For more than 50 years, South Canterbury's Turley Farms has been finding new ways to use the agricultural land in the region, adding horticultural crops and hybrid vegetable seed production to traditional arable and livestock options, and now the family company is investing in large-scale apple production as well.
The Turley operation started when Murray Turley's father Alan bought a small farm near Temuka in 1952 which he gradually expanded and by the time his son came home, the property had grown to 400ha, mainly used for arable production.
Under Murray's watch, that grew to 4000ha, producing an expanding range of crops and including a dairy operation, but has since been scaled back to 1900ha with the sale of the dairy farm when Turley's took a 20 percent stake in corporate farming operator Dairy Holdings instead.
The Turleys have always looked for new, more profitable ways to use the land, and were one of the pioneers of growing potatoes and onions at scale in Mid and South Canterbury.
"Potatoes were a low-margin crop, but in the early 1970s we were the first in South Canterbury to mechanically harvest them rather than hand-picking them and that took a lot of costs out of the growing operation for a processing crop," says Murray.
Next on the list was hybrid vegetable seed production, and today Turley's has nearly 200ha devoted to growing carrot, spinach, radish, beet and canola seed for Northern Hemisphere clients. A larger area of land is used for wheat, grass and white clover seed crops, and there are cattle and lambs grazing other parts of the farm as well.
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