It is a dreary day as the mist descends to near ground level and hard rain begins to pelt a farm just outside of Mt Somers village.
Deer farmer Duncan Humm opens a lane gate overlooking a back paddock that, until lately, was leased out for dairy grazing and has just been drilled into oats after a winter crop.
On one side is a slow flowing canal stretching beneath the foothills of Mid Canterbury, which is part of the Rangitata Diversion Race irrigation and power generation scheme.
On the other, paddocks as flat as a billiard table go to the main road.
At one stage the Humm family had crunched the numbers, but could not quite get them to work for irrigating the property and providing more income.
Years have passed and it is this 35ha block from which Mr Humm will generate a return — shadowing deer farming, dairy grazing or even converting the land to a dairy farm.
Just a few red posts give a hint as to what is coming next.
Like the nearby canal, this block will generate electricity, but by harnessing another energy force.
By the end of the year construction is due to begin on a solar farm providing 23 megawatts (MW) at peak power and likely an average of 18MW-20MW.
The bleak weather on the day is a misnomer. There is enough sunshine hours to more than make this work.
Once up, the 37,630 panels will provide enough power for about 4340 households. To put that into context, the small village of Mt Somers might only have 250-300 homes.
The Humms provide the land with HES Aotearoa, a joint venture formed by United Kingdom renewable energy companies, operating the solar side.
Various options were looked at including having a stake in power production, but they ended up with a straightforward lease on a per hectare, per year basis.
Mr Humm said the low-risk option was a no-brainer as soon as they started talking about the leasing terms.
In many respects, the solar farm is an extension of harnessing the sun for livestock farming and sits comfortably with him.
"As a pastoral farmer, we are already using the power of the sun through photosynthesis to grow food so photovoltaics is the same thing, but just a slightly different conversion of energy. So when you get down to it, it’s not too different to what we are doing now — except we are harnessing the sun twice before it hits the ground."
He said they knew they needed passive income because of their small land base and with their many different roles realised they were at risk of running themselves ragged all the time.
"It leads to the Holy Grail thing of drystock farming and not having to employ extra staff and it means I don’t have to chuck in all my other jobs and can carry on doing all the other things which I enjoy. It would be nice sometimes to simplify my life, but I do these things because they’re all interesting."
A central substation is likely to be based on the site with a cable running out to power lines on the adjoining road.
Nearly three years have passed to gain resource consent and approvals including from Transpower to get access to the grid.
Part of the consent requires 4m or 5m-wide native strips to be planted and this will eventually keep most of the solar panels out of sight of passing motorists.
The family is just going through farm succession with a twin brother and three sisters on the same page about wanting the land to stay in the family.
Mr Humm and his wife Lorna lease part of Richwood, which is in a family trust, with the other part leased out by a neighbour for dairy grazing.
Home for them and their 10-year-old daughter, Isla, is a new-ish home in the village, about 1km down the road from the family farm.
The property was bought by his grandparents, Gordon and Vyvian, in 1964 with his parents, Bryan and Christina, taking on 180ha of it in the early 1970s and an uncle farming the other half.
A block on the other side of the RDR race was sold to a dairy conversion in an opportunity too good to say no to and several small blocks have since been added so it now sits at 150ha, a small farm by today’s terms.
"That’s our big challenge and both a blessing and a curse with farm succession. If you’ve got a big farm, you’ve got some big frightening numbers to sort your siblings out, but then with a small farm how do you make it economic enough to actually make it viable for yourselves and generate enough income and cash to sort out farm succession?"
One way or the other the land needs to be run reasonably intensively to make this work.
"We kicked around so many different ideas of what we could do, from felling all our trees and putting irrigation on and going dairy farming ourselves because it would have been a good little dairy farm on its own. But we didn’t want to bowl all our trees because we are blessed with heaps and none of us are really that keen on milking cows or being stuck in a single income stream business."
So they knew what they did not want to do and the big question was: what to do?
Contracting is too competitive now and they do some consulting, but wanted to try to steer away from what everyone else was doing.
