Andy Hayes: Scheme Chair and Fifth-Generation Waitaki Farmer
The new dairy shed, built in 2018.
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ndy Hayes is a fifth-generation farmer in the Waitaki District of New Zealand’s South Island. He is the chair of Haka Valley Irrigation Ltd. (HVIL), a small irrigation scheme established in the last decade, and is also involved in representing small irrigators in his role as one of the directors of the Waitaki Irrigators Collective (WIC), which promotes the interest of local schemes and independent offtakers. In this interview, Mr. Hayes tells us about his farming operations, his involvement in HVIL and WIC, and the broader landscape of irrigated agriculture in New Zealand. Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
8 | IRRIGATION LEADER | January 2022
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PHOTOS COURTESY OF ANDY HAYES.
Andy Hayes: I was born and raised in this valley at a farm that has been in the Hayes family name since 1878. My children are the sixth generation to live here. The farm is close to a large river, the Waitaki, but the water has to be lifted 150 meters (492 feet) to get it into the valley, so back then it was not seen as possible. In the 1990s, we started considering it as part of establishing our own little irrigation scheme.
After university, I came home and started looking at different things we could do with the business. We put in our own little irrigation scheme, which served us for 14–15 years before we needed a bigger scheme—something that could service a few more customers. We had interest from neighbors and local farmers. My wife Liz and I bought the farm from my parents in 2009 and ran it for 4 years as a sheep and beef farm. In 2013, we looked at establishing a bigger irrigation scheme that would pump more water from the river into this area. We thought it would be viable to upgrade the existing irrigation system, which was a K-line system that dragged lots of little sprinklers around on above-ground pipelines. The K-line system had served its purpose for a while, but it was quite inefficient, so we wanted to upgrade to pivot irrigators. At the time, the sheep and beef industry wasn’t strong. Dairy was more profitable. We could see the value in putting in center pivots, but we needed to change the business to do that. We converted to dairy in 2013 and then looked into building this bigger scheme, the HVIL, which was commissioned in April 2014. We made the other scheme
