Young grower relishing NZ opportunities

Otago Daily Times

29-07-2025

A year of backpacking led South African man Steven Rink to finding a new home managing vegetable growing in Canterbury. Tim Cronshaw reports.
After graduating with a degree in conservation and ecology from the University of Stellenbosch, Steven Rink headed off to New Zealand in 2019.
The born and raised Capetonian from South Africa visited the sights of the country, then ended up helping out at a wholesale nursery operation in Tauranga, overseeing the propagation and irrigation departments.
Initially the plan was to spend 11 months on the road — until he got stuck in lockdown when Covid-19 arrived in 2020.
When this was lifted his travels took him on another adventure to the Marlborough Sounds.
"While travelling I met a friend who was working at Lochmara Lodge and I ended up working a summer out there doing odd jobs, living and working there and doing the backpacking thing. At that stage I was going back to South Africa for my brother's wedding and wasn't sure whether I would be coming back to New Zealand."
Unsure of his next move, he opted to gain more work experience, and applied for a job at Oakley's Premium Fresh Vegetables, a family business growing and packing fresh vegetables at Canterbury's Southbridge,
"I was in the middle of Marlborough Sounds on a jetty hoping I didn't catch a fish when they called back to tell me I got the job. I took a punt and really loved it and four years later I'm still here and fully invested."
His wider family has a close connection with farming, with his grandparents and uncles still on farms in Zimbabwe when his parents headed for Cape Town.
"Throughout my childhood we would go back there to visit my grandparents' farm and the uncles, and in the early 2000s when that all went horrible most of the uncles went to Australia and some went up to Zambia and one went to South Africa, and he had a big farm there. So every school holiday my mum would ship us there and we would spend the holidays on the farms.
"So my greater family is very much a farming family, but I didn't grow up on a farm driving tractors. I know this sounds silly, but you can almost feel it in the blood and tend to pick things up and understand things a bit quicker than someone who doesn't have that background."
Initially, Mr Rink, 30, was brought in as a production assistant at Oakley's, growing and tending vegetables such as broccoli, pumpkin and beetroot.
The business is known for its potatoes, with its own Golden Gourmet brand, and also grows rotational cover crops, and he immersed himself in the new learning experience.
Mr Rink said he was lucky to work under manager Lucas Rossi.
"He invested a lot of time and energy in training me and had ridiculous amounts of patience and really allowed me to grow and learn and get that experience. I worked at Oakley's for three months and went back to South Africa for my brother's wedding and that's when we went into that second lockdown and I ended up having four months back in South Africa waiting for them to lift the bubble.
"A huge factor coming back was that opportunity, as I've never worked for a company that invested so much in their staff in training. That ability to grow at Oakley's is why I'm still there. It's a really great company with a great culture."
Vegetable growing's multi-faceted nature — with no day the same as the next — and the many challenges it invariably throws up appealed to him.
"You might have done something one way for 10 times, and at the 11th time have to do something completely different, and need to be able to adapt and change and improvise and overcome. No two challenges are ever the same."
Last year he was elevated in the business to become the production manager.
Over winter a typical day might see him behind the laptop planning crop rotations, carrying out maintenance in the workshop and gearing up for the season.
When spring comes along his team of six staff are hard at work planting and cultivating to get crops in the ground. Entering early summer is a maintenance phase to make sure crops have enough moisture and fertiliser, and the spraying programme is on schedule.
Then through March and April harvesting goes "24/7" as much as the season allows. A previously wet season was tricky, but the seasonal changes are part and parcel of growing.
"I think a lot of people don't see and appreciate what goes on during the spring and summer months. Sometimes they might only see the winter work which is quiet with shorter days, but then in summer they forget you are up before the sun and working long after it's down. It changes a fair bit and my role has also changed."
Working more in the office comes with the territory now, and his team does much of the grunt work, but he never asks them to do a job he has not done himself — from hand-picking broccoli to every other task.
The day before winning the Canterbury Young Grower regional competition, he was working on a potato grader.
"I'm probably happiest in the tractor to be honest, as I can crack on and do a job rather than moving all the pieces.
"I think every farmer will tell you that they would pick a tractor seat over an office seat any day of the week."
Aside from the career opportunities, a Kiwi partner is another reason keeping him in New Zealand.
Then there is the allure of living in the South Island and going from work to a skifield on a winter weekend or hiking in the summer.
At first glance it might appear vegetable growing has taken him away from his university qualifications, but he sees this differently.
The degree was largely focused on sustainability and looking after the environment with part of it conserving species in the wild.
"But we could pick and choose our majors and I majored in soil science because I always knew I wanted to be growing things whether in a nursery or in propagation, farming or in an orchard.
"I didn't want to do straight agronomy and commercial farming and, yes, that's what I am doing now, but I also love that [Oakley's owner] Robin Oakley is very open to new initiatives and doing things better in sustainability.
"So we use a lot of tech for our soil moisture and do heaps of soil testing and leaf testing to make sure we are doing the best for our crop as a business, but also for the environment in terms of leaching and excess fertiliser.
"We are a company that is sustainably focused and that's what gives me that kick from the conservation and ecology side that we do a lot of work to get our soils and microbes right."
As the Canterbury Young Grower titleholder, Mr Rink will contest the national competition against six other regional winners in Christchurch in September.
That will arrive "slap-bang" in the planting season, so he is about to start his homework for the final, including knocking on the doors of industry people to get an insight into avocado, kiwifruit and other horticulture growing outside of his expertise.
"I always say I'm definitely not the smartest in the room but I know who to ask to get that information. That's my key strength, on how to identify a problem and find out how to solve it."
The Canterbury competition was the first to be held in the region for several years.
'The modules were a mixture of the basics that we all need to know and also stuff that really stretched us. I had thought it would be nerve racking but it turned out to be really enjoyable.'
Runner up was Brooke Chambers, who is part of the operational team for Farm Right's orchard development in Canterbury.
Beyond the immediate future of the competition, Mr Rink has mentally committed to giving his all to Oakley's for the next few years.
When he first started as production manager it seemed overwhelming but he's grown into the job, wanting to continue learning all he can about vegetable growing.
Where that would take him next, he was unsure, but working for himself one day was on the to-do list.
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