Junior Young Farmers from Napier Boys' High School earning points for the East Coast team in the Region-off. Photo / FMG
Junior Young Farmers from Napier Boys' High School earning points for the East Coast team in the Region-off. Photo / FMG
The work young farmers on the East Coast have been doing to support their cyclone-stricken communities has received recognition allowing them to help even more.
The FMG Young Farmer of the Year competition hosted its inaugural Region-off earlier in the year, in which seven regions combined the forces of their AgriKidsNZ, Junior and Young Farmers winners to face off.
The East Coast took out first prize by earning the most points doing activities to give back to their community, like fixing fences, cleaning up local spots, helping local farmers, giving blood, and rallying votes from their supporters.
As part of the prize, the East Coast team won $5000, which they chose to gift to the East Coast Rural Support Trust last week to continue to support their good work in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle.
“Off the back of Cyclone Gabrielle, a lot of our effort for winning the Region-off came from effort put into trying to remedy or respond to Cyclone Gabrielle,” Patrick Crawshaw said.
He said farmers were under pressure not only from recovery, but from commodity prices coming down, increasing inflationary costs and managing mental health.
“I thought it was quite relevant to direct [the prizemoney to the East Coast Rural Support Trust] to see if we could support farmers to be able to do something off the back of that.”
He said for the East Coast team, the requirements of the Region-off were for the most part simply doing what they were already doing as part of recovery.
“We were already doing it, all of the FMG Region-off required was for us to validate it so that was capturing photos of the effort and energy.”
Pat Crawshaw said participating in the Region-off was simply doing what they would have done as part of recovery. Photo / FMG
Napier Boys’ High School head of agriculture Rex Newman said the Crawshaws did “outstanding” work driving the team.
“They’ve done all the work and they have had a massive impact on that side of things so for us, we just support what they do,” Newman said.
He said he hoped more schools across the East Coast would be encouraged to participate in future Junior Young Farmers events.
As well as the money for the East Coast Rural Support Trust, $1000 was awarded to Crawshaw, $1000 was split among the junior contestants and $1000 was split among the AgriKidsNZ contestants.
James Pocock joined Hawke’s Bay Today in 2021 and writes breaking news and features, with a focus on environment, local government and post-cyclone issues in the region. He has a keen interest in finding the bigger picture in research and making it more accessible to audiences. He lives in Napier. james.pocock@nzme.co.nz
