Crunch time for organisers to make call on running Fieldays 2022

Fieldays at Mystery Creek. Photo / RNZ - Maja Burry

RNZ

Fieldays organisers say a decision on whether this year's event will go ahead will be made within the next two weeks.

The Mystery Creek event, held annually in June, normally attracts over 100,000 people but with New Zealand currently in the red light Covid-19 setting, events can only have 100 people.

New Zealand National Fieldays Society chief executive Peter Nation said that puts organisers in a tough spot.

"We're working through the seating, what that means from a risk profile point of view but our absolute intent is to run Fieldays in 2022," Nation said.

"It can go head under the orange or green setting and of course last year we operated Fieldays in between two outbreaks quite safely and successfully but this time we need to fall back to orange."

Due to the scale of the event a decision on if it would go ahead would be made within the next two weeks, Nation said.

"We're talking 9000 contractors to build a small city of 1400 sites, with the way the industry is now and less staff they want a bigger lead time of nine to 10 weeks, which is why we need to make a decision soon."

Nation was hopeful the event would go ahead because with the border now open interest from overseas had been high.

"We're talking to international people all the time, a number of them have indicated that they would come now the border is open.

"It's another big part of the event's value, we get trade delegations from all over the world coming down and looking at distribution opportunities and new innovations, in 2019 we had exhibitors from 11 countries."

Fieldays pumped millions of dollars into the economy and was a great opportunity to show off new technology and innovations, as well as getting people off the farm for a day - so organisers really wanted to be able to run it this year, Nation said.

- RNZ