Fieldays purchase wins holiday bonus for couple

Jock Finlayson won holiday air tickets when he bought a new Renovator AS16 at the National Fieldays. Photo / Supplied

A trip to the National Fieldays in June will take one Northland farming couple much further afield later this year - thanks to Canterbury no-till specialists Duncan Ag.

Jock Finlayson,73, from Purua, ordered a new Renovator AS16 undersower at Mystery Creek and unexpectedly came home with a free trip to Rarotonga for himself and his wife Chris after winning Duncan Ag's special Fieldays promotion.

That has since translated into a travel voucher which the Finlaysons will use to fly to Perth in spring to see family and friends, including former agricultural exchange students who are now broadacre crop farming in Western Australia.

Meantime Jock says while it will be five weeks at least before the ground is dry enough to start undersowing with the new Renovator, he is confident it is up to the challenge of Northland's sometimes difficult and undulating terrain.

As well as sowing new pasture on their home farm west of Kamo, where they finish beef cattle and run dairy grazers, he and son Karl will use it to drill paddocks for other farmers in the district, something the long established farmer and trained mechanic has been doing for the past 40 years.

Originally it was just new pasture, but now he is increasingly sowing forage crops such as turnips for dairy farmers in particular.

The new Renovator replaces a Connor Shea drill bought second hand some years ago, which Jock describes as a good machine but which was increasingly difficult (and expensive) to find parts for.

Before that he used an Aitchison.

Key priorities in purchasing a new drill were to buy a well engineered, NZ made machine with good backup for parts and service.

Northland's challenging terrain is also behind his preference for a relatively narrow drill.

The Renovator AS16 is a 16 row air seeder with a 2.4 m working width which he says is much more suited to the type of hill country he works than wider drills.