Craig Carr, group managing director and guest on this week’s Hemp Podcast, said his father started the business over 40 years ago with a handful of straw contracts in the Canterbury region of the South Island of New Zealand.
Moving into machinery service and seed production in the 1990s, the business really took off in the 2000s when the Kiwi dairy industry went through a period of growth.
“It was a big time in New Zealand of change, of farming. Dairy was really starting to grow,” he said. “And with that our business grew also.”
This growth enabled Carrfields to acquire several other ag businesses, making them a major player in New Zealand agriculture.
Carrfields has been working in the hemp sector for over 20 years, with an early focus on oil seed production and combine harvesters, and has since been working with fiber hemp for industrial uses.
Carr attended the Montana Hemp Summit in August and was impressed with the level of cooperation and collaboration among the U.S. hemp industry in the grain and fiber sectors.
“What probably stood out to me the most was the willingness of IND HEMP and others to actually work together for the benefit of the industry,” he said.
“Even though we’re way down here in New Zealand, there’s a huge opportunity for us to share learnings and to actually share information around what has worked and what hasn’t worked, because when you’re dealing with a product like hemp — and particularly hemp fiber — you know, you’re very reliant, as most people will note, on Mother Nature.”
Carr said the biggest challenge the industry faces, in New Zealand and abroad, is making it profitable for producers.
“Because if the crop is not sustainably profitable, then we are not going to have that supply base in the future,” he said. “We need to ensure that all of the financial metrics go back and start with the farmer.”
