Phoenix Garlic Ltd
The mix of Pat’s and Gaye’s farming backgrounds, Pat from a Marlborough dairy farm and Gaye’s from a North Canterbury sheep farm, has created a unique hybrid of sorts – garlic and shallot growers. Pat’s mother always said ‘you’ll never go wrong farming. If all else fails you can always eat what you grow.’ Pat and Gaye have thought a lot about this and just in case life got that grim, ten years ago they also planted 20 hectares of grapes just to make sure the meals didn’t get too predictable!
Pat and Gaye were married in 1978. It’s true they would not be here today if Gaye’s fantastic salary as a dental nurse hadn’t supplemented Pat’s flights of fancy in trying to grow garlic commercially. In fact, their first crop was harvested in February 1978, just three months before their wedding. It was a beautiful crop and a prominent local identity who was trading some produce at the time saw the crop and asked to buy it ‘in the field’. Pat thought this was pretty amazing so demanded a small deposit and sold the crop. The balance didn’t arrive as the local identity had fallen on hard times. So had Pat! He wasn’t telling Gaye though.
Garlic was a crop Pat’s mother and father grew to supplement the family income. Pat remembers Alan Beaufoy from Turners and Growers buying a small crop off his mother for 9 pence/lb and she reckoned she made a small fortune. The next year Pat’s father sold the same man (AB) a five acre crop which was graded in one day in the field and 1000*20kg bags were shipped that night to meet a vessel in Lyttelton for Fiji. By today’s standards, that’s still a pretty good crop.
In 1978, Pat and Gaye bought a small, 8 hectare farm and leased 30 hectares from Pat’s parents early in their married life and had no choice but to take a risk on a high value garlic crop if they were to get ahead at all. The house they lived in for the first three years as a couple was so run down, that Pat signed it up quickly before Gaye had been through it – on the premise that the land was a huge opportunity. The truth was that if Gaye had seen through the house first, she would never have agreed. Ever since that day, decision-making has been a more democratic process.
Pat and Gaye have been a permanent feature of the garlic industry in New Zealand for thirty years now. Three years ago they had the opportunity to buy out other members of a local co-operative who had grown tired of the hard work competing against cheap imported product and perhaps the alternatives offered by an ever-expanding local wine industry. Pat and Gaye said “great, let’s have a shot’.
They have a commitment to innovation, to change and to continuous improvement. They accepted long ago the challenge of growing a difficult crop and are unfazed by competition from the monstrous, cheap Chinese product.
The keys to their success have been the joint vision they share to do something different, to produce a crop they could enjoy growing and be proud of as they watch it exit their packhouse. Pat and Gaye are bold, and have been risk takers with their own money, and they back themselves and take the satisfaction that comes from that. Each season is a new one and they love planting time in the depths of winter in the rain and frost as much as they enjoy the highs and lows of summer when the crop result makes them smile or frown. Each year, it is back to the drawing-board to see what they can do better.
The multi-million dollar garlic and shallot business run by Gaye and Pat serves both local and export markets including Australia, the Pacific region and Japan. All are important but with the demise in recent years of other local garlic operations, Pat and Gaye are hard-pressed to keep meeting domestic demand. They have made a huge financial commitment to improving local seed lines but have had little success finding their way through the morass of bureaucracy that prevents the importation of new seed. This is the latest challenge which will be conquered.
Pat and Gaye have a daughter and son-in-law who both teach in England. Son John and his wife have just joined the business and become third generation growers when they plant the first crop in their own name this July. Youngest daughter Annabel is a zookeeper about to terrorise her parents by heading off shortly to the jungle in Borneo in pursuit of gorillas.