So solar farming it is.
The deer farming enterprise began in the early to mid-1990s when his parents, running 2000 ewes and a handful of beef cows, bought a neighbouring 30ha block.
"To make a budget work for that block of land, deer and having that diversification was the best thing at the time. And I had been hounding Dad to get into deer farming because I had quite a few people down our road that were into it in a big way at the time and I was mad keen on them so that was our start and we have been doing it ever since."
The Humms juggle busy lives to run the venison and velvet herd on 43ha before and after work. Once the solar farm is built they will look to add more fencing and increase deer numbers.
Venison provides about three-quarters of their turnover.
At one stage, they had about 200 hinds and close to 100 stags, but pulled this back to 150 hinds and 75 stags in a breeding and finishing operation.
Traditional English red deer bloodlines bred by themselves were bolstered with faster-growing and larger-framed red genetics from Tom MacFarlane’s Melior stud.
Mr Humm said they had invested a lot of money and time in their venison hinds, mostly to increase growth rates to build on carcass weights.
Unlike most deer operations, the Humms like to wean fawns after the rut because of the lower stress and they have pushed their genetics along with single sire mating with the hinds grouped in one stag mobs.
Autumn is a phase of grass growth at Richwood and they find fawns averaging more than 300g a day do better staying on mum. By prolonging deer milk, fawns tend to live longer when they become hinds.
By the time they are weaned when the stags go out in early May, the stress of being separated from hinds is less because they are ready to leave. Earlier-born fawns have started self weaning anyway.
Their oldest is 23 years old and has fawned every year except for being deliberately kept back for the first time this year, earning her right as a nanny hind to care for young weaners.
The stags join hind mobs in January with conception dates traditionally in early to mid-April and fawning in late October onwards.
"We try to have everything we are killing gone before the end of the chilled season before they are 12 months old. We used to chase as much of the chilled season as we could. The cycle is the fawns are born October into December and are killed the following early October. The last three years we have gone away from on-schedule and are on contract now and supply Mountain River Venison. They are putting product into the traditional German market, but also into Scandinavia and North America."
Forward contracts are set above the schedule rate and killing space is guaranteed.
By the time they leave Richwood, both the young males and females are at 110kg to 120kg liveweight with females carried on to New Year. In a good year they are sold as replacement hinds, otherwise they go to the works.
Pushing their hinds towards high growth rate terminal-sire types was balanced with producing maternal lines with good mothering and free from fawning issues that could also handle dry years without kid glove treatment, he said.
Until lately, few hind yearlings were kept for the breeding herd as it was turning out good fawns.
As the hinds have aged and younger genetics have stepped up, they now tend to keep upwards of 30 young hinds. Progeny from hinds they have artificially inseminated themselves for the first time this year, will also be retained.
Even their first calving hinds — coming up to 2 years old — hit 100% scanning most years which is above the industry average of 85% to 90%. For a small intensive flat land operation, that is a good result as deer do best in bigger herds in a hill block.
Several top stags might be grown out to explore their upper limit of potential to be used as sires.
The couple like their stags to yield at least 5kg-6kg of velvet with a few outliers going above this. Anything failing to cut good-quality Super A velvet is usually culled.
Velveting starts on October 25 and runs through to Christmas with regrowth appearing after the festive season. They have remained shareholders of Provelco since it went from a co-op to the company it is today with Mrs Humm acting as chairwoman for the past couple of years.
In another governance role, she is the chairwoman for the Canterbury Deer Farmers Association.
Both of them work outside of the farming operation with several day jobs.
He is the operations manager for fertiliser company Top Soils which consumes about 30 hours of his working week. Fertiliser is supplied to clients with their own spreading machinery or contractors and he is constantly on the phone working out their needs and orders.
Mr Humm was a client when he first started talking to owner Don Hart and became his right-hand man 12 years ago when the business — based on the family’s Methven farm — began expanding.
For him, it was an easy transition to more natural fertilisers with no super phosphate touching their soils in at least 15 years.
