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When Katoa Station on the East Cape recently sold to an English company for almost $4.2 million, there were alarmed mutterings that foreigners with deep pockets were squeezing local farmers out of the market.
Cue the familiar ghoulish caricature of rich, rapacious foreign landlords striding our prone pastures, extracting a quick buck then moving on. Except the reality could, in this case, be precisely the opposite.
And it's certainly more interesting, involving as it does one of the world's richest greenies with a grand global vision for sustainable farming. Connections to diffuse business interests include literary king-makers Granta, charitable trusts with an annual grant pool exceeding £17.5 million ($46.5 million) revenue, and there is also the project to save endangered languages and the whiff of (legal) tax dodging in Britain.
But first, the land. Katoa Station is a verdant 600ha of large flat expanses and rolling hills dotted with pockets of native scrub and, from spring, grazing lambs. It's a 15-minute drive to Te Araroa on the East Cape, 165km to Gisborne. It's picturesque to a townie but hard work and capital intensive to the farmer, especially with its erosion-prone hills and with sheep prices low.
After farming lambs and bulls there for 15 years, Murray and Linda Pike were ready to sell. So when British farming company Ingleby expressed an interest in the land, the Pikes put Katoa on the market. They knew of Ingleby by reputation: it already owned four farms in the Gisborne district.
Less was known about the Swedish-born, British-resident, family behind the company. The Rausings' vast wealth flows from milk cartons, specifically from Tetra Pak, which was invented by the company founded by Rueben Rausing in Sweden in 1950. Rueben's sons, Hans and Gad, co-owned the packaging company when they moved to Britain in 1983. In 1995, aged 70, Hans sold his 50 per cent share in Tetra Pak to his brother for about $4.4 billion. His daughters Lisbet and Sigrid are actively involved in managing the family fortune - both on the investment and philanthropic side. Lisbet, a historian of science, has the most to do with Ingleby.
Bayleys agent James MacPherson received 17 inquiries about Katoa, but none could match Ingleby's offer. The station's rating valuation in September 2005 was $2.5 million. Six weeks ago, Ingleby bought it for just under $4.2 million. And now, the company is courting a nod from the Overseas Investment Office to buy Matahia Station, also in the Gisborne region.
Rick Braddock, Ingleby's Auckland-based general manager, says the Gisborne properties will be managed as a single network, with livestock bred on some and fattened on others (Katoa's role).
"It's a strategic acquisition: it's not a land-grab for the sake of purchasing land," he says. Ingleby is a global farming company with holdings in Australia, North America, South America and Europe. Braddock, a financier who has worked in farming all his life and who leases Motutapu Island in the Hauraki Gulf, says he was attracted to Ingleby's sustainability ethos. He sounds like a true believer.
"[Ingleby] wants to combine the best practical, ethical and scientific know-how with good leadership and organisation. And it has a belief that good farming can both feed the world and protect the environment."
Of course, it also has a brief to make "a high threshold return on investment".
INGLEBY BOUGHT its first New Zealand farm in 1999 - Puketiti Station, near Piopio in the King Country - for $9.5m. This country was attractive because, Braddock says, "We farm in a sustainable and environmentally correct manner, we are English speaking, non-corrupt, politically stable and generally a good country to invest in."
Now, Ingleby owns almost 17,500ha in the King Country and Gisborne regions. It briefly owned the historic Raincliff Station in Canterbury, where it farmed deer, but it sold that last year for some $5 million more than it paid just a few years earlier. Braddock says the company is now focusing on sheep after discovering that deer farming didn't gel with its farm-portfolio model.
Despite the sale of Raincliff, Braddock says, the outlook for the remaining farms is long term. "Multi-generational - let's say 100 years."
Local Federated Farmers president Jean Martin has only good things to say about Ingleby.
"They've got a very good reputation for being very good farmers; they're very good at sustainability and environmental issues, they employ all local people, they're good employers... they've done a lot of development work."
She says New Zealand owners don't always have the capital to invest to bring out a property's full potential. Some farmers see foreign ownership as preferable to pine plantations, the fate of other East Coast farms that have been sold, out of desperation, into forestry.
