New breed in paddock

The farmer in those celebrated Toyota ads has raised a few rural eyebrows at its stereotyping. TIM WATKIN investigates the modern reality behind the farming image.

Think of the typical New Zealand farmer and what image does your mind drag from the back of your individual and cultural closet of memories?

You might see a bloke in a Swanndri, gumboots and slouch hat leaning on a gatepost, or maybe a musterer as in the Speights advertisement. Perhaps it's a sketched outline of Wal Footrot or the full figure of Fred Dagg.

What you probably didn't imagine is 27-year-old Gene Roberts, the winner of the Young Farmer of the Year contest last weekend.

For a start, Roberts is a farm manager near Papamoa with no family background in farming. (Last year's winner was, as heretical as it sounds, a lawyer). He has a university degree (Bachelor of Agriculture) and his interests include skiing, cooking and reading. He talks about farming's role in the knowledge economy and, he laughs, "I certainly don't go shopping in downtown Tauranga in my gumboots and Swanndri."

This is not the image of a farmer that we're familiar with. We know the man alone, the salt of the earth, the tough bloke. That image of the farmer is one of the icons of New Zealand masculinity. But it's losing currency. It's on its way to the freezing works.

Like the Gallipoli veteran and the amateur All Black, it's an image of our colonial heritage fading from reality to myth.

Today, as the $12.5 billion GlobalCo reshapes our dairy industry and becomes our biggest business, farmers say it's time for New Zealanders - especially those townies - to reshape their perception of the farmer.

John Lay, an arable farmer in South Canterbury and a former head of Farm Management at Lincoln University, says "People do think about tartan Swanndris and peculiar hats. Although the appearance indicates that old-fashioned image that people have, underneath is a very sophisticated entrepreneur probably handling millions of dollars in assets and turnover.

"They are usually conducting several enterprises and are often confronted with more problems, more risk and more decision-making than the average city businessman."

Consider Grant Rowan, who farms bulls on 190ha of leased land in Manawatu, owns a dairy farm in Southland and is doing an MBA part-time.

There are still plenty of the old-style farmers around, he say, "but there's an ever-increasing group of farmers who are business-focused and have expanded beyond the one-man or family farm."

They're getting degrees and diplomas, talking marketing and, as a demographic, they're one of the highest users of the internet.

Rowan says the "she'll be right attitude" is having to make room for a push for excellence. "For young people who have high levels of debt, mediocre performance is not going to cut the mustard. The reality is that even though we are having a commodity boom at the moment, the value of agricultural products is slowly declining and we have to be more efficient with the resources we have to stay ahead."

Trevor Walton, managing director of Wham Group, the publishers of Deer Farmer and Wool Grower magazines, says to make it as a farmer these days you've got to be sharp.

"You go and talk to them and you've got farmers talking to you about megajoules of digestible energy per kilogram of dry matter, and things like this."

The average sheep farm today, he says, is worth around $1 million. Average lamb carcass weight has gone up 3.3kg, or 25 per cent, between 1986 and 1999. Lamb production per ewe went up 60 per cent.

"It's very hard to find any significant industry in New Zealand that has had the productivity increases of the sheep industry. It's a real success story.

"The gap between the old idea and the reality is going to become so wide it will have to change, under its own momentum," he adds.

If you doubt the extent of the changes, just go down to Christchurch, head office for Swanndri. Partly as a reflection of the farmers' changing lifestyles, they've introduced a lifestyle range alongside their workwear range.

Sales and marketing manager James Sheehan says farmers these days don't ride horses or old, uncovered tractors eight hours a day in all weather. They're on the quad bike or sitting in the tractor cab with the stereo and air-con on. The old Swanni is still a top seller, but garment of the moment is the merino wool, sleeveless zip-up vest. It's fashionable and, importantly, is uni-sex. Plenty of women are doing the business out on the farm these days.

Women like Waikato dairy farmer Wendy Rowe. She says, "The old Swanni's not seen quite as much. If you went to a restaurant in the middle of Hamilton you'd be very lucky to pick the farmer from the townie neighbour sitting at the adjacent table. They don't wear their gumboots to town like they used to. There's very few who do that, even in a place like Matamata."

She says women are much more visible now, and operate a national e-mail network offering advice and support. There are great business opportunities available, more technology use and more tertiary training than when she started 24 years ago.

"In some areas, such as Southland, you get the perception that there are corporate farmers who don't actually put their hands on their cows too often now. They're busy doing the rosters, keeping up with technology and making sure they're doing the best on the bottom-line."

Brian MacDougall, organiser of the Young Farmer of the Year contest, and a contestant himself from 1984 to 1990, says the questions are very different now from when it started in 1969. They are more about technology and business and, well, they're harder than they used to be.

Stephen Jack, a field officer for Ravensdown near Timaru and two-time runner-up in the Young Farmer of the Year Contest, is an example of the rural entrepreneurs springing up like clover. He's one of four directors of a company producing the all-new Smitch, a phone-controlled switch. Plug it in with your electric blanket at home and you can turn it on via your mobile phone. Connect it to the farm gate, and you can open and close it from miles away. Due out in shops soon, more than 1000 orders have already been placed and international markets await.

He says farmers are great problem-solvers and adroit business operators. "People in their glass towers in Auckland are bloody pups compared to the wealth generation of some farms."

