Yams and lambs

For as long as he can remember, fifth generation South Canterbury farmer Alistair Boyce says yams grew untended in the family garden, but in 1991 he and his father tried growing a few commercially, a venture that quickly grew into a serious business that is now one of New Zealand’s largest producers.

“They just grew wild,” Alistair recalls. “They’d come out at Christmas for a roast and that sort of thing and Dad decided to put a row in the garden and they grew damn well. He took a few up to Turners and Growers in Timaru and they said if you can produce them, we’ll take everything you’ve got.”

Alistair reckons the yams on the Waimate farm were probably brought to New Zealand from South America by his seafaring great, great grandfather, a renowned grower and propagator of exotic plants, who bought the farm on 24 December 1883.

More than 140 years later, when Alistair came home to the farm to help his parents, it was yams that provided the diversification they needed.

“There wasn’t quite enough turnover to keep me here all the time, so we had to figure out a way to pay for the cost of having me at home. We grew quarter of an acre in the first year and that doubled, and doubled and doubled until 1996 we had seven acres and we were still digging with a fork and bucket.

“I said to Dad, ‘There’s got to be an easier way than this’, so we had our first harvester designed. It wasn’t flash but it did the job for four years and then we had another one built, and that’s when the packing shed was built. There was getting to be a bigger and bigger demand, and we needed to move on into the next phase.”

In the late 1990s the Boyces joined a yam breeding programme run by Crop and Food, as the Crown Research Institute was then known.

“They went round the known yam growers and asked them if they wanted to be involved in field trials for breeding because they had this stuff they’d brought out of South America and they didn’t have enough room to grow it all.

“I think they had about 20 different varieties here from memory, and we narrowed it down to three pretty quick.”

That was the beginning of Alistair’s lifelong fascination with breeding better yams and in 2007, from crossing two of those varieties, they gained a plant variety right (PVR) for their Southern Flame variety, with its very distinctive red tuber. It’s still the main variety they grow, along with a few of the original Market Red variety that grew for so long in their vege patch.

Now alongside their Southern Flame, the cherry-red Southern Ember (PVR006) is coming through, but Alistair is still running his breeding programme to find the perfect yam, both sweet and flavoursome as well as long-keeping and commercially viable.

Alistair is fascinated by the genetics of yams. As an octoploid, they have eight separate sets of DNA (genetic material), compared with the one set that human beings have.“I don’t fully understand what effects that has inside the plant, but it gives them a helluva big breeding potential. From one cross you could have 20 different varieties.”

“We started off with 70 varieties and we’ve narrowed it down to about eight. We try a few rows of each and if they don’t pan out, we feed them to the sheep.”

As well as learning about the genetics of yams, Alistair has learnt how best to grow them on the family farm near Waimate, on the rolling landscape at the base of Hunter Hills. He and Sharon bought Woodlands Farm from his parents in 2007.

“Our ground is not traditional vegetable growing country, and we have very heavy soil which has challenges in itself,” he says. 

He’s self-taught, not having been to university, but after 30 years of observation, along with trial and error, he’s developed a system that works, based on regenerative farming principles.

“There’s a lot of biology goes into it and I’ve hit on a regime of planting mixed pasture after the yams and it’s just improving the soil within 12 months. It’s how you use those plants, you’ve got to look after them and it’s all about improving the biology of the soil.”

As well as growing yams, Alistair runs 400 breeding ewes plus replacements, and he describes the business as “yams and lambs”. Although there’s not much money in lambs these days, the sheep are an important part of his management, speeding up the process of improving the soil.

“The worms and microbes have to break down the green matter in the soil and that process uses a hell of a lot of nitrogen, whereas if you use animals and it goes through their gut, that’s already broken down, they’ve done the work for you. It doesn’t take as much out of the ground, in fact it increases the biology in the soil.”

The yams require artificial fertiliser as well – “our special brew” – but Alistair strives to minimise his use of chemicals, only using them when he has to.

One of the main things he’s learnt is how to manage Woodlands Farm’s difficult soils.

“Timing is everything when you’re cultivating our soil, using the right equipment at the right time. If you miss out because it’s got too dry or you do it when it’s too wet, you’re back to square one.”

For seven months of the year Alistair and his family run the farm, cultivating the ground and growing yams as well as looking after the sheep, but in winter up to 18 part-time staff are taken on to harvest and pack yams, an operation that lasts five months.

Most of the crop is sent direct to Turners and Growers depots throughout New Zealand for sale through Foodstuffs and Fresh Choice supermarkets as well as a number of independent sellers. Alistair says he’s found the supermarket chain, and especially marketer of 20 years Grant Brian, very supportive.

“Grant started selling our yams in 2004 through Freshmax  and could see the potential of what we had, and now 20 years on is still helping us through Turners and Growers,” Alistair says, but adds he is concerned that national consumption of yams is falling slightly each year.

“They’re seen as an old person’s vegetable, traditionally eaten in roasts. A lot of young people don’t eat roasts, and they have no idea what to do with them, so that’s why we put different ideas on our Facebook page. They’re beautiful in stir fries, beautiful in a butter chicken curry, or in an air fryer. One of my favourites is butter, yams and swede mashed.”

 

This article was first published in the October issue of NZGrower & Orchardist