Martin wryly observes the flow of New Zealand dairy farmers to Australia and New Zealand company PGG Wrightson's purchase of dairy farms in Uruguay.
"It's happening. We're doing it, too."
Ingleby has curried favour with local communities, too. It sponsors the East Coast rugby union, funds a farming school in Waipaoa, and has bought equipment for the East Coast ambulance service.
Says a farm manager on one of their Gisborne properties, "They're not here to take a quick flick and disappear."
WHEN ASKED about her immense wealth, Lisbet Rausing once told a reporter, "Often Americans say, 'Oh, my wealth is a terrible burden' - and I think, 'you should be bloody grateful'. I feel enormously lucky. It brings opportunities and extra responsibilities, but it is not a burden."
The Sunday Times ranked the Rausing family sixth in its British rich list this year, estimating its fortune at £5.4 billion. Hans received an honorary knighthood last year for his philanthropic work, and Lisbet and Sigrid run their own charitable trusts. The Sigrid Rausing Trust has shelled out more than £85 million (NZ$230 million), and intends to give away £17.5 million in grants this year alone, mostly to human rights, women's rights and environmental groups.
Lisbet's Arcadia Trust favours environmental groups and the protection of cultural heritage, reflecting Lisbet's other occupation as a research fellow in the history of science at the Imperial College of London. One of Arcadia's major beneficiaries was a London University project to record the thousands of languages at risk of extinction by the end of this century.
Lisbet, in her late 40s, is most involved in overseeing Ingleby (Sigrid, who bought Granta magazine and publisher in 2005, and founded independent publisher Portobello Books, busies herself with publishing
and her philanthropic work).
Lisbet visited New Zealand twice, staying on Ingleby farms and meeting all the staff. Braddock describes her as "a very pleasant woman, very intelligent, very capable and very caring".
She lives in Holland Park, London, with her husband Peter Baldwin, a professor of history at UCLA, Berkeley, and her son and daughter.
She and her family appear to be a breed not often seen here: mega-rich, erudite, and serious philanthropists. Hans, now in his early 80s, lives in a purpose-built Sussex palace, but retains frugal habits, such as reportedly wearing a Timex watch and claiming senior citizen rates on tickets.
In a 2005 interview, Lisbet told the Independent newspaper of her surprisingly ordinary childhood in Lund, Sweden.
"We didn't have cooks or chauffeurs, or anything... And I am glad because it meant I learned how to do things: how to cook and so forth...
"My younger brother [Hans Christian] and sister [Sigrid] and I always had the same pocket money as everyone else, and we went to normal village schools. I suppose some of the other children might have been aware of our family being different. But the little medieval university town I grew up in was very academic. A lot of the kids were children of vicars and doctors.
"My father never worked on weekends. And he always stopped work early on Fridays so we could go out and ride. When we got home after our ride my mother would make pancakes for us and my father would cook dinner for us.
"I don't think my father ever thought money was important. He was - still is - always thinking about machines and innovations and fixing things. That is his passion. He just likes solving problems. He has that kind of mind. Money is a by-product."
The main negative press the Rausings received came from a 2002 investigation by the British Guardian into Hans Rausing's tax affairs. The article alleged Hans used a legal loophole in British tax law, and contortionist financial management, to greatly minimise his taxes, in one year declaring taxable earnings at the same level as someone on a £656,000 salary. (The loophole lies in the fact that you can be a British resident but be classed as "non-domicile", so you are not required to pay UK taxes, if you can show that you retain ties to your home country and intend to return there at some point.)
Braddock insists the Rausings "have a very responsible attitude towards the community, and that includes towards tax. I am very surprised that that article came out, it's certainly not the belief I have in how they manage their affairs."
The Rausings couldn't be reached for comment.
Meanwhile, Ingleby is busy preparing Katoa for the spring lambs - and the future. Earlier this year, Ingleby farm managers and their wives were flown to Copenhagen for a conference, where they were shown Scandanavian examples of profitable sustainability.
Says Braddock, "We would like to think we'll be leaving this land in a better condition than when we inherited it."
