Ray Ellis wound up in Tauranga exporting potatoes, onions and tallow to Asia through a roundabout route.
The owner of Ellis Agricultural Services was a Wairarapa farmer in the 1970s when he received an offer to prepare the management proposal for a proposed beef research breeding block in Taiwan.
There he found himself working for Teng Hui Lee, then a pioneering agricultural reformer, who went on to become a noted politician credited with encouraging democratic political reform in Taiwan. Mr Lee was the first directly elected president in Taiwan and served in that role from 1988 to 2000. He was also the first locally born Taiwanese to lead the country after decades of rule by the Chinese politicians who fled the mainland after losing the Chinese civil war to Mao Zedong's forces in 1949.
"TH Lee was my boss at the time," said Mr Ellis. The future president, who gained a PhD from Cornell University, was at the time running the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, a US-sponsored organisation aimed at modernising Taiwan's agricultural system and at land reform.
"They liked what I put on paper and the end result was that New Zealand sent up 6000 pregnant dairy heifers to get the Taiwan town milk scheme going. At one point in the 1970s we had about 30 Kiwis up there making dairy farmers out of rice farmers."