Time to put feet up for record-breaker

• Published date: 23 April 2024
• Publication title: Ensign, The

Mike Solari celebrated 50 years of farming at Otama with wife Margaret and friends and family recently

After leaving an English agricultural college he started working on a farm his father bought on the Lleyn peninsula in northwest Wales, Mr Solari said. The land was close to the coast and covered in rushes, he said.

The plan was to grow early potatoes as the climate was mild and there were no late frosts.

‘‘The grass grew for 11 months of the year.’’

There were also sheep on the farm and when it came to drenching time four men were needed to catch and hold the sheep which were in pens.

In his second winter on the farm Mr Solari decided to travel to New Zealand and ‘‘study sheep yards’’.

When some English friends knew he was coming to New Zealand they told him to visit Margaret Logan, who lived at Otama, in Southland.

Miss Logan had stayed with them while she was on an exchange.

He arrived at the Otama farm just before Christmas and the family invited him to stay.

‘‘I had a month here.’’

Mr Solari worked for some of that time on Bob Miller’s farm. Mr Miller was married to Merle, Margaret’s sister.

He went home and then returned to New Zealand in January 1968 and proposed to Margaret before going back to Wales.

‘‘He had to go and plant his spuds,’’ Mrs Solari said.

He came back four months later for the wedding and the couple returned to Wales to harvest the potatoes.

By 1974 the Welsh farm was a productive unit and Mr Solari was looking for a new challenge.

The couple had the opportunity to buy land at Otama and so they returned to New Zealand with two children, Liz, 4 and James, 2, new David Brown and Fiat tractors and a self-loading silage wagon.

‘‘I just loved New Zealand. I loved driving tractors on these farms.

‘‘I loved the people.’’

The river silt loam soil was also a lure which was ‘‘much better than we had been farming in Wales’’.

Later, daughters Karen and Amy were born.

During his farming career he enjoyed trying new ways of doing things, Mr Solari said.

When the opportunity came to buy one of the first power harrows imported to New Zealand he was quick to buy it.

Throughout the years he developed a nine-year rotation of crops to improve the fertility of the soil.

One of the crops he grew until recently was oil seed rape.

In the 1980s during the oil crisis he started mixing the oil with diesel.

‘‘We tried it and found our tractors ran well on it.’’

Mrs Solari said at the time when farmers were looking to diversify the crops they grew, the...