Not a farmer but still a Young Farmer

Natalie Watkins is not your everyday farmer. She isn’t wearing gumboots or perched on the back of a four-wheeler motorbike. There’s no Swanndri in sight and I didn’t meet her on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

Natalie is a farm systems nutrient analyst at the Ruakura AgResearch campus in Hamilton. She spends her day working in an office or lab rather than out on a farm. That doesn’t stop her being chairperson of the Hamilton City Young Farmers club.

Waikato/Bay of Plenty regional chair Jason Te Brake isn’t a farmer either. He’s a group financial accountant for Affco based at the head office in Horotiu.

As the Young Farmers website says, “You don’t have to be a farmer to join Young Farmers – a love of the land coupled with a willingness to participate and be an active member of your community is all you need.”

Although neither of them are farmers, both Natalie and Jason grew up on farms. Natalie’s parents owned a dairy farm in the King Country while Jason’s family owned a dairy farm in the Waikato.

They both helped out whenever they could and Natalie worked on farms during the holidays for a bit of extra cash while she was studying at university.

After graduating from the University of Waikato with a Bachelor of Science majoring in Earth Science, Natalie went overseas for a while. When she came back to New Zealand a couple of years later, she knew no one in Hamilton and wanted to make some new friends and get involved with the community.

“My parents were involved in Young Farmers when they were young and so they’d always said to me to get involved with it. But when I was at university I always kind of thought you had to be a farmer to be involved in it so I never really took up the opportunity,” Natalie says.

“I found out they had a club in Hamilton that wasn’t just for farmers and thought it would be ideal.”

New Zealand Young Farmers is a not-for-profit social organisation supporting the rural youth. It was formed in 1927 in Feilding, and now has over 1600 members in 90 clubs across the country.

Natalie’s club is made up of a couple of farmers, a few lawyers and accountants, and some who are nurses.

There are 30 members and the club has over 100 people on its mailing list.

“The farmers that we’ve got in our club have been to university and are interested in the whole scale of farming not just what’s happening down on the farm,” she says.

The different people involved in the club make it “quite varied”.

“The friendships I’ve been able to make in that group have been amazing,” she says.

One of the benefits of being a club member is the social events for members to hang out and catch up with each other.

“We had a tour of the Good George Brewery in January.  It was a lot of fun.”

The Hamilton City club also had a golf day put on by insurance broking company, Abacus Group Ltd.

“They pretty much supplied everything for us we just had to go to the golf course for half a day and play Ambrose style golf in teams and they put on a barbecue and beers so that was a really cool afternoon,” Natalie says.

Nationally, each year there is the New Zealand Young Farmer of the Year contest, where Young Farmers compete in a range of sections to test their hands-on farming skills and also test their knowledge in the commercial areas of agriculture. From carving the Sky Tower out of wood with a chainsaw to a HR scenario and business presentation, the contest is described as “the ultimate rural challenge”.

“That’s a big thing on the calendar that the members want to go to,” Natalie says.

“Regionally we have a ball – it’s a big thing in the Waikato. All clubs tend to have quite a lot of attendance at that. We had 116 people attend the ball.”

Another big event on the Young Farmers calendar is the New Zealand Agricultural Fieldays.

Natalie: “If you’re a farmer in New Zealand or anyone who works in the rural industry then that’s the place that they want to be for four or five days whether they’re trying to sell their products, promote what they’re doing, or as a farmer just going along to learn new things, so usually it’s beneficial and important on the farming calendar.”

Since the Fieldays were first held in 1969, the Waikato Young Farmers have been involved in some way or another.

It began with helping with the car parking, and then somewhat haphazardly progressed to the Young Farmer volunteers being ‘safety officials’ as they began working with ACC in the 1970s and 1980s to try and improve the on farm health and safety of its members.

As safety officials at the Fieldays, the volunteers were given the responsibility of keeping visitors a safe distance away from machinery demonstrations and reporting any exhibition display area problems such as uncovered tent pegs or exhibition staff undertaking unsafe practices.

One car parker, Graham McBride from the Te Kowhai Young Farmers club, was bailed up by an ACC rural consultant, and handed an all important orange vest and clipboard and told he was “the Safety Officer for the National Agricultural Fieldays.”

His job was to supervise the safety of the public while earthmoving equipment was shown off to the excited onlookers. A few close calls showed “the somewhat dubious distinction” of being a safety officer.

New Zealand Young Farmers now have members who sit on the National Fieldays committee, as well as their own Young Farmers site committee for the event.

“The site committee will plan what we are trying to achieve from having a site at the Fieldays, organise the logistics such as set up, pack down, volunteer roster for people on the site,” Jason says.

“They will also be the face of Young Farmers at this event, being approachable for potential members looking to make enquiries about the organisation, sponsors which may visit the site or general public who are interested in what our organisation is about.”

Other Young Farmers volunteer to help out with the logistics and activities of the Fieldays such as First Response teams, helping with the tractor pull, and after all this time, they’re still volunteering to herd the cars in the car park.

“The hours are long for our volunteers and set up/pack down is usually done on our own time as we do still have jobs we must work around it,” he says.

“It’s very busy. But it’s also very beneficial to receive the recognition from the industry for the involvement our organisation has with the Fieldays.

“Our presence at the Fieldays is a great way for us to interact with the industry and organisations we have established relationships with, as well as showcasing the benefits of being involved with us.”

The Young Farmers exhibition is always a bit informational and a bit promotional. They like to have their cake and eat it too.

“We usually have tug of war competitions, agri-sport race offs, chef demonstrations etc,” Jason says.

This year visitors to the Young Farmers site will find a petting zoo with different animals which can be petted on each of the days, as well as the usual Young Farmers fun activities and a shearing display.