BEEF, ARABLE & CONTRACTING, NEW ZEALAND (PREVIOUSLY CAMBRIDGESHIRE, ENGLAND): Sarah and her family recently emigrated to New Zealand, prior to this, in Cambridgeshire, Sarah and her partner were farming around 450 acres (182 hectares) of arable land and permanent pasture, with Sarah running a mixed arable (spring wheat, winter barley, maize, beans and linseed), beef (a crossbreed of British Blue/Simmental/Limousin cattle) and contracting enterprise on a number of Farm Business Tenancies.

Sarah’s move to New Zealand had been on the cards for a few years, and the beginning of 2022 started a motion of events that kept pushing her and her family in that direction.

Feeling that UK farming was not sustainable for tenant farmers, especially for farmers wanting to increase their acreage, Sarah and her partner believed they could achieve more farming in New Zealand than they could in the UK.

Although the contracting part of their business was going well, they were not enjoying the amount of stress and overall vulnerability it came with, and staffing had become a huge problem with seasonal staff becoming more and more unreliable.

Sarah said: “Farming in the UK always felt like such a battle, I always felt I had to justify what we were doing, but in New Zealand, it's just a normal thing, almost everyone you meet has something to do with farming, there’s no stigma around it.”