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Meet the ‘Spud King’: His business is worth $1b but he’s still farming - ‘it’s better than sex’
Allan Pye, the ‘Spud King’, is as keen to work today as he was when he started out as a teenager. Photo / George Heard
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And he really could be anywhere. The shores of Lake Wakatipu, Dubai’s tree-shaped Palm Jumeirah, a Parisien apartment on Place des Vosges, Barbados, Lake Como, Sydney Harbour...
But those places hold little attraction for Pye. And neither do flash cars (he drives a bog standard Hyundai), superyachts, designer clothes, or high society cocktail parties.
“I have no interest in playing golf, or bowls, or billiards; I just enjoy farming,” he says several times during a rare interview with the Herald on Sunday which visited his vast, largely fenceless property on the Canterbury plains between Rakaia and Methven.
Now aged 82, Pye shows few signs of slowing down. He gets about the farm – actually, several joined-up farms – most days, checking on progress. He just snapped up another 2700 acres (1093ha) to make his Highfield property total about 7000 acres now, growing lots of spuds, carrots and other crops. He also owns nine dairy farms, milking 9000 cows.
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“I talk to the staff here and I know exactly what’s going on - I still have some say on what we are doing. I enjoy that,” he says.
“I love sitting on a header. There’s nothing more satisfying than sitting on a header and harvesting 10 to 12 tonne per hectare crop of wheat. It’s better than anything. Sex is good but only lasts for a short time. Driving a header, it goes on all day and all night.”
And it all started with the humble, ubiquitous spud.
Keen to work
Pye was born in the South Canterbury pottery town of Temuka in 1941 as war raged on the other side of the world.
Growing up with three sisters, their father had a smallholding, running a few sheep and some crops.
“He didn’t do anything for me,” says Pye grimly, pointing out that he barely features in a family history booklet written by his father.
After attending Temuka primary school, the young teenager spent a wasted year at Timaru Tech.
“I didn’t learn anything,” he says. “I was keen to get out and work, earn a few bob.”
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Although he played some rugby as a young fella, he mainly loved farming, driving tractors, and helping out.
During school holidays and weekends, Pye worked down the road for a potato grower. He saved every penny and reaped foundational lessons.
The farmer, who he described as being a “messer”, would say: “Be here at 7.45am.”
Pye would cycle over, and the first point of business would be a cup of tea. Then they would check the old V8′s oil and petrol.
“He mucked around digging those potatoes for six months of the year,” Pye recalls. “He was bloody hopeless.”
After that early experience, he went to work for local farmer Hector Palmer who ran a tighter operation. Pye was told to arrive at 7am. When he got there, Palmer would be revving his vehicle, impatient to get working, having already milked 100 cows that morning.
“He was very successful,” Pye says. “It showed me that if you want to get anywhere, you have to get stuck in. I was just keen to get ahead.”
Pye was yet to turn 15 but he knew he was wasting his time at school. His parents didn’t stop him leaving.
He asked his father if he could lease an acre from him. The old man mulled it over for a week and agreed. But a few days later came back to him and suggested going in with his three sisters and taking shares for two acres rather than one.
That first crop started everything. It did well and turned a £700 profit, which Pye got a quarter of.
“I learned pretty quick that an acre on my own would have been better than two acres with my sisters.”
The next year, going out on his own, he doubled his acreage – something he aimed to do every year.
The goal was always to make money.
“It seems a bit stupid really, there should be something else in life than just money but that was important to me.”
What did the young man spend his cash on?
“Oh, I was saving it up to be able to buy something good later... Well, I bought a baler. Yeah, I wanted to be successful.”
It was early on, still in the 1950s, that Pye learned the benefits of water to growing potatoes. Irrigating doubled the yield, he discovered, even though nobody else appeared to be doing it.
The determined, self-taught young farmer kept plodding on, gradually building up his operation every year and pouring profits back into the business. He started looking further afield for inspiration and ideas.
Boldly, he wrote directly to the world’s biggest potato grower, southern Idaho grower J.R. Simplot. During the Second World War, under contract to the federal government, Simplot supplied about 15 million kilograms of dehydrated spuds to the US Armed Forces. He was the Henry Ford of spuds.
Simplot, who also struck out on his own aged 14, replied, agreeing to show Pye his operation. So, the entrepreneurial Kiwi booked a trip to the US, which coincided with a conference in California.
But when he arrived, Pye got chatting with another farmer who suggested he was wasting his time seeing Simplot. Instead, why didn’t Pye visit his boss who grew potatoes in the Tri-Cities area in south-eastern Washington, using a unique irrigation system that was doubling the yield of everyone else – including Simplot.
The industrious Pye rented a car and made a visit. He was amazed by what he saw. They were using a system called centre-pivot irrigation. It was the first time he had ever seen it – and he was converted on the spot. He was the first farmer to bring centre-pivot irrigation to New Zealand, a system widely used today.
The business blossomed. Pye was quickly becoming a major force – while also bringing up a family with wife Diana.
