Off farm pursuits keep life interesting
Early in his career Chris Stewart realised that farming alone wouldn’t be enough to satisfy him so he invested in an off-farm business and is a keen participator in endurance racing events, as well as helping his wife Serra with her fledgling pre-cooked food business.
A third generation farmer in Dipton, northern Southland, Stewart was given some advice when he left school in the eighties that has shaped his whole career.
“They said, ‘Look, go farming but always give yourself an option so if it doesn’t work you can do something else’, and that was really good advice,” he recalls.
He graduated from university with a BCom and then joined multi-national company Unilever’s graduate management programme in Auckland and after six months was promoted into a management position.
“It was never going to be a career but you learn a lot in a company like Unilever,” Stewart recalls.
“I don’t think there’s any company in the world that budgets better than them. We spent our life budgeting so it’s a great skill to learn and we brought that back here.”
After a couple of years working for Unilever he felt ready to leave the big city and go farming. With neither his brother nor sister wanting to farm, he assumed he would replace the current worker on the home farm and work alongside his father.
“But Dad said, ‘No, you can come back but they’re staying’, so with family equity backing, Serra and I came back and bought a farm down the road.”
Serra recalls, “We came down when we got engaged and bought the farm, then our honeymoon the following year was driving down to our new life in Dipton.”
They lived on the 242ha farm they’d bought and had their own stock but effectively farmed in partnership with Chris’s parents.
“We farmed sort of on our own account but it was great to be able to make mistakes and learn really quickly,’’ says Chris.
After a few years though, Chris started to feel the need for new challenges.