Forbes Elworthy worked as a shepherd after leaving school but now he runs a company responsible for some $380 million worth of farming assets.
These include an ambitious plan to spend almost $40m on converting 137 hectares of established dairy farm land near Kerikeri into what will be one of the country's biggest kiwifruit orchards.
His Craigmore Sustainables vehicle is also building a fund of $250 million to create a diversified business of the best of New Zealand orchards across a range of fruits – including kiwifruit, apples and wine grapes, plus emerging crops such as cherries, citrus and avocado.
However, the company’s staple includes dozens of agricultural assets, which in New Zealand are owned through dozens of corporate entities and limited partnerships on a co-investment basis.
For example, he founded Map of Ag in 2012, which can integrate a wide range of farm-related data. It works with farm service providers such as vets, agronomists and processors, to join up data inputs which would not otherwise “talk to each other” around the networks of farms they serve.
“For our industry, data is a means to an end. It is not valuable until it is made relevant to the optimisation of the farm,” he told the Farmers Guardian.
Brought up on Canterbury’s Craigmore Station, Elworthy went on to study agricultural economics at Lincoln University and then went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
After time at Goldman Sachs, he completed an MBA at Harvard in 1992. Forbes worked as a trader and manager at Merrill Lynch from 1992 to 1999 before founding Craigmore Sustainables in 2008 with his brother-in-law Mark Cox.
It now manages a mix of dairy, grazing, forestry and horticultural properties throughout New Zealand, encompassing more than 15,000ha, and including dairy interests in North Otago.
A focus on planting marginal hill country in new carbon and timber forests means those forests are now absorbing sufficient carbon dioxide to offset two-thirds of the net greenhouse gas emissions of a small New Zealand city for the next 15 years.
2018: $60 million