Company saviour to retire

Brian Train

For retiring Allied Farmers chairman Brian Train, more than 50 years of farming hardly seemed like work. At 70, he's not ready to call it a day.

"I've got one or two business interests," he says cagily. "[I'll ] put my feet up for a couple of days, look around and make sure I've got something to keep me busy."
Train's working life has been a half-century journey that traced the modernisation of farming.

His father farmed a bush block that took him a five-hour coach journey and three-hour horse ride to reach from Waitotara.

"You didn't go home from work each day," Train says.

In the 1930s his father bought a farm in Waverley, which Train took over following his death in the early 1950s. It's still the family farm today.

During the 1950s so-called "rehabilitation land" provided small dairy units for soldiers returned from war, where about 60 cows could provide comfortably for a family.

"Today it would take 200 odd cows,' he says. "Critical mass has increased considerably right across the farming sector.

"Put it another way ... one prime lamb in those days would buy a pair of working boots. Today it takes three prime lambs."

Yet he says more was gained than lost through modernisation with improved efficiency, technology and equipment.

Although much has changed, he says, some things can always be depended upon.

"The New Zealand farmer - he'll get stuck in, he'll do it himself, and he'll make sure it's done."

It was a practical, can-do attitude Train took with him as chairman of Allied Farmers.

"The word 'can't' doesn't exist in my dictionary," he says.

He became chairman in 1987 when the then Farmers Co-operative Society was in dire financial straits, with 87 per cent debt to equity.

At a shareholder meeting the board proposed selling off the stock and station operation, "basically the whole guts of the business".

The proposal was rejected, the board resigned and Train was elected chairman. The company would be managed under a scheme of arrangement until all remaining creditors were paid in 1993.

The company grew, expanding its rural services into King Country, Waikato, Manawatu and Hawkes Bay, and listing on the stock exchange in the 1990s.

The pride in Train's voice is obvious when he talks about his part in turning around a company "that was on its knees".

Around 1987 Allied Farmers was about the sixth biggest stock and station company out of about nine operators, he says.

"Now we're number two, because there are only two stock and station companies left providing full services." He sees the recent merger of rivals Wrightson and Pyne Gould Guinness as an opportunity rather than a threat.

"The thing about monopolies is they create bureaucracies, and a lot of the synergies start to get dissipated.

"It's not going to go like the dairy industry. It won't be monopolised. Farmers won't allow that - they want competition."

He is unfazed by reported signs of an economic downturn.

"The pundits have been saying we've passed the peak. When it happens there'll be opportunities. In a downturn, cash is king."

Train has shown an appetite for a challenge, expanding his Waverley sheep and beef farm into meat exporting in the 1970s.

The first year generated a $1 million turnover, although the net profit was a more modest $5000.

After more than 50 years of farming, he has no regrets.