HE SPENT time in his youth skiing southern slopes as a self-confessed adrenaline junkie but John Fegan’s career was more about avoiding the cliffs and crevasses that accompany employing farm staff.
Fegan has now decided to call time on being New Zealand’s longest-serving farm employment specialist after two intense and formative decades where he was often a catalyst for some of the change the sector has witnessed.
Fegan says the opportunity to sell Fegan and Co in Cambridge came through a conversation with Hamilton based human resources, employment relations and recruitment consultants Russell and Linda-Maree Drake, with whom he has had a long-term business relationship.
Despite selling the business Fegan intends to continue to play a role in it over coming months and possibly longer.
“Taking the business to the next level was something that was going to involve a lot of investment and time on my behalf. Russell and Linda-Maree already had those skills while I have more of the skills around employment agreements, the top of the cliff stuff, if you like.”
It has been Fegan’s ability to help farmers recognise the importance of good conditions, contracts and processes that has made him and his business something of a go-to practice in recent years but that has not always been the case.
“I think I spent the first decade and a lot of energy convincing farmer clients that if they employed the right person and managed them properly they would not have to stipulate demands like ‘supply your own motorbike because mine always gets wrecked by staff’.”
This came in the form of a consulting business that was an almost quirky anomaly on the farm services landscape, which, at that time was limited to the stock agent, the banker, the accountant and, usually reluctantly, the lawyer.
“I was probably seen more early on as a cost mitigator rather than a value-adder.”
That usually involved helping farmers avoid the increasingly sharp teeth of 1991’s Employment Contracts Act, a piece of legislation that along with his own work did help drag farm employment out of the dark ages.
“A common practice back then on 300-400 cow farms was to employ a staff member over the busy time, then get back from holiday and sack them and milk the cows yourself.
“Farmers who did that just failed to see the short-sightedness of what they were doing to keen young people who wanted to work on farms and would have been well worth keeping.”
It was the same era where staff often shared the house or an unserviced sleep out with little separation for either boss or worker in their farm and personal lives.
Fegan’s niche in farm recruitment was founded as much on his ability to stand on both sides of the contract fence as it was from an understanding of farming’s closeness, demands and constant one-on-one contact with staff.
He grew up on a Waikato drystock farm and after graduating from Lincoln in the mid eighties spent time working in the mohair goat industry, setting up a branch of the Mohair-Cashmere warehouse in Timaru. That was before the entire sector disappeared in a puff of speculative smoke.
Following that a winter driving skiers over the Crown Range to Cardrona bought the buzz of an adventure guide’s lifestyle, white water rafting and guiding in Queenstown.
“It was a great job for a single guy in his late 20s and I could have stayed at it. The lure of being paid to ski for 120 days of the year was a strong one.”
But after a stint working for a farm education training organisation and having the choice of moving with them to their head office in Wellington or staying put back in the Waikato, he opted to leave and set up his consultancy.
That business has run alongside the dairy sector, in particular, as it experienced its assorted epochs of growth and with them a need for more trained staff on equitable employment agreements.
“The growth in dairy down south in particular meant the good farmers grew, milking more cows on larger farms, but they also came to learn they were no longer managers who converted grass to milk.
“They became managers who managed other people to get them to convert grass to milk. A whole new skill set was required.”
With it has come the influx of overseas workers and Fegan maintains despite some dodgy immigration agents inevitably arising, on the whole the agri-sector is playing a straighter game than others in its treatment of these workers.
Penalties dished out to farmers for failing to keep hours records were lamentable but also partly a function of Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) seeking only a two-week window to assess if staff have been overworked.
“Taking it in spring time for that short period lacks a seasonal view of the whole farming year. If they checked now they would find those same staff are well under their maximum hours.”
With two sons at Lincoln he shares concerns over that institution’s future and about how the farming sector in general is going to cope with the need for more technically proficient farm staff.
“My biggest concern is we are not fundamentally fixing issues I was involved in discussion almost 20 years ago now.
“The industry’s future growth will be restricted by being able to get good people and simply saying we can rely on technology will not suffice. You then need a different type of technically capable farm worker to manage that technology.”
Meantime he feels confident the business and Fegan and Co’s clients will be in more than capable hands as employing and finding the right people becomes ever more challenging and managing staff relationships becomes more complicated.
