When Carlos Bagrie and his wife, Nadia Lim, spotted a Queenstown high country station for sale on Trade Me, they took a leap of faith. He talks to TRACEY ROXBURGH about his journey to Queenstown, and his next adventure
Carlos Bagrie’s come full circle.
Growing up on a sheep farm at Morton Mains, about 25km east of Invercargill, the family ties to land in New Zealand date back almost 150 years.
Bagrie, 38, is now a fifth-generation farmer.
The first Bagries arrived here in the 1870s, farming at Clinton, in East Otago, and then moved towards the Whakatipu.
‘‘My great-grandfather and great-grandmother farmed Queenstown Hill and Albert, my grandfