Heading for the sun: Barn dance a foot in door with locals

Bryan Heighton and Cheryl Hobin have settled at Mangawhai. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

When Bryan Heighton and Cheryl Hobin moved out from Auckland to rural Mangawhai, one of the first things they did was invite the locals to a barn dance.

Mr Heighton had sold his Rosebank Rd furniture business to his former employees when he turned 50, but built a large new workshop on his new 16ha deer farm so that he could keep making furniture in between going fishing.

He sold the deer and initially let the grass grow. The local farmers were amazed.

"Various farmers were coming to me saying, 'What are you doing with all that grass?"' he says.

"I got on to a contractor and said, 'Turn it into silage or hay.' They made all these bales and we piled them up in the workshop, so it started life as a haybarn.

"Then we invited 150 locals to a barn dance to introduce them all to B and H Furniture, with a local band. All the seats were on hay bales."

It was a great success. Locals still mention the evening when they run into their new neighbours. And it was a smart move because farmers are inherently wary of citified "lifestylers" who mow their grass instead of fattening livestock on it.

Retired journalist Roger Smith, who founded the Howick and Pakuranga Times and recently wrote a thesis on the changing rural district he now lives in along Oneriri Rd west of Kaiwaka, says farmers "mourn what they see will eventually be almost an end to traditional farming, as they understand it, on the peninsula".

"Land on the peninsula now sells for prices far beyond its worth as farmland," he writes.

At the same time, the sons of families that have farmed along Oneriri Rd for 150 years are going into city jobs and no longer want to farm.

"To retire with any measure of financial comfort, their parents are forced to sell their farms to others," Mr Smith says.

"They accept that farm parks and small blockholdings will inevitably become the dominant land use."

Along Oneriri Rd, the 30 traditional farms are now outnumbered by about 100 occupied lifestyle blocks, with more coming up for sale.

Mr Smith quotes farmers' concerns that the lifestylers feel no attachment to the land, won't stay, and make no effort to get to know the locals.

"They don't want to involve themselves in the community," one farmer said.

Mr Heighton and Ms Hobin are aware of these feelings instinctively. They plan to mow a diamond in a paddock this summer and invite the neighbours to a softball party. Mr Heighton has also made a bar for the local fishing club out of a magnificent macrocarpa. "There's a lot of barter because I do so much fishing. I think we participate really nicely."