During the second week in June, Jayne and I took our three boys Sam (18), James (16) and Charlie (12) to the national Fieldays in Hamilton for three days. I grew up in North Island, so Fieldays has been a firm favourite for me.

I had some business to do and key personnel from some of our suppliers to see, but the main purpose of the trip was to give our boys greater exposure to the broader agricultural industry and a glimpse of the technologies that will be with us in the near future.

See also: The dos and don’ts of farm-saved seed

About the author

David Clark

Farmer Focus writer

David Clark runs a 463ha fully irrigated mixed farm with his wife Jayne at Valetta, on the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand’s south island. He grows 400ha of cereals, pulses, forage and vegetable seed crops, runs 1,000 Romney breeding ewes and finishes 8,000 lambs annually.

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This was the first “back to normal” Fieldays post-Covid, so exhibitors and spectators were excited to be there, although buyers had a high degree of caution due to increasing interest and input costs and falling commodity values.

I was particularly impressed with the number of exhibitors that engaged positively with our boys and were willing to pause and share knowledge with them. I thought back fondly to people who bothered to talk with me when I was an enthusiastic teenager.

I was impressed by the wide array of technology that is becoming available to us; some useful, some fanciful and some a solution searching for a problem.

Equally I reflected on some of the technology I saw and marvelled that when I was the age of my boys, attending Fieldays with my own parents, new ideas then are now commonplace or even outdated in current farming practices.

If we take the past 100 years of food production, we have seen rapid development and uptake of inventions, technologies and scientific breakthroughs as farmers have continually strived to improve the productivity and efficiency of our systems.

As learning and awareness has developed, so too has our ability to reduce the impact of our farming systems.

Only a couple of exhibitors fell into the trap of trashing existing or past practices to promote the need for their viewpoint or product. For me that strategy belies the journey of constant improvement and learning that we farmers are proudly on.

The questions I saw asked and the answers given over our three days makes me confident that the future for agriculture is bright.