For this Canterbury family, there’s only one way to earn a crust.
There’s a reason they call the Canterbury Plains “the bread-basket of New Zealand”. Across the country, farmers grow about a million tonnes of wheat, barley, oats and maize grains every year – and three-quarters of that crop comes from the rich soils of Mid and South Canterbury.
For local farmer Mark Henderson, who grows Duchess milling wheat which goes into the kibbled grain used in Ploughmans loaves, it’s a family tradition.
Like many New Zealanders who fought overseas in World War I, Mark’s great-grandfather qualified for the soldier-settler scheme, which allowed returned servicemen to be granted farmland on generous terms and apply for cheap finance to develop it. The Government emphasised that the scheme’s success would depend on the men’s hard work and initiative to make it a long-term success.
They certainly picked a winner in Great-Grandad. Mark is now the fourth generation of Hendersons to work on the land here.
“My uncle lives just across the road on the original farm that my great-grandfather got in 1919,” Mark told media personality Hayley Sproull when she visited his farm just outside Ashburton.
“Dad and his three brothers farmed in a partnership for many years until they dissolved it in 2000 and we all went our own ways, which you’ve got to do when you’ve got cousins and so on involved – you’ve got to go and do your own thing. But there’s three of us on one road and two of us on another, so we’re all close by.”
Mark and his family have been on Braelyn Farm for 30 years, with his parents sharing in the operation. His heart is in the 210ha of arable, or cropping, land, although they also have a 111ha dairy farm with a sharemilker on it.
He checks off the wide range of crops grown. As well as wheat, there’s barley, ryegrass, fescue, white and red clover, plantain, radishes, carrots, mustard, many of which are sold as seed crops.
“In arable farming you’ve got to spread your risk around,” he says. As any home vege gardener knows, “You’ll get viruses and so on in the soil that you can’t control.
“Especially with wheat - there’s one that you get that’s a root-borne disease. You could grow wheat continuously, but you’ll go through two or three years of pain where you won’t get much of a yield.” And as any business owner knows, that’s no way to earn a living these days.
But this is more than a business to Mark. “I just like seeing the crops grow, taking care of them, putting the right inputs into them, not too much, not too little, to get a good outcome at harvest – and fingers crossed that you get a good harvest. I like harvest time because you get to reap the rewards – and hopefully they are rewards and not a bloody disaster!”
That means keeping an eye on the weather – spring, when the wheat is growing rapidly, is our most fickle season, any given day bringing sunshine, warmer days, rain, or even hail – before the crop is ready for harvesting, usually late December or January.
It involves long-term planning as our climate changes, keeping up with new rules and regulations, and technology. “We’re doing everything right, we’ve been doing everything right for years. We don’t want to ruin the environment,” Mark says.
Cropping farmers sometimes add fertiliser such as nitrogen, potassium and phosphates to supply essential nutrients. These days, that’s a carefully monitored operation using advances such as GPS technology to precision-map where fertiliser is applied to the land.
So, will there be a fifth generation of the Henderson family working under the blue skies on the wide, flat Canterbury Plains, keeping the flour mills and bakeries supplied with wheat?
The Hendersons’ story is one of family, tradition, commitment and legacy. For Mark, there’s no pressure on his son and daughter. “If they’re keen, good. Whether they want to farm or not, that’s up to them.”
“Some people say the worst thing you can leave your children when you die is a farm,” he says with a laugh. “I wouldn’t like to see it get sold, it’s been a large part of the Henderson family history and there’s always options. You can always generate an income off it if you lease it out and you can borrow against it – it’s good to have.”
And like the crops that grow on the land, it’s been the family’s bread and butter for over a century. As they say at Ploughmans, local tastes better.
To find out more about why local tastes better go to www.nzherald.co.nz/ploughmans