New (ad)ventures in family farming: Rural entrepreneurship in 21st century New Zealand

Abstract

This paper arises from a larger research programme examining current transitions in New Zealand agriculture. Our particular interest is in the rise in New Zealand of the multi-functional family farm. These family-owned farm businesses are best characterised as ‘hybrid’ commercial entities because they combine, in novel ways, traditional production-orientated activities (business as usual) with one or more new, and often small scale or niche, consumption-orientated enterprises. How farmers go about creating the consumption-based arm of their farm businesses, and embedding them in the family farm structure, is the main focus of our inquiry. This process is significantly underexplored in the recent context of the New Zealand experience and thus our research attempts to open up a new conceptual space for thinking about the subject. Our fieldwork has included in-depth interviews with entrepreneurial family farmers, an analysis of secondary data, and interpretive farm-walks. Our conceptual work has been informed by ideas sourced from the literature on: rural entrepreneurship; the commodification of rural space and the multi-functional global countryside. In this paper we present three family-farm business case studies which are used to illustrate the ebbs and flows of the process of new farm venture creation in New Zealand. Our discussion leads to two main conclusions. First, rural entrepreneurs do not operate in insolation when developing their new venture but rely on, and sometimes create from scratch, particular local-global networks. The shape and success of their new business may be strongly influenced by these network relations or ‘social worlds’. Second, the peripheral location of many family farms creates a unique way-of-working: resource-constraints are common to the experience of business start-up and thus many entrepreneurial farmers do, by necessity, adopt a ‘bricolage’ approach to the development of their new on-farm enterprise(s). Our concluding discussion also highlights a major challenge for entrepreneurial family farmers in New Zealand: balancing the demands of new venture creation with the exigencies of family and community life.