Finalist is region's pride

Tom Adkins with Fern on his parents' farm at Okoia. Photo / Paul Brooks

Whanganui-raised Tom Adkins has won the Aorangi FMG Young Farmer of the Year award and will compete in the grand finals in Whangarei in July.
Tom, 23, has secured himself a spot at the FMG Young Farmer of the Year Grand Final after winning the regional final.
He is a block manager on Caberfeidh Station and an Upper Waitaki Young Farmers member. He was home recently and Midweek caught up with him.

Tom's parents, Grant and Clare Adkins, farm at Okoia, just outside Whanganui, where he was brought up. Tom has been in the deep south for two years.
Caberfeidh Station is a sheep and beef property, "On a large scale, but still quite intensive," he says. "Five and a half thousand hectares, effective. It runs 15000 ewes and 1500 cattle, roughly. Enough to keep me and 12 others busy."
Tom was educated at Huntley School, then Whanganui High School, completed Year 13, then went to Telford agricultural college in Balclutha where he sat two one-year papers, graduating with a Certificate of Agriculture (Lincoln) and a Diploma in Agriculture (Massey).

"I went to Lincoln after that for my Diploma of Farm Management," says Tom. His father was also educated at Lincoln. "From Lincoln I got a scholarship from Lone Star Farms. They asked which of their farms would I like to work on if I had the choice." Tom chose Caberfeidh. "Any job out of uni is a pretty good job to start with ... they have been really good." Tom feels he has been given opportunities to grow in his career that he may not have been offered elsewhere.

Now he's a Young Farmer of the Year candidate.
"Mum and Dad were part of Young Farmers," says Tom. "They were in the Marton Young Farmers, so I've always known about the contest and the organisation. I joined the Lincoln Young Farmers."
There are seven Young Farmers regions in New Zealand: Tom represents the Aorangi region, which is North Otago, South Canterbury up to the Rakaia River — the middle of the South Island. He says the Young Farmers clubs are one of the go-to places to meet people. There are eight clubs in the Aorangi region.
"There are people in our club who will travel for an hour to attend meetings."

To compete in Young Farmers competitions, you start with the district contest.
"It's organised by one particular club and it's not heavily sponsor-based. There's a wide array of mostly practical tasks, and most of them are reasonably simple, along the lines of portable trough assembly, a bit of chainsawing, loading tyres and pallets on to a truck using a tractor, stacking hay bales about three high with a tractor, seed and weed identification, butchery." Then there is the theoretical side. So why did Tom take on the challenge?

"A good, fun day out. Test yourself: see what you know. A good chance to learn more things, as well and become familiar with things you might be out of touch with. I haven't used a chainsaw a whole heap at work, so it's nice to give yourself a refresher.
"It's all very casual. The top four from each district contest go through to the regional contest. "There were 15 of us at district level, then the top eight [at regionals], and it's just the one winner who goes through to represent your region in the grand final. It shortens it down pretty quickly." The regional contest is still organised by a club, but there are more components to it.
"There's an exam; a head-to-head, in which all competitors are completing the same task at the same time; physical skills — this year we had to build a planter box in 25 minutes ... " He says the regionals are more intense, more competitive and fewer contestants. "There are seven modules of tasks, mostly based around sponsors, like Honda, FMG, Ravensdown — they are the focus of a lot of theoretical modules. Seeds, sprays, fertilisers and soils are a large component of agronomy and agriculture. There are agrisports, similar to the head-to-head, in which all are competing, but instead of the one task, there is an array of tasks."

In July he will compete in the grand final, for which he will have to know a little of everything, and with modern farming so diversified and science-based, that's a lot to learn. That will include all types of horticulture — kiwifruit, avocados, apples — apiculture, dairy, goats, venison, alpacas, pork, sheep, beef, forestry. I mentioned emu farming, which had its boom and bust, but Tom says there's nothing stopping the examiners pulling something out of the archives. He says sometimes it depends on the region where the finals are held. With it being in Whangarei this year, he feels it could be worthwhile to brush up on Northland farming priorities.

"It is a contest for New Zealand agriculture, but you can clue yourself up on what it's easy for people to organise." To study for the finals, Tom says it's a case of writing a list of everything you can think of, then ticking them off. When he came home to Whanganui, he "spent time on a friend's dairy farm, spent some time on a digger, some time welding, calibrating seed drills, just trying to cover a broad spectrum of knowledge I can become familiar with, so I might not be a master at it, but if I get there and I've seen it before, it's not a surprise and I have a bit of an idea of what to do." He has also spent time on a kiwifruit property.
But there could still be surprises.
"[The contest] is very health and safety conscious, so you're not going to be put in a situation where you could hurt yourself. Judges and officials will flag you and stand you down for 20 seconds for a health and safety violation."
The finals take place from July 7 to 9, over three days of competition. There are seven contestants.

"There's technical day, in which there is a three-hour exam, and we are in the process of writing an innovation project — we have been given a theoretical 120 hectare block of Northland land, and I have to write a report, including financials and full business plan, on a market-leading product that we have to come up with. On technical day we have to present it to the three judges and sell it to them as if they were investors."
Contestants are also put in a human resources situation in which they have to sort out something like a work conflict. There's also an interview based on a community footprint video which contestants have to make before the competition. They have four topics to choose from.

"Day 2 is practical day — we get given two and a half to three hours' worth of tasks and we get two hours to complete as many as we can to the quality we like.
"Shearing is a definite possibility. It was at our regional contest: we had to shear two sheep each."

Day 3 consists of an evening show after a day of Young Farmer meetings. There is a quiz for contestants, a dinner, and all seven contestants had to deliver a prepared speech. That night the winner is announced and the award presented.
"The beauty of it is it's the biggest celebration of practical skill and knowledge in farming, I reckon."

The Young Farmer of the Year competition is open to young men and women up to the age of 31. Tom is 23, and he knows there will be others there with more experience.
"If you've prepared well and if you're strong in a lot of areas that are there on the day, then things will go your way. I am not so experienced in some ways, so I'm going to go and give it my best crack, that's for sure. I certainly won't give anything less."
Follow Tom and his opponents on the FMG Young Farmer Facebook page and give him your vote for People's Choice.