KEY POINTS:
If you passed him in the Fieldays' crowds, chances are you wouldn't have picked John Austin as someone who had just bought $800,000 worth of heavy farm machinery.
Dressed in a navy fleece jacket and open-necked shirt, Austin didn't stand out from the record 131, 629 crowd who thronged to the Southern Hemisphere's biggest agricultural hypermarket at Mystery Creek, near Hamilton.
Based in Te Awamutu, the agricultural contractor operates 26 tractors and two combine harvesters and employs up to 60 staff.
At Fieldays, which ended yesterday, he worked on deals to buy a $143,000 tractor, a combine harvester worth more than $500,000 and a drill worth a further $130,000.
Also on his shopping list was a set of discs for ground cultivation, worth $60,000 to $70,000.
Townies may be reeling from food price hikes, but Austin's spending points to an industry enjoying the benefits of a global demand for dairy products and soaring grain prices.
And he was bullish about farmers' prospects for the next few years.
Austin predicted sheep, beef and dry stock farmers, who have struggled with low returns while dairy farmers enjoyed record payouts, would soon have their day in the sun.
"I'd say there would be a lot more optimism at Fieldays and people with more cash in the system after quite a few poor years."
Rotorua dairy farmer Lachlan McKenzie was looking at spending $100,000 on an in-shed meal feeder and left with quotes from three exhibitors. "It's like a supermarket. Rather than driving all the way to Hamilton, and then to Rotorua and then somewhere else, I can get three quotes from one place."
This year, more than 1000 exhibitors occupied the 40ha tent city.
Mystery Creek general manager Barry Quayle met one South Island farmer who spent $1 million at the four-day event. He said the word from exhibitors suggested total sales could top last year's record $300m spend.