Instead, their soil needs are supplied by the likes of guano phosphate or reactive phosphate rock. Soil tests showed it responds better and longer for their biological system, despite fewer units of phosphate being supplied, and that includes animal health.
Nitrogen is reserved for their crops, while soils in the area are typically hungry for calcium, magnesium and zinc, selenium and especially copper for deer.
Unsurprisingly then, he’s a foundation board member and treasurer for Quorum Sense, a charitable trust promoting regenerative agriculture.
"I’ve always been quite open-minded and curious and not deliberately anti-establishment or anti-mainstream, but my mind must work differently. I don’t deliberately do something different, I just do what suits us and our own situation."
Mr Humm found he gravitated towards like-minded farmers in this direction as they were already putting in diverse pastures at Richwood including chicory, plantain, clovers and fescues.
Most of their paddocks are still ryegrass and clover based, but they aren’t afraid to mix it up.
Coming out of winter, a warm season of crop is sown about now for silage or forage in January and February. This goes into permanent pasture or is direct-drilled into brassica-based winter crops containing mixes of 15 species.
Into this unorthodox blend goes beans and sunflowers with peas likely added if they are not too susceptible to frost.
"We just did it to keep the deer happy really when we started. Deer are really fickle and do not like single species monoculture. They are browsing animals and back when we used to grow straight swedes or kale, they would get to a point in winter when they didn’t want to eat it any more. One of the biggest things we battled with deer is to get them to stop vandalising fences and gates and digging wallows. By observing their behaviours we found the better fed they are, the less of those problems we were hitting and the more satisfied they were. Especially when the weather’s dreary and ryegrass has no guts to it, you can tell they’re unhappy when they are pacing the fences and would see it on the scales as they wouldn’t grow as fast. Once we got some diversity and got our soils right, they were heaps happier."
On the velvet side, they do not feed palm kernel extract to gain more growth and restrict themselves to a bit of barley when it’s cost effective.
Otherwise, they prefer to grow feed in the paddock so the deer can harvest it themselves.
There’s also a buy and sell page and this provided the lightbulb moment for the solar farm.
One April day in 2021 someone wanted to put in a message in the trading post for land to build solar operations.
Intrigued, Mr Humm messaged him back and a few weeks later the HES team arrived.
"Up until that moment the idea hadn’t crossed my mind. The only solar we had is a couple of portable electric fence units and never had contemplated the thought of having a utility scale solar farm. The greatest thing about solar is in the past five to 10 years the cost of building has plummeted and the whole equation of set-up cost and yield and scale, from a dollar and cents point of view, just smashes any other form of generation provided you have got good sun and good location."
HES was looking to build about 500MW in New Zealand and were looking for enough land to do that.
The Humms’ site was found to be suitable with good access to the adjoining road and power lines and a nearby sub station.
Mr Humm said they would ideally have gone for a 50ha site if the substation was larger and this would still give them two-thirds of the farm for other enterprises.
Among the panels they can pretty much farm anything they like as long they do not damage panels or grow something tall enough to shade them.
More than likely, the agri-voltaic option will be based around a preferably profitable form of sheep farming. This might take the shape of a 300-ewe flock with subdivision to manage peak grass growth.
Mr Humm already knows he wants to push the limits on how much food they can grow on the land.
In some countries, orchards are set up under panels and other ideas they have toyed with are sheep milking or dairy goats.
He said he was keeping an open mind to find something that would fit in and be profitable.
"My theory is we can grow very much, if not more, than your normal sheep farm. We can get down rows of about 8m pole to pole and the panels themselves will be about 2.3m in big long rows. At midday and night the panels will be dead flat, but we should be able to get a 6-8m drill in piece of cake or even take silage with rakes and balers.
"I want to grow some barley under it in some of the paddocks to see just if we can with our really old combine [harvester] which has a 14-foot front. A big combine with a big front might struggle, but I’m pretty sure our combine will reach under the panel just nice, up and back each lane. I just want to do it for the fun of it to see if we can and it’s an opportunity to learn."
