Reuben Carter’s team are in the heart of the potato planting season when the planter starts playing up.
Time’s money and they can’t afford a mechanical breakdown, so the crop manager for Canterbury’s Oakley’s Premium Fresh Vegetables brings the tools out and gets to work.
It’s a good job the trained mechanical engineer, who served an apprenticeship in his youth, can do this in his sleep as bringing help out would’ve slowed them down.
"At the moment our mechanic’s on leave, so I’ve been stepping in to sort out a few things the last couple of weeks and get a few projects finished and going for planting. Today with the breakdown on the spud planter was just one of those niggly things that crop up from time to time so it was good to pull the tools out and go back and have a bit of a refresher and do a bit of trouble-shooting. It was just a wire [issue] that wasn’t telling the operator what it was doing properly. A sensor and a couple of bits of wiring were getting old so I thought we were going down one track and it ended up being a faulty wire with a break in it that was connecting and then it wasn’t connecting. It wasn’t until I did a few basic tests that I found it so, hopefully, the boys can be flat out back into it."
He joined Oakley’s in 2023 after making several sea changes in his working life, each one a break with the past to grow his skill set.
"It’s been a quick journey, as I started off here as a member of our production team and doing all the tractor and crop work out in the field. Back in May our production manager moved on to other things and an opportunity came up and myself and my other team-mate split his role in half into two crop management roles and cut the product portfolio in half. It’s been a steep learning curve and another great opportunity."
He manages the broccoli, onions and all the cover and arable crops, leading half of the production team of six staff. Pumpkins and broccoli are hand-harvested and the team swells seasonally — mainly backpackers are employed this year and in the past Pacific Island or Vanuatu workers.
Being exposed to so many cultures keeps the job interesting, when combined with a mixed bag of vegetable crops, and he likes the daily challenge of growing food for the table.
Oakley’s specialty is fresh vegetables and they grow the various crops on a mixture of owned and leased land from local farmers which helps to give the scale for crop rotations. Part of the job is managing its rotation needs with those of the farmers’ for crop and soil health.
Surrounding farmland from the company’s processing site at Southbridge is on deep and fertile soil types supported by irrigation with resulting good yields through the year.
Broccoli is being planted year-round every week and the harvest continues throughout the year. Beetroot planting is staggered, with some more to follow, and the pumpkins are in the ground.
Just before Christmas, all the potato planting should be completed in a busy time of the growing year.
"I get a lot of satisfaction in seeing those crops come through from planting right through to harvest and the other side which just amazes me is the quality and quantity we produce. From an arable and drystock background I thought I could do pretty well growing a 10 tonne crop of wheat [to the hectare] and barley with a couple of rotations of lambs following behind them. But growing spuds and the crops we grow here it just astounds me how much food we can produce on the same amount of ground and the quality of that food we can do with minimum waste."
One day he did the numbers on how many people they can feed in a year and it was a "phenomenal" number. Oakley’s vegetables go beyond greater Christchurch. Broccoli is stocked mainly in South Island supermarkets, but also in the North Island.
Serving initially a local market the pumpkins and spuds now also go nation-wide.
"I class ourselves as a smaller company here in Canterbury, yet we are feeding so many people in New Zealand and that’s pretty cool. Naturally, from that has been the leadership which has grown from the opportunities I have been given."
The immediate plan is to continue progressing with Oakley’s as the challenges in from of him over the next year are enough to keep him busy and satisfied.
"Going forward, will be taking the staff who are working for us on a journey and trying to share the enthusiasm I have for the crops and for the produce we grow so that excites them and gets them passionate about what they are doing and doing a good job and for the quality of the produce that we are producing."
The vegetable connection can be traced back to when he was a youngster watching his grandfather grow food for the home table.
Raised on a sheep and beef farm at Opononi, on the west coast of Northland, made a lasting impression on him.
"When I was about to leave school I was trying to work out where my next move was and Dad asked me what I wanted to do. I told him I was going to leave home and go on the farm. He said: ‘Well, no you are not’. So that was a bit of a rude awakening at that point and we talked about things and the idea of an apprenticeship really appealed so I did one as a fitter and turner and did five and a-half years for a mechanical engineering and hydraulic engineering company in Whangārei. It was a really good grounding as we had a really wide customer base with a lot of industrial work and a lot of hydraulics coming in day to day for everything from agricultural, to earth moving to industrial and marine as there was a slipway which did a lot of ship repairs, so we got exposed to that. And then there was a machine shop with a lot of fabrication, so it was a neat company to be a part of."
Mr Carter’s father had wanted his son to avoid farming because he had gone through the tough mid-1980s period, when subsidies were removed and farmers were leaving properties.
Not wanting him to face the same hardships as other farmers, he steered him in the different direction.
Accumulating more skills for his next progression came quicker than expected, when the Whangārei company went through a restructure and he was made redundant.
Fortunately, he got picked up quickly by a family friend, who had a farming machinery dealership, as a servicing technician for tractors, harvesters and other machinery in the field and workshop for two and a-half years.
"I just happened to be talking to one of our customers one day that I was looking to go overseas and do a harvest and he was looking to step out of his harvester at the time because his business was growing and he offered me to drive his gear. So I went and drove his harvester and went contracting for another two years."
