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Hey, they're drinking espresso down here
Stevenson's Country, June 13, 2003
Rural people are latte-loving, cellphone-toting, four-wheel-drive vehicle fans who appreciate technological innovation, art, and quick download time on their internet connection.
In other words - if the Mystery Creek National Agricultural Fieldays are an accurate reflection of rural New Zealand - they are just like their urban counterparts.
The sun has shone on the 35th annual event, near Hamilton, to make trekking its miles of roads a pleasure - albeit a tiring one - for the thousands of visitors streaming there each day.
Just as farming has become more sophisticated and diversified in the last three and a half decades, so too has the Fieldays.
Once the pies and sandwiches served up by Women's Division Federated Farmers were the staple, if not only, Fieldays fare. Now there are espresso bars on every corner and a tempting variety of food from whitebait fritters to Chinese meals at several food alleys in between.
Cellphone coverage may be dodgy in some parts of rural New Zealand but not at Mystery Creek where extra towers boost the airwaves. That means exhibitors who've relocated much of their operation to the site for the four days can still be in touch with head office, and visitors, too, can combine business with their one-to-four day outing.
The shoe phones are also very useful as, inevitably, you lose touch with your companions in the sprawling marquee city and are forced to call up and ask, "where ARE you? Right, meet you by the ANZ (or Gallagher, or Fonterra) arches."
Plenty of people arrive by bus but the acres of car parks mirror motorised New Zealand. Except here the Remuera tractors are more likely to go off road and get their tyres dirty.
But the four-wheel-drives that really get this crowd excited are genuine farm tractors - paddocks of shiny, powerful beasts of more models and makes than you can shake a cattle prod at.
And nearby are their lifestyle block cousins, the ride-on mower. Once these would never have got a look-in at a real farming show like the Fieldays but with an estimated 700,000ha of small holdings nationwide - up from 100,000ha eight years ago - lifestyle block holders are a rural force to be reckoned with.
The low-slung orchard tractors, too, are a sign of the changes in land use in New Zealand since the Fieldays began in the 1960s. Between the 1994 and 2002 agricultural censuses alone horticulture land has blossomed from 5600ha to 109,400ha as avocados, olives, and wine grapes have increasingly joined the traditional mainstays of apples and kiwifruit.
Dairying's predominance across the landscape is reflected in the giant Fonterra marquee and stand after stand of glistening, stainless steel milking machinery.
The meat industry had made a good turnout but even at Fieldays the debilitating and bitter takeover battle between Hawkes Bay's Richmond and Dunedin's PPCS is obvious. In other years, PPCS, the majority shareholder in Richmond, has shared the northern company's exhibition space. This year the two are well apart.
E-farming is the Fieldays feature theme this year and almost every exhibitor can refer would-be customers to their website for more information.
But e-farming is still a frustrating exercise for many rural dwellers, and for some just a pipedream as they wait for the promise of access to the world at the flick of a computer switch to match the reality of living at the end of a copper telephone wire trail. Beam me up rural Scotty, is the hope but the warp factor is still running very low.
Rural folk share their city cousin's concern for the environment but one suspects farmers are more likely to take practical measures while townies donate to Forest and Bird. The Department of Conservation's stand is packed and there's a constant huddle round a plethora of inventions and new product releases offering new and better devices for dispatching stoats, ferrets, rats and possums.
Into the middle of all this intense farm-ness has strayed a bemused townie. "I didn't realise farming was so big," he said.
"Oh, it's just the country's biggest industries and what makes the place tick," I replied.
He was not convinced. "Technology is what makes the place tick," he told me.
I agreed. But I didn't have the time to give him the quick rundown of the agricultural science and technology that has transformed farming in New Zealand and so too the country's economy.
Nor that this technology is crossing over into human health areas such as growth and fertility, and sparking whole new products and industries such as nutraceuticals and biotechnology.
So, I just left him with one thought. Sheep numbers may have declined to 39 million from a height of 70 million in 1982 but the total amount of sheep meat New Zealand produces has risen. Why? Improved sheep. How? Technology.
But got to go now. Lost my companion. Where's the cellphone?
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