the projects the Klaus Ag crew were working on which was filling in an old slurry pit next to the dairy for a shed to be built on. I was fortunate enough to take Kyle’s new 8s 205 Massey Ferguson for a drive on the road and I have to say I was quite impressed with how the mighty ferg handled on the road, the comfort of the cab and the new Massey Ferguson cab display. Considering by that time it was past 5 o’clock on a Friday afternoon the only reasonable solution was to head to the pub in Matamata! It was at that point I discovered Speights Summit Ultra, which is the NZ equivalent to Boags St George and I apologise to all my fellow Tasmanian Boags drinkers. Speights Summit is much better than Boags St George! 

Over the weekend the contracting lads would take me down to Rotorua where I went on the Luge which is a great bit of fun, as well as going shooting on a property just out of Rotorua. I can confirm that there was a slight smell in Rotorua similar to that of rotten eggs. The smell is caused by the geothermal activity within the area which causes the release of the sulphur gases giving Rotorua it’s unique smell.

One of the biggest contractors in the area is Gavins. Their yard is in Gordonton and for someone who loves machinery it was incredible having a tour around their yard. Gavins have 60 tractors - a mixture of Fendt and John Deere, 6 Claas Jaguar choppers, 2 combine harvesters and just about every implement you can think off to put behind a tractor. They also have a goat dairy and grain depot at the yard. The most astounding part of their operation is the size of their workshop and parts store, the workshop is bigger than most dealerships and the parts store is basically like walking into a dealership parts store. It was absolutely wicked to check out such a huge operation. 

Over my final couple of days, I headed to a dairy expo field day in Matamata where I caught up with the Vantage/Trimble rep for the area Russel Van Der Lak. Russel and I spoke about how we use Trimble drainage software as an integral part of WD Drainage and how farmers in the Matamata area are starting to see the benefit of running GPS, section control and variable rate spreading in their farming operations. 

The dairy expo was a fantastic day to mingle and network with different business around the area, from effluent spreading contractors, Bluegrass Contracting, GrainCorp, Dairy NZ, NZ Department of Primary Industries and many more!

You’re probably wondering by now, being that there is so many dairy farms in the region and the fact that I was staying on one whether I had milked a cow yet? Well I can confirm that the answer is yes, I did 2 morning milkings with Carla and her 140 cow herd. While Carla was full of praise for my efforts, I think I’ll stick to operating tractors for the time being!

On my final day in the area Kyle, Jacob and their crew got stuck into chopping some maize for pit silage, it was pretty cool to see a different type of operation and get more of an understanding of how the chopper works.   

My next host club was the North Waikato YF, my hosts Jamie Mcdowell and Rhys Johnston lived 15 minutes out of Te Kauwhata on the dairy farm that Jamie works on, and Rhys works as a water pump technician. My week with the North Waikato crew was focused around the regional finals on the New Zealand Young Farmer on the year. It was interesting to see the planning that the club put into the organsing of the final and just how big the Young Farmer competition is in New Zealand. NZYF is structured into regions. The clubs in that region have a district competition and the winners from the districts then compete in the regional final. With the winner of the regional final going on to compete at the National final. We spent the Friday setting up the modules of the competition, the modules were based around general farming tasks. (Fencing, setting up GPS in a tractor, replacing wheel bearings, being interviewed, woodwork and agronomy).

Saturday was competition day! The competitors were from a mixture of agricultural professions. They competed in the modules throughout the day, earning points for how well they completed each module. The support of the competition from sponsors to the farming community showing up on the day to watch the competitors, the atmosphere around the area was pretty cool.

Aside from the main competition, there is also a competition for school kids called “AgriKids”. In short it is a scaled down version designed for a team of classmates from schools around the Waikato region to compete in modules such as (farm hazard identification, Milwaukee tool set, pest identification and tractor components). I saw the AgriKids a fantastic way to get young kids into Ag and Young Farmers, there is also a national final for the AgriKids held on the same weekend as the main competition. I’d really love to be able to implement something similar to run alongside the Rural Youth Tasmanian Young Farmer Competition.

During the day I got to meet Chloe Jones who is the chair of the national NZYF board and discuss the similarities and differences between our two organisations. 

The stand out for me from the day was the evening show, the competitors were situated on the stage in the hall behind podiums set up with buzzers. The MC for the evening who is known by the name ‘Radar” (I still don’t actually know his real name) conducts a general knowledge quiz with the competitors. The easiest way to describe the YF quiz is to watch an episode of the TV show “Hard Quiz”. I found that the quiz tested the ‘off the top of your head’ knowledge and that is what really set the competitors apart from one another. Hugh Jackson was the winner of the regional final and I wish him all the best at the National Final at Invercargill in July.

It was also a privilege to be called upon to give a short speech during the night, to talk about the exchange program, Tasmania, and Rural Youth. 

The next couple of days I spent more time with the North Waikato crew of Jamie, Rhys, Nathan, Cody, Kayla, Jamie Coad-Drayton, Sharee, Jayden, Nathan and Rachel Waugh and Jamie Waugh. As well as heading down to Hamilton for a look around the city, checked out the St Andrews Hamilton Golf Club and a classic car museum. I went and tore around the go kart track at Hampton Downs raceway and of course headed back to the ‘Rango’ for a sendoff drink with the North Waikato crew!

