The Grange

Genna and Alistair Bird have diversified their North Canterbury sheep and beef farming operation to include on-farm accommodation, walking and bike tracks and horse-riding. Alistair also has an on-line presence through his ‘Kiwi Farmer’ YouTube channel, ‘Kiwi Farmer’. They’ve become adept at working out which new venture works best for them and their family lifestyle.

He and his wife Genna Bird have been in charge of The Grange near Oxford since 2014, leasing the 565ha (475ha effective) property from Genna’s family trust. About three-quarters of its income is derived from sheep and 20% from cattle, with the balance coming from horse riding and accommodation.

In the 2023 NZ Farm Environment Trust Awards, Genna and Alistair were the winners of the Bayleys People in Primary Sector Award, NZFET Biodiversity Award, NZFET Innovation Award, and Environment Canterbury Water Quality Award. Their big focus for the coming year is agritourism, and they are developing a new cabin and walking tracks.

Genna and Alistair love sharing the property’s views, nature and wildlife with numerous recreational walkers and horse riders who stay at The Grange, as well as their YouTube audience. They use YouTube and Facebook to promote the positive aspects of New Zealand’s agricultural lifestyle to a global audience. As they explain on the global channel, their aim is to document their daily life, bringing the highs and lows of a New Zealand sheep and beef farm. Their on-farm accommodation is listed on Canopy Camping.

Alistair says he started the channel after becoming frustrated with a lack of positive media coverage of farming. He wanted to share their personal farming story and the work they do to promote New Zealand agriculture. They also want to share the challenges farmers face, including regulations, environmental pressures and mental health concerns.

“The YouTube channel is warts and all. You’ve got to find a happy medium with what you’re putting out there but overall, the whole forum has been really positive. We've had very few negative comments, but the community is really, really good. I think the best thing is the camaraderie from around the world: You have people in the UK and Aussie, farmers just like us having the same battles. I’ve said this a few times, but we think we're in New Zealand at the bottom of the Pacific, kind of in our own little world and that everything's different down here. But it's all the same challenges that the northern hemisphere guys are facing.”

Genna she they now feel so much more connected to their audience than they ever thought. “People can see the comments under videos, but there's a lot behind that as well. People will make contact, maybe just for a little bit of advice or they might be giving us advice, or they might be saying to Alistair, ‘Hey, this is what's happening over here - it's amazing how much that adds.”

The commentary can be really satisfying, Alistair says. “You get some really genuine comments like just the other day, with how grateful people were that my YouTube was there because of they had people in hospital and the channel was able to help people pass the time with something positive and not too fast-paced.”

It’s been the same with young kids watching, Genna says. “A lot of lot of young kids watch it and a couple of them have been going through some pretty traumatic health stuff...they just they love the channel. One of things about it is that there’s nothing controversial; no swearing or anything like that. The mothers that have touched base with me are really appreciative of that too. So that’s one of the unexpected things when we thought ‘I’m going to start a farming YouTube channel’. People can watch it when they're sick’.

A few subscribers to the channel have turned up at the farm to meet them in person. “We’ve had people who say ‘we just drove past or something and I'm like ‘why didn’t you call in? But we had a Dutch couple who were really cool who went out their way to come see us. Some of our visitors are not necessarily staying in the accommodation, but they've gone out of their way to call in or message and see if we're around. Other people have said, ’Hey, I've got my family over from wherever, do you mind if we just come and visit to show them a farm?’.

Genna says they’re now trying to move into more walking trails around the farm. “They’ve done an amazing job down at Ashley Gorge with walking tracks there and we were very involved with that when I was homeschooling my oldest; we'd go down every week and do the trapping and the tracks and that's been really nice for the area.”

Alistair enjoys showing off the place. “By the time you get out the back of our place, it's obviously not as accessible off the road, but once you get out the back, it's quite similar. There are some beautiful spots out there and we’ve got some pretty ambitious plans to expand walking tracks into there. Probably for the first 10 years we were here, we were dipping our toes in so many things. By about year 6 or 7 we went, we have to just make some decisions here and not go do everything half arsed or everything badly. We don't just have a whole bunch of money at our fingertips everything is run through over and over and over, and we are learning to pull in as many people as we can that we trust.”

Genna says they tend to bring in people “on the brink of retirement” to advise them, including their dads. “It would be fair to say that both of our fathers are incredible businesspeople and mentors in the agricultural sector; we spend a lot of time with both racking their brains constantly and we’ve also had help from farm consultant, Tom Fraser. I think he turned 80 last year and he’s been in a couple of times. He’s just amazing: he’s not a Devil's Advocate, but he'll just challenge us on what we’re thinking, saying ‘Well, what about this? Or what do you think about that? Or why not do this?’ And it doesn't even mean that that was a better idea. It might just expose us to what we're feeling rather than just going, ‘we can't do that because whatever’. If it wasn’t tourism, you could do pine trees and we didn't want that, though we do have some native ETS and we're kind of trying to extract as much value out of there.

And they also draw on respected advisors like the bank manager or accountant. “You just gain so much out of conversations, the ones that are challenging. They’re the ones we enjoy.’

Alistair says although they’re diversified, the challenge has been committing to one venture or another. “Even the accommodation got to a point where even once we built that first permanent property, it was like ‘either we must really invest in this - make big improvements and go into a whole different level - or shut it down. But even that would be costing us, because we'd borrowed money to build it and once it’s open you've got insurance - and insurance is more than our own house. There’s all that sort of stuff.”

But over time it’s become easier to figure out what really works, he says. “We looked at all the land and went, ‘what is the best use and how do we get value out of that? We’ve tried to consolidate but still with that diversity That’s where the tourism came in: we looked at the block out the back and thought, we can't effectively graze and use it as farmland. It was pretty much 200 hectares of unproductive land, mostly a lot of gullies and native bush. We have a cabin out the front of the farm and the new one is out the back there, in a gully.”

Farming wise, The Grange is split 70:30 sheep to cattle. For the past five years or so Genna and Alistair have had a 65ha lease block on the other side of Oxford down by the Burnt Hill ford across the Eyre River. This year they are using that as a wintering block for all the ewes, just to give the hill a break and let them grow some grass.