In late May, I was fortunate to have a week in the US visiting suppliers of an irrigation business we are part owners of. Nothing beats fronting up, in person, and meeting with the people you deal with.

The relationships built face to face are enduring and real.

It was an epic dash, however. We left Christchurch late Sunday afternoon, arrived in Los Angeles mid-Sunday afternoon local time, and had our first meeting two hours later.

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About the author

David Clark

Farmer Focus writer

David Clark runs a 463ha fully irrigated mixed farm with his wife Jayne at Valetta, on the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand’s south island. He grows 400ha of cereals, pulses, forage and vegetable seed crops, runs 1,000 Romney breeding ewes and finishes 8,000 lambs annually.

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Our week continued at that pace, with factory visits, meetings in boardrooms, and evening meals together.

From LA we headed to San Francisco, on to Boise, Rupert and Twin Falls in Idaho, on to Salt Lake City in Utah, down to Dallas, across to Claremont in Florida, before back to Houston, Texas – in a combination of driving and flying.

We then boarded a flight home via Auckland and were back in Christchurch by 9am the following Sunday. A huge week, all done in cattle class.

I love rural America. It’s a great place, with genuine, hard-working and passionate people, both in the regional cities and out in small towns.

A talked-of theme that was very evident when travelling was the demise of the family farm and the growing dominance within agriculture of the corporates and the mega-farms. This trend is, sadly, not isolated to the US.

It was with some trepidation that we headed Stateside, but what struck me was everyone we interacted with, from business owners to waitresses serving our breakfast, was they all just wanted to get on with their lives and do the best they could for their family, which I guess is all each of us wants to achieve.

The chaos that we are seeing from the White House is, in my view, not representative of the US and is being conducted within an enclosed silo isolated from reality or the interests of most of society.

But equally, the other side of politics seems just as separated from the moderates who form the middle of our society.

Maybe the world over, we are sick of the extremes and are looking for our leaders to govern for us in the middle.

The trip to the US really was a great week.