Whangaroa Ngaiotonga trustee Wess Wetere. Photo / RNZ, Sally Round
By Sally Round of RNZ
Last year’s win of a prized trophy for Māori farmers is still sinking in for Northland farm trustee, Wess Wetere.
“Having a million-dollar herd and having made a profit was something we looked forward to in five years, not three - none of us were really farmers.”
The farm, owned by the Whangaroa Ngaiotonga Trust, was awarded the Ahuwhenua Trophy in 2025 for its beef operation near the settlement of Whangaruru on a finger of land jutting out from Northland’s east coast.
“We knew what a cow was and a bull was, but we didn’t know whether we were going to milk cows, whether we were going to do what the previous tenant did,” Wetere told RNZ’s Country Life during a tour of the farm.
In 2020, with the help of a $900,000 Provincial Growth Fund grant, the trust turned a calving operation on a degraded block of land into a beef fattening farm running 950 young bulls on 350ha.
The 1100ha block also includes native and exotic forest and wetlands.
The trust was able to bring the land back from the brink, tidy it up by removing 60ha of gorse, setting up a 40km network of pipes to supply troughs and putting in 57km of fencing.
It was the culmination of decades of alienation from the land for some 1300 Ngātiwai shareholders.
“We basically had no fertiliser for many years, there was only one or two troughs, the fencing was in poor state, gorse took up over a third of the farm,” Wetere said.
“It’s taken a lot to get the pasture quality up and control our gorse as well, but we’re getting there,” farm manager Matthew Payne said.
But just as the farm was rehabilitated, it was hit by a devastating deluge in January, a huge setback, but one Payne and his team have taken in their stride.
“It ripped out a lot of infrastructure, laneways, fences, water pumps, and we just got a lot of mud pulled out of swamps and blocked access ways to the farm.
“We had to do a lot of walking and a little bit of kayaking to shift cattle.”
Shifting cattle was a 40-minute job instead of five minutes, “when we kind of didn’t have a lot of time”.
The farm was still recovering during Country Life’s visit in the autumn.
Larger culverts had been installed, and roads were being rebuilt with material from the on-farm quarry.
Payne said the new drains had helped the farm come through more heavy rain events over the past few months.
The team was aware that climate challenges would not be going away but still saw “heaps of potential” for the whenua, Wetere said.
Aside from beef, horticulture and agritourism - such as mountain biking on the forest tracks - were some of the ideas being floated.
Analysis pointed to a more tropical environment, with even crops like mangoes a possibility, he said.
- RNZ