Fieldays

On Friday the 17th, I left Jenni at home with the children and went to the New Zealand National Agricultural Fieldays, more commonly referred to as Fieldays. It is the largest agricultural show in the Southern Hemisphere and happens just outside of the city of Hamilton (two hours south of Auckland) at the Mystery Creek Events Center. It is also where farmers get together to discuss farming innovations, find contacts and make their major purchases for the year as most equipment is on sale. The only way that I can imagine describing it to people in the States is a state fair and agricultural expo rolled into one. There are no rides, but children were running all over the place (many of them on school field trips with their school uniforms on), eating junk food and delighting in the carnival-like atmosphere. There aren’t any carnival games either, however many of the merchants are almost as aggressive as carnival callers in getting you to try and buy their products. All the normal farm products from water troughs and fencing material to tractors are available and bargaining for these products is going on all over the place. There are also a wide variety of retail products produced in New Zealand including lovely Limoncello and wool and possum fur knitted goods. The Fieldays grounds cover almost 100 acres so my day involved a lot of walking. For me the most interesting part of the show was a barn that was full of farm innovations that people had come up with and were working on getting marketed. A few of the innovations that I remember were a better way for spreading effluent, a cheap moveable fence, a simple device to put over the top of water tanks to stop evaporation loss and a cheap, easy fence tightener. Although I didn’t get to see them, there was also a tractor pull competition and a competition to determine the most eligible rural bachelor. The only bad part of Fieldays was the traffic when we were leaving. It took us almost an hour just to get out of the parking area to the main road. The picture above doesn’t do it justice, but it was the best one I got without photo editing to create a panorama.