Kevin Mortensen. PHOTO: BRIANNA STEWART
LAUGHTER follows Kevin Mortensen around the Te Kūiti Saleyards.
A friendly catch up in the first yard, the receiving end of a teasing joke in the next, and everyone is curious why PGG Wrightson’s King Country regional livestock manager is being followed by a camera.
This month marks 40 years since Kevin started pushing the broom at what was then called Wrightson NMA Ltd.
Since 1983, the company has been through several mergers to become what is now PGG Wrightson, but one thing has remained stable for Kevin.
WORKING LIFE “I have worked for no-one but PGG Wrightson and worn nothing but a blue shirt my entire working life.”
That isn’t to say Kevin has stayed in the King Country his entire working life, though.
He first got some work experience with the company a couple years before he left school, helping at cattle days at the Piopio and Te Kūiti saleyards on Fridays.
But he doesn’t count that in his official four decades at PGG Wrightson.
On January 5, 1983 he started in Piopio full time.
He stayed for a couple of of years before a brief stint in Te Kūiti as a stock clerk and then another couple of years in Te Awamutu.
He moved further afield in 1987 to Waipukurau in Central Hawke’s Bay, followed by Hokitika in November 1990.
Exactly five years later in November 1995, Kevin returned to Piopio where he has been based ever since.
“Then all of a sudden, 40 years is done and dusted.”
Kevin said technology had changed the job a lot, particularly when it came to how stock was marketed and sold.
“There’s a lot more now with scales and electronics, whether it be online buying or scales with cents per kilo versus dollars per head.”
Previously much of the marketing was done through newspapers, but Kevin said even in the past five years there had been a major shift towards social media.
The job was busier and with bigger numbers when he started.
“It was probably busier because there wasn’t cell phones, so a lot of the phone work was done at night, whereas now you can do a lot of the phone work and get the organising done during the day.
“There’s still phone work at night, but back in the day of the old RTs, if you had to get hold of somebody, you had to radio the shop and they’d try to ring them if they could.”
Kevin is now working with a lot of the grandchildren of the people he originally worked with, and takes pleasure in saying many have become friends not just clients.
“There’s three generations I’m dealing with in some of these places around.
“You get to know them all pretty well and you get to know what they want, when they want it and how they want it.”
When asked about the best bits of his career, Kevin’s mind goes back to his five years on the West Coast, particularly in Haast.
“Just watching how they operated and sold stock, and forwarding big mobs of cattle through rivers with helicopters and jet boats and dogs and horses – stuff you don’t witness up here.
“It’s all totally different down on that West Coast; it is totally different country down there.
“Some of the highlights of my career were in the cattle sales in Haast.”
Kevin said things were different in Haast now the town had a saleyard.
“But back then, it was a progressive sale. You’d sell one farmer’s cattle in one yard and then we’d all pack up and move to the next sale yards and sell there, sell there, sell there and go right up to the Arawhata.
“It was good fun.”
COMING HOME But having been born, bred and schooled in Piopio, when home started calling he took the opportunity to move back north.
“I was always wanting to come back home and the timing was right,” he said. “The King Country is a very strong sheep and beef area and that’s what I wanted to be involved in. “That’s sort of changed over the years. Now we’re seeing a few more dairy farms come into the King Country.”
With all the changes in in the industry, including increasingly diverse ways of farming developing in the region and farms being sold to trees, the stock agent role was likely to evolve, Kevin said.
“Who knows where it’s going to be in another 20 years.
“Whether I’ll be here to see it, who knows.”
Kevin said he worked with a good team, both in his company and those outside it. His role consisted of “keeping the ship sailing straight” but he said with such an experienced team, including some who had been with the company longer than he had, that task wasn’t too difficult.
He thought positively about much of the past 40 years – although there had been challenges.
TESTING TIMES “It has been a good life. But there has also been testing times when you wonder what the bloody hell you’re in it for.
“You feel a lot of the cockies’ pain. If they’re going through pain, we feel the pain too.”
Some of the hardest moments were just last year.
“With the drought, Covid, works closing as such and just not being able to get stuff gone in the dry. That would have to be some of the most testing seasons we’ve had.”
Kevin said there were days or weeks when nothing seemed to go right, but at the end it all turned out okay.
“That’s about it in a nutshell; 40 years, what more do you say?”
