Lloyd Downing. Photo / Richard Robinson
National Agricultural Fieldays chairman Lloyd Downing is off to the United States on a marketing mission to sell Kiwi farming ingenuity.
The organisation - which runs the biggest agricultural show in the Southern Hemisphere at Mystery Creek near Hamilton - will have a stall at the Kentucky National
Farm Machinery Show this week. "What I would like to think they would do is to see us on the site at Kentucky and then either come out to Mystery Creek to see the one-stop-shop with all New Zealand technology on display or if they come out at any other time of the year ... we could point them in the right direction."
At an Israeli agricultural show 95 per cent of visitors were from overseas and five per cent were local, Downing said. "We're the other way around [in New Zealand] ... we need to change that," he said.
"There's only so many farmers in New Zealand and for some of our exhibitors to expand they need to be expanding offshore."
Despite the global recession Downing did not see the current global recession as a difficult time to sell New Zealand technology.
"The recession is an incentive to get more economical farming systems," he said.
The farming sector was recession proof to a degree and food was not discretionary expenditure, Downing said. "You can make a decision whether you're going to buy a car or whether you put it off for six months but you can't do that with food."
Downing also planned to visit a show in Kansas and head to Paris, France, for another show where he would meet rural organisations and gather ideas for the New Zealand event at Mystery Creek.
Downing has a dairy farm in Morrinsville with about 580 cows, and his son has 300 cows nearby. The drop in Fonterra's payout from last season's record available $7.90 per kg of milksolids to a forecast of $5.10 for this season wiped $270,000 off the combined operations.
However, at a $5.10 payout dairy farms should still make a reasonable return, Downing said.
"I'm pretty bloody confident," he said.
"I think that it's not all bad but there is hard times coming for New Zealand and I think John Key and [Finance Minister] Bill English and all them are right in going to Australia to figure out how we're going to get through this."