So why aren't we looking down on the farm for our glamour business leaders? Why does the business chatter always seem to be about IT, start up dotcoms and stocks and shares rather than stock and shearing?

The country is still wed to the notion that while country folk might be tough, direct, shrewd even, they're not exactly the sharpest barb on the wire. They may be the backbone of the country, but not the brain.

"It's a stereotype," says Walton. "A comfortable stereotype."

So where does this stereotype come from and why is it so firmly fixed in our minds?

An agricultural commentator and former farming tutor at Waikato Polytechnic, Clive Dalton, says the image goes back to feudal Europe.

"The serf worked on the land and the serf was a pretty thick sort of guy. So the inference was if you worked on the land you were thick. That's gone worldwide. In America rural people are seen as hicks, in Europe they're called peasants and, sad to say, it's going to be hard to break."

Howard Grieve, the Saatchi and Saatchi writer who wrote the Toyota "bugger" ad, says every colonial country has an idealised outdoor, rural archetype. Think of the Man from Snowy River or Daniel Boone. The "bugger" ad is a legacy of our own Barry Crump and his man alone image, "which comes from the myth of the young country, breaking in the soil, no bullshit."

Murray Ball, the cartoonist who drew a line around the iconic New Zealand farmer and called him Wal Footrot, says there are still plenty of farmers around in the Footrot mould. "Out here in the wilderness where I live near Gisborne, there are still plenty of characters like that around. You go down to the stockyards on a Friday afternoon and you'll see plenty of guys in gumboots and black singlets."

But, he sighs, they're a dying breed.

"Wal Footrot, he originated in 1974 and even then he was a memory ... they've almost become a myth in this country and I equate it with the Wild West. Americans still try and link themselves with that."

New Zealanders have a similar relationship with the farmer or bushman, says Grieve. "Most New Zealanders are heavily suburban, but we love this image of the man alone, rural and strong."

And we've loved it for a long time. In a recent article in the New Zealand Journal of History, titled "Rural Myth and Urban Actuality: The Anatomy of All Black and New Zealand Rugby 1884-1938," Lincoln University's Greg Ryan argues the image of the tough, proud farmer was idealised as early as 1905.

Even then, Ryan says - despite the idea perpetuated today that our rugby success was founded on hard rural stock - most of the All Blacks on the 1905 tour to Britain were urban and better-educated than the average New Zealander. But in Britain, New Zealand was glorified as a rural arcadia. In the face of military losses in South Africa and public concern over the growth in German power and Asian population, the leaders of public opinion "idealised the 'men of the land' as representing a counter to the physical degeneracy caused by urbanisation."

New Zealanders were hailed as the sons of the soil and the saviours of the Empire. At a time when our identity was barely formed and Britain's view of us all that mattered, it was something we could celebrate in ourselves.

The myth advanced, Ryan concludes, as rural New Zealand retreated.

Today, the idea of a farmer is increasingly shorthand for a way of life that for most New Zealanders has become little more than a romantic idea, a part of our psyche once loved but lost. As we continue to move city-ward, we know the farming life only through media, history or second-hand experience.

As Walton says, "In the last couple of generations the link between most city people and rural New Zealand has become really attenuated. In my father's generation, everybody knew somebody who worked on the land. Not now."

While the myth might be an increasingly important link to our past for townies, it's wearing thin among farmers. "Some of those stereotypes really get to grate," says Walton.

Many farmers are tired of not getting the credit for their economic contribution to the country. And the hick image creates practical problems as well.

"We do struggle recruiting the type of people we want," says Rowan, "and part of this is the image that you don't have to be all that smart and if you don't do well at school you can go and be a farmer. In that sense the image is harmful and is an issue we need to address."

Others view the passing of the old style farmer with regret. Ball fears that with it may go the quiet determination, modesty and dry, self-deprecating wit it embodies.

"What I mourn is the loss of a New Zealand identity that was embedded in the older-type farmers; the lack of concern for external influences and the getting on and doing the job. I think that was, and probably still is, an integral part of the New Zealand character.

Similarly, old-timers like 70-year-old Charolais breeder Rusty McIntyre worries that young farmers don't have the knowledge of their animals and eye-appraisal skills once common among farmers.

"I think the younger generation, they've grown up more and more to rely on figures."

He used to start at 5 am, plough with horses and cut scrub with a slasher. Now they get up at 7 am and turn on their tractor or chainsaw. There you go, he says, "it's just part of progress. They use their brains more and don't do the physical work."

Walton, however, says young farmers are still, well, a bit sheepish about abandoning the old ways altogether.

"There's still a guilt complex among farmers that if anyone catches them at home at 10 o'clock in the morning they'll be teased for being lazy, because in the old days no self-respecting farmer was ever seen at home - except for lunch time - in daylight hours."

Rowe's feeling is that although farmers might now own a suit and a fancy computer, "the good hard core of earthy common sense" that Ball says is so important to the New Zealand character, remains.

"And most farmers still like to think that if they tell someone something, that's it. Your word is your bond."

Grieve says the farmers he knows are remodelling the image for modern times.

"In this GlobalCo thing, they're just taking that resourcefulness in the myth of the farmer and amplifying it onto a much bigger scene. It plays into a number of attributes, doesn't it? It's extremely cooperative, egalitarian in nature, a victory for common sense."

You're just left wondering which way Fred Dagg would have voted.