BUSINESS DIVERSIFICATION
A station for life
The owners of Mt Somers Station have long family links to the property and plan for those links to remain in perpetuity. Anne Lee reports.
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t might have been less than a tenth of Mt Somers Station’s total area but converting to dairying in 2013 was the key factor in enabling succession on the historic Canterbury property. The 3800-hectare station, in the foothills of the Southern Alps, is now a highly diverse operation with its owners and custodians, David and Kate Acland, farming it with a deeply rooted sense of responsibility to those who have gone before and those who will come after. If they feel weighed down by that responsibility, they don’t show it. The couple instead share an air of excitement, eager to take on new challenges, learn and grow. They’re prepared to take risks, but calculated ones and ones that don’t put the core asset - their land - at risk. The station was settled by David’s great, great grandfather more than 160 years ago but then sold. 30
In 1983 David’s parents Mark and Jo bought it back. They too saw the benefits of diversifying their income and were prepared to adventurously try new ventures - championing live deer recovery and farm tourism. David has two younger brothers and while there was a succession plan in place, the deaths of first his Mum and then his Dad seven years later in 2014, and the fact his brothers had other careers meant the succession plan had to be fast tracked. “The dairy farm has already been part of the plan because it gave us a parcel of land that could create dividends for all members of the family,” David says. He and Kate have now bought out his brothers and wholly own the station. “We didn’t really see it as an option not to have a go at purchasing the whole station even though it was financially quite a stretch,” Kate says. She holds a masters degree in farm
management consultancy from Lincoln University as well as a degree in viticulture and oenology. At just 26 and before she’d met David, she bought a 7ha vineyard and packhouse in Marlborough and developed a small winery in time for the 2008 harvest. But it was there that Kate learned the art of survival and “pivoting “– a phrase that’s become all too common for many this year amid Covid-19. She’d just started her Sugar Loaf label when the global financial crisis hit and grape land prices plummeted. “I was young, I was really naïve and I had to change direction really quickly if I was going to survive in business. “I threw the business plan out the window and identified a market where there was a shortage of winemaking space for small producers. “So changed direction a bit and did contract winemaking where people
Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | November 2020
