From the Lip: Fieldays and Fieldnights

Jamie interviews Andrew Little at the 2015 Fieldays

Only a couple of sleeps to go and then it's off to Mystery Creek for the 48th National Agricultural Fieldays, without doubt the biggest annual event on the farming calendar. This year's theme is 'Collaborate to Accelerate Innovation'.

A quick look through the history books shows us the first Fieldays took place at the Te Rapa Racecourse in 1969 and some of the founding fathers, such as Sir William Gallagher, are still there nearly five decades later. The move to the current site at Mystery Creek took place in 1971, with the Pavilion and Events Centre built in 1995.

For reasons which will soon become apparent, I reckon my first sojourn to Mystery Creek was circa 1997, which makes this year my 20th anniversary appearance and me somewhat of a veteran.

I actually could have made my debut way back in the early 1980s when some of my northern Southland farming mates made the long trek to the big smoke of Hamilton. Unfortunately I was stuck at Lincoln College so I couldn't join them. Their stories of crazy nights out in the Tron only whetted my appetite. Hamilton sounded so exotic compared to our home village of Riversdale.

If indeed 1997 was my first trip to the Fieldays, I hardly covered myself in glory. An Invercargill-based travel agent mate of mine, Tony Laker, organised a one-day hit and run return trip to Hamilton in association with CRT Southland. Tony and I have since colluded on many successful tours including a 2003 UK and Ireland Farming Tour, a 2012 Farming and Footy Tour to South America, another to South Africa in 2014 and a wonderfully successful Rugby World Cup Tour to England and Wales last year.

Unfortunately our first tour wasn't so successful. We left Invercargill on our privately chartered Ansett jet at 6am. My job was to entertain the troops on the way up with various sponsor prizes, random giveaways and an assortment of corny and poorly-told jokes. All the sponsoring companies on board had to come up with something for the passengers' goodie bags.

My company, Radio Hokonui, really pushed the boat out with no-expense-spared wraparound sunglasses that cost all of about five dollars. They were a cheap and nasty imitation of the Dirty Dog shades made famous at the time by the Men in Black movie and by New Zealand First political henchmen of the day, Tau Henare and Tuku Morgan. More about the sunglasses later.

We arrived at Mystery Creek by about 9am. The day had dawned fine and it went swimmingly until after I'd finished broadcasting my farming show at 1pm. Swimmingly, if you exclude the dozens of Southland farmers who were wandering around Mystery Creek with one lense popped out of their Hokonui branded sunglasses. I knew I shouldn't have been so cheap!

After a lovely lunch with a nice glass of wine, it started to rain, as it does in the Waikato on occasions in mid-June. One glass led to another as the rain set in. I blame the Invercargill-based Ansett agent Paul Harrington who was with us. He declared it "too wet to look at tractors" and a fine session ensued as more and more of the touring party gathered at the wine bar to see out a fun day at Fieldays.

The only thing I really remember of the trip home with any clarity was waking up mid-flight, somewhere over Canterbury, telling an inappropriate joke and then promptly nodding off to sleep again.

I'm constantly reminded of my slip up. Some twenty years later, I'm still approached by random strangers asking if I'm Jamie Mackay. In the vain hope they'll say something nice about my radio show or this column I proudly beam "yes", only to be deflated by the response, "aren't you the guy who made a bit of a dick of himself on our Fieldays trip?"

Thankfully in the ensuing 20 years I've grown up a bit. But as all Mystery Creek veterans will tell you, pacing yourself is paramount at Fieldays. Forget three full-on days of broadcasting and filming videos. Safely navigating the social calendar is the real challenge.

This week we're hosting Allflex winners at the Wales v Chiefs game on Tuesday night and attending the annual Crowe Horwath dinner on Wednesday. There's a Rabobank breakfast to co-host with Hayley Moynihan on Thursday and that evening at the annual UDC/CB Norwood dealers function it's a Q&A with our Fieldays Ambassador, Andrew Hore.

Somewhere in and amongst all that we have to squeeze in the annual running race around Hamilton Lake. Here's hoping Horey's slowed down a bit from his All Blacks days.