Honouring Mum and Dad: Farm ownership dream becomes reality

Wednesday, 24 June 2026

Alister and Kylie Stewart have bought their first farm this year. Pictured with their children Charlotte and Thomas Stewart.

For Alister Stewart, buying his first farm is not only the fulfilment of a lifelong dream, it’s about honouring his parent’s legacy.

“The important thing for me was to turn the death of my parents into something positive and move forward. They worked really hard and sacrificed a lot of their time to work to give me good opportunities. I want to take that to the next level and it would be a poor repayment of me not to.”

Stewart, 35, and his wife Kylie, 38, purchased their first dairy farm in Matamata-Piako District this year and reckon life since has been like “skipping through a field of tulips”, despite the “eye watering” mortgage. This comes at a time when dairy farm sales are strong after a healthy season for farmers.

For Alister, owning the farm is about honouring his parents and moving forward after their deaths. Pictured with his wife Kylie and their children Charlotte and Thomas Stewart.

After growing up on his father’s farm before it was sold and later helping out on his uncle’s dairy farm milking, Stewart said he always wanted to go back farming. It was a desire that grew after the death of his parents, who originally planned to go into partnership with him and Kylie.

Stewart has named his farm Ridgeway Natural Farms after his dad’s original farm. After dabbling in a social sciences degree, studying organics and working in kiwifruit orchards, Stewart started working as a farm assistant in his early twenties and planned to work his way up to ownership through contract and sharemilking.

Alister Stewart loves his cows and one of his favourite parts of farming is going out in the paddock for scratches.

However, when he inherited his parents’ home he and Kylie decided to sell it and their own Hamilton house, “get a monster mortgage” and have a crack at dairy farming, ending up just outside Walton.

“It didn’t feel like good luck to us … but we consider ourselves lucky that we didn’t have to go through the traditional pathway of uprooting our family for contract milking.”

Alister Stewart says the farm needs a lot of work putting in infrastructure and weed management, but is excited by the challenge.

The couple put an offer in on the farm at the end of last year and took over June 1. They now milk 226 Jersey cows on the 78ha property and have a 30-a-side herringbone shed. He said the price, infrastructure and five-bedroom home attracted them to the property.

There were multiple parties interested in the property, but they scooped it up for $3.25 million. He reckoned it made financial sense to him to buy a smaller farm and said if he was alive for the next 50 years, he’d still be on this farm.

Alister Stewart is interested in regenerative and organic farming practices and plans to be spray-free. Pictured with his wife Kylie Stewart and their children Charlotte and Thomas Stewart.

“It’s a beautiful farm that just needs polishing … There is a lot of work to do but we both saw the potential.”

Fencing, planting natives and weed control were all priorities for the next year to restore the farm to its former glory. Stewart said he saw himself as a “landscape ecologist” rather than just a farmer and planned to run the farm spray-free, focusing on soil health to rebalance the farm’s biodiversity and reduce weeds.

Bayleys real estate agent Dave Kilbride says there are more serious farm buyers around this year.

He loved problem solving and was excited to be restoring the land. One thing he was looking forward to was planting hundreds of native trees along the waterways.

Kylie described the deal going through as “exciting but daunting”, but they wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“I would encourage other people to buy if they’re able to. The ability to make my own schedule is massive and that’s been a lovely consideration for us as a family. If I need to go to town or take my wife out for lunch, I don’t have to ask anybody’s permission,” Stewart said.

Bayleys agent Dave Kilbride noted that there had been strong farm sales over the last year.

“Generally, there are more people inquiring and turning up to open days. That’s a big difference to a couple of years ago when the intermediaries and bankers would turn up, but there weren’t many serious buyers.”

The Real Estate Institute of New Zealand’s rural and lifestyle report for the year ending March 2026 highlighted a year-on-year increase of 34.4% in Waikato dairy farm sales from 61 to 82. The median price per hectare was $45,550 up 2.1%.

Kilbride noted there were more serious buyers looking and that had turned into multi-offers for the majority of farms he had sold.

“There’s been a number of good years of returns for the dairy farmers, but also this year, we saw a big jump in cow prices.”

This meant the gap between sharemilkers and owners reduced as cow numbers rose by almost half, he estimated, and land value remained stable. Both established farmers and first farm buyers had been active in the market, with more established farmers looking to expand across multiple properties or help children into farm succession.

He had seen more dairy farm sales than sheep and beef as he believed drystock farmers were using higher returns to reinvest in farms.