My final week on exchange was spent with Graham Johnson and Carly Christenson who are a part of the Te Kawa West YF Club. Graham and Carly have a 300-acre livestock enterprise farm, they run a mixture of sheep, beef and deer. Working with deer was quite interesting as Graham mainly breeds deer for the velvet from their antlers which is then used in Chinese medicine. Te Kawa had a club session in stock judging at Annie Gill’s farm to prepare for the inter-club tournaments where I got to meet the rest of the club which was fantastic. Over the weekend I went back to Hamilton with Georgia Young, who is the regional chair of the Waikato/Bay of Plenty NZYF.

I went and watched the Waikato Chiefs verses the Christchurch Crusaders, fortunately the Chiefs were able to get the win so that made all the locals extremely happy. On the Saturday I went on a 4WD trip with the Hamilton City YF, we went out to Hugh Jackson’s property at Te Akua, the farmland in Hugh’s area is a combination of barren and majestic. To be honest I spent most of the day in disbelief of the terrain I have never seen anything like it, steep rolling mountains with huge gullies, right on the coastline with fences all but vertical on the hills.. Originally the farm started out as a soldier settlement block and over the years Hugh’s family has bought on and added to it. Currently the farm is a 600-hectare grazing property.

After the weekend I headed back to Graham and Carly’s. Graham and I chipped away at some farm work, building a new farm, feeding out, fixing water leaks and tagging fawns. Tagging the fawns was my first time up close to deer. We separated the fawns from the does, ear tagged the fawns and the released the fawns back with the does to see which fawns matched with “mum”. Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances I missed most of the matching process - I fell asleep in the ute!

During my stay with Graham and Carly we ventured down to Taupo, this was where my thrill seeker was released. BUNJY JUMPING!!! It was only a 60m jump but it was wicked!! It certainly got the adrenaline pumping. 

My only round of golf in NZ I played in a Fonterra corporate day with Steve (Grahams brother-in-law) at the Tokoroa Golf Club. Embarrassingly I clean shanked my first drive of the day onto the road about 25 meters in front of me, while it wasn’t my finest day golf wise networking with the local farmers over a free cold brew was exceptional and made it well worth it. 

Graham and I were talking about one thing or another and we ventured onto the topic of land prices, in the Matamata district farmland averages $70,000 a hectare, and the Waikato average  is 50-60 thousand a hectare. Graham even said that there has been some farms hit $100,000 a hectare in the region.

Unfortunately, during my final week on the North Island I was struck down with a bad case of tonsillitis which laid me up for a couple of days, huge thanks to Graham and Carly for looking after me during that time. On the 7th of March I continued my New Zealand adventure by heading south down to Christchurch, I was met at the airport by a family friend John Porteous who lived in Tassie during the late 90’s early 2000s and was a part of Rural Youth himself during his time in Tasmania. John showed me around Christchurch and the Canterbury Plains. From his balcony you can see 3 to 4 hours off into the distance across the plains. Christchurch has been completely rebuilt since the earthquake of 2011, at the time there was $40 billion invested into the city and it is only just nearing 100% completion, there are still scars across the city with some buildings yet to be knocked down or rebuilt. However as John eluded to, there is the possibility of another major earthquake. 

I would spend my final 10 days travelling solo around the South Island, spending 5 days in Queenstown, Dunedin and a few more days in Christchurch before I flew home. Queenstown was the perfect spot to just kick back and relax on the waterfront or go on a bush walk in the hills that surround the town. While there I did a Kiwi Experience day trip down to Milford Sound, Kiwi Experience is like a Contiki tour so I met people from all around the world who were just travelling around. The boat on which I did the Milford Sound cruise the “Lady of the Sounds” was actually built in Tasmania in 1989 and was refurbished in Dunedin in 2008. 

I went to the original Speights brewery in Dunedin and caught up on the history of the brewery. In a bid to increase publicity of the brewery James Speights one of the 3 founders entered their beer in competitions in Australia. The Speight’s logo has 3 stars on it and they represent the 3 medals the beer won. 2 of the medals were actually won at the Tasmanian International Exhibition in 1894-5. Now Speight’s is also brewed in Auckland however beer brewed in Dunedin will taste different to if it is brewed in Auckland because there is a natural spring under the original factory which water is still taken from today to brew the beer made in Dunedin.

On my way back to Christchurch I caught up with another family friend George Muirhead in Oamaru. George is originally from Scotland who stayed with my family on his Young Farmer Exchange to Tasmania in 2013 and now lives in New Zealand with his family.

As I finished up my final 2 days in Christchurch and flew back to Tassie, I found myself thinking of the time spent in Melbourne Airport 6 weeks prior. In the words of Slim Dusty “When I was a young man and carried my pack,” Getting on the plane in Melbourne to fly to Auckland I had absolutely no idea what the next 6 weeks was going to bring, the experiences to be had or the people I would meet and the lifelong friendships I would form. Thinking about it, that is the best part of the exchange, you live by the next 5 minutes or the seat of your pants because you just don’t know what is in store next.

To sum New Zealand up it is very similar to Tassie in the terrain and climate, everything is either a little bigger, or flatter, or is hotter or has a higher rainfall. I could quite easily live over there.

Finally I would like to thank Rural Youth Tasmania, New Zealand Young Farmers and the Waikato YF region. My sponsors Salters Hire, Vantage Australia and WD Drainage for helping with my travels I will never forget the support you gave me, and my hosts who looked after me in NZ, without you all this trip would not have been possible. 

Most importantly to all my new mates back in New Zealand, save me a seat at the bar. I shall return!

 

Cheers

Hayden Richardson

“Tas”