Onion growers 'push limit' in export deal

By PHILIPPA STEVENSON

A Timaru couple who introduced potato growing to South Canterbury's Levels Plains and who have challenged the dominance of North Island onion growing have won a top farming award.

Arable farmers Tony and Afsaneh Howey were awarded the Farmers' Mutual Group Rural Excellence Award, organised by the Royal Agricultural Society, in Hamilton.

Seven regional finalists competed for the prize, formerly the A. C. Cameron Award.

Judges said the Howeys won with a combination of drive, initiative and a high level of achievement in a relatively short time.

Mr Howey, who left his job as a Maori Affairs farm development officer in 1986 to go crop farming with his brother, became independent of the partnership in 1996.

He and his wife have combined three separate properties, totalling 510 hectares and all needing irrigation, on which onion and potato growing generate 80 per cent of farm income.

Other crops, such as wheat, fescue, vining peas, brassica seed and barley, are grown as break crops between the main harvests.

Mr Howey, a director of the company that built the community-owned Opuha Dam, which failed during construction in February 1997 but began operation this year, said the involvement "in something that went wrong" taught him much.

The experience did not blunt his capacity for risk, he told the audience at last Thursday's prizegiving.

He described how, with only one year's experience of onion growing, he agreed to export onions to Russia in tandem with others who had never grown onions at all, an exporting company that had never exported onions and an importer that had never imported them.

He said a new onion packhouse had been set up with a manager who had "never seen an onion before."

Mr Howey acknowledged that the venture, which included using overseas-sourced onion-curing processes, pushed the limits, but the judges praised its success in providing benefit for the local community by employing 50 staff.

"The fact that this was all achieved in just over three years makes it even more amazing," said Phil King, the convener of the competition.

Mr Howey said artificial curing of onions, needed in the south because onions harvested in autumn could not dry naturally as they did in the North Island, increased the possibilities for the crop.

"We have cheaper land, and don't have the white rot [disease] from the continuous cropping [in the North Island]."

Mr Howey said the earlier pioneering of potato growing on the stony soil of the Levels Plains, north of Timaru, occurred after he came across de-stoning technology in Britain in 1992, during a study tour as a Nuffield Scholar.

Co-judge Roger Marshall praised the high level of contestants, who were all top performers in their respective fields.

"There are an increasing number of bright, motivated farmers working with science, and increasing profitability," he said.

Other farmers who followed their example were lifting the whole standard of farming.

"The knowledge economy is certainly alive and well on New Zealand farms," said Mr Marshall.

The other finalists were beef and sheep farmer Mark Raine, of Mokau in North Taranaki, dairy farmers Helen and Murray Jagger of Whangarei, Hilary and Brian Power, of Whakatane and Fay and Gordon Edgecombe, of Hastings, mixed cropping and sheep farmers Jane and Guy Lissaman, of Marlborough, and sheep and beef farmers Diane and Graeme Spittle, of Southland.