They had five children who Pye says were “fired up like me wanting to do things”. While other families took regular holidays, skiing on the nearby Southern Alps or boating on the Central Otago lakes, the Pyes kept on farming. By age 11, the boys were driving tractors, eager to be like dad.
Looking back, Pye wonders whether it was the right thing.
“Maybe they ended up missing out … I was always doing things. There was plenty of work on,” he says.
But it developed in his children a similar robust work ethic, which they would take through their own adult lives.
Even early on, Pye’s eldest son Mark was keen to expand the family business.
Pye had been supplying spuds to Watties’ factory at Washdyke, Timaru, before it moved to Hornby on the southern outskirts of Christchurch. And when that closed, he didn’t have an outlet for them.
He had already set up a pea factory and was working with Timaru financier Allan Hubbard, who would die in a 2011 car crash, aged 83, while his South Canterbury Finance empire was crashing down and heading towards the largest fraud trial in New Zealand history. Pye says of Hubbard, “in the end, he lost the plot”, but years earlier the pair looked into starting a potato processing factory.
They just needed someone to buy the potatoes. That’s when Pye contacted McCain Foods in Australia – also of spud origins - which suggested he grow them across the Tasman. They couldn’t grow enough in Australia for what they wanted to process.
Pye flew over on a reconnaissance mission around South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. The chap taking them around knew where all the water was.
They stopped by a flat stretch of land outside of Parilla in South Australia, 200km east of Adelaide. Traditionally a grain-growing centre, they tried to steer Pye away, citing the salty water in the area.
“They didn’t know what they were talking about,” Pye looks back wryly. For another few days, he continued to be shown other areas along riverbanks but was always drawn back to Parilla. He didn’t want to pay big money for riverside land and thought it would work.
He went back and scooped up Parilla. Bores could bring up water to run centre pivots that would cover 150 acres of spud-growing land.
Pye returned to New Zealand and offered the opportunity to his son Mark and his then-girlfriend Fiona to set up. They moved over in 1990 and leased the land. The boreholes were also cheap. He bought American motors and pumps, and they were under way.
They have continued to expand over the years – and are now probably Australia’s biggest suppliers of potatoes, including low-carb spuds. They have thousands of acres. Allan Pye maintains a 50-50 share and tries to get over every five or six weeks, Covid-19 restrictions permitting.
“The salt doesn’t worry it - still grows good crops. And everyone was saying the water was far too salty. It was all bullshit.”
‘We’re making money’
In 1998, the eagle-eyed businessman spotted another opportunity across the ditch. Tasmania’s biggest farm was coming on the market, and Pye saw its potential. Teaming up again with his old mate Hubbard and an American investor, Bill Griffin they snaffled the nearly 60,000-acre Rushy Lagoon on the northern tip of Tasmania for a steal.
Formerly owned by British Tobacco, the trio paid $10 million for the sprawling land that Pye now owns alone, running 6000 beef cattle, several dairy farms. and several thousand sheep. It’s probably worth six times that now.
“There are plenty of buyers who want to buy it off me,” says Pye, who still gets a kick out of hearing just how much weaning calves fetch every season.
Turning a profit by smart farming is still where Pye gets his kicks.
While giving a driving tour of his Mid Canterbury estate, it’s suggested to him that a recent rich list put the family agribusiness at around $900m. He tried fending it off but when pressed he would only say it was probably “a round number... but don’t put that in the paper!”
“The crops are growing, we’re getting a good return, we’re making money,” he says.
“When we get a balance sheet - I get the figures every three months - we’re making really good money and it’s really satisfying. I don’t want to be playing golf or bowls or billiards or anything else. I’m just satisfied here on the farm.”
When asked what advice he would have for any youngsters thinking of getting into farming, he encourages them to stay in school a while longer than he did.
“It’s important to have a good education,” he says. “I was no good with a pencil and paper and no bloody good at school, I was just keen to get out and earn some money. But I would still encourage people to stay at school for a bit longer than I did.”
He enjoys getting out and talking to interesting, enterprising people – and likes to support industrious go-getters where he can.
But he would never go far. He firmly believes that his bit of Canterbury dirt is the best place in New Zealand to farm.
Driving past a large, red machine that is harvesting a field of carrots that will ultimately end up in Japan for juice (“that machine cost $1m, can you believe it?”), he talks glowingly of the rich earth.
“This soil was blown here,” he says, “River silt, I reckon. Blown here from the hills over hundreds and thousands of years. Before man came here.”
There is up to a metre of that rich, silty soil in places. Magical for growing spuds.
McCain prefers the Russet Burbank variety. Known for its dry, white flesh and large size, it’s perfect for nice, long chips.
Asked what the key is to growing the perfect spud, the king says it’s simple. “Lots of water.”
Bouncing along the paddocks while workers harvest rows and rows of potatoes, Pye can’t hide his delight.
“Look at them ... beautiful spuds,” is his repeated refrain.
And when asked how he likes his spuds, perhaps with a Sunday dinner, there are shades of shrimp enthusiast Bubba Blue in Forrest Gump.
“I like spuds mashed, boiled, roasted... anyway at all,” he smiles.
“Nothing better than spuds.”