Missing the direct involvement with farming, he joined the Young Farmers organisation and began entering its competitions.
Through the contests he came to the realisation there were gaps in his skill set and moved in 2010 to do a Bachelor of Agriculture degree, majoring in plant science and plant production, at Lincoln University.
"Our family has always had a large garden and we’ve always grown our own potatoes and pumpkins and what not for our own consumption. I always enjoyed it and Granddad always had a fantastic apple orchard and figs and eating grapes and I always enjoyed doing a bit of pruning and growing stuff, so I naturally enjoyed that and did those subjects. Equally, I picked up farm management papers because they were compulsory parts of the degree and some animal science papers as well and a couple of subjects like biology and chemistry, which I never did at high school."
In short time, he came to appreciate their relevance, especially for chemistry in soil science.
"I’ve always been very practical, but never had the theoretical or scientific background to reason why we did those things, so going through those papers at Lincoln really cemented a lot of that practical knowledge I had and I really enjoyed my time there and that drove me to my next move."
After graduating, aged 26, he joined Barenbrug NZ — formerly Agriseeds — to sign up with their graduate programme and was accelerated as an agronomist for the company in Waikato for a couple of years. He specialised mainly in dryland grass species such as ryegrass and clover, as well as herbs and feed crops in fodder beet, brassicas and oats.
Then a farm manager role opened up on its research farm in Darfield and he returned to Canterbury again. He was in charge of a team of three who carried out the cultivation and all the other work for commercial crop trials that also gave him the opportunity to cut his teeth in leadership. This also helped him increase his knowledge base for the Young Farmer contests.
In his final year in his second attempt in the grand final, he finished runner-up in the national competition in 2014, perhaps not quite the result he was after, but looking back, still a source of satisfaction for him.
That was followed by nearly five years managing an arable and livestock research farm for AgResearch at Lincoln.
"I was missing the livestock work at the time and was asking around in a friend group that all went through uni together and one of them said they were after a new farm manager at AgResearch."
Sadly, the former manager had died early and, thrown into the deep end, he had to learn fast. As challenging as this was, he proved a quick learner.
His next step was to re-enter the commercial side of farming and join up with Oakley’s.
More lately, he has completed a Horticulture New Zealand Leadership scholarship.
He and 17 other scholars, including Leaderbrand operations manager Neil Redelinghuys, a fellow Cantabrian, took part in the programme in two phases over nine weeks, between August and October.
This included five days in Auckland in August and a further three days in Wellington during October.
The programme focuses on building the scholars’ confidence to take the lead and earn a wider appreciation of how to address industry issues.
Out of the course, they gain a greater understanding of what leadership is about and develop ready-to-use leadership and business skills such as communication, teamwork, critical thinking and problem solving.
By the end, they develop a personal plan to go forward in their leadership career.
Mr Carter said he put his hand up as he was always looking to develop his skills, was naturally curious and wanted to further himself. Oakley’s owner Robin Oakley and general manager Bernie Siew encouraged him to put his name forward.
Earlier he had got a lot out of completing a Kellogg Rural Leadership course and it seemed a natural step to take.
"A lot of it is just being a good decent person within your company and community as well. Some of it is just being more understanding of your staff and know the pressures that they could be under and building relationships is a big part of it. Communication is another one, especially for the horticulture industry where we have a lot of seasonal workers and a lot of internationals where English isn’t their first language, so communication came out as important. One of the things we latched on to was being benevolent — being more caring and understanding of staff. Everyone was quite intrigued with that one and what it meant in our context."
Among the tips and tricks learned were dealing with conflicts and keeping a level head and not being shy to take on "courageous conversations", but being fair and aware the other party could have a different view, seeking feedback and explaining the outcome.
"And it’s also OK not to have the answer there and then and say I don’t have the answer right now, but I will go away and come back to you. Is that all right? And follow up in a timely manner."
By the same token, he’s learned to encourage, value and applaud team members to come up with great ideas.
At Wellington one of the points he picked up on was meeting MP Andrew Hoggard, who stressed the value of coming to the table with issues, and also options to resolve them.
"For me a lot of the values I had been brought up as a kid around honesty, trust and being community minded and caring — there is a lot of things that follow through. Some of it was every familiar from doing the Kelloggs, but it’s also good to get a refresh to take some of those learnings aboard. The cool thing about our whole cohort was everybody covered just about all the groups from the horticulture industry — apple and pears, pipfruit and stonefruit, berries, kiwifruit, processed and fresh vegetables — we were all around the table and even though we came from slightly different sector groups, we all had similar issues and spoke the same language."
Mr Carter, 40, lives in nearby Leeston with partner Emma, 2-year-old daughter Heidi and another child due in February.
Further ahead he would like to grow food on his own land one day.
"Long term there’s always been the appeal of land and farm ownership and that’s always been a dream for me working around in the background. I think it will be a mixture as I still enjoy the arable side mixed with a bit of livestock. I just look at it and if I can incorporate different production systems into the one operation, that just spreads the risk a lot more."
It makes sense that he would employ the wide skill sets he has picked up so far for the day when he finally works for himself.
