A young farmer walks into the Waikato Times office and asks for a job – he has no clue what made him do it.

This was 53 years ago and now Kingsley Field is at the 50th National Fieldays. He is the only reporter still there after they started in 1969.

He remembers the first Fieldays well. The first two years the event was held at the Te Rapa racecourse in Hamilton. There were about 85 exhibitors and 18,000 people attended.

Field grew up out the back of Otorohanga in the Otewa Valley and did a couple of years’ farming after leaving Wesley College, Pukekohe.

Field’s first memory was the really interesting accumulation of machinery: “What was then fairly innovative stuff, things like post hole diggers and drag lines.”

Ever since they bought the piece of land at Mystery Creek it has continued to grow. Originally there were “doomsayers” who said it would never happen there.

“It’s too far out of town. People will get lost in the fog.”

He says that in fact, it has never looked back.

One of the special things Field recalls over the first decade at Mystery Creek, was the mud. There wasn’t the road infrastructure that there is now, it was just flat paddocks.

“It very quickly churned to mud,” he says. “You’d see poor ladies getting around in high-heel shoes that were ankle deep in mud.”

He says that nowadays there is a big swing towards urban people attending and there is a lot more for them to look at such as the cooking shows.

“The Fieldays has always been at the forefront of all of this innovation and expansion into different fields of farming. There’s always things that are interesting if you wander around and just spend a bit of time looking and listening. Kiwis always seem to be wonderfully ingenious.”

What’s Kingsley looking forward to at this year’s Fieldays? “Whitebait fritters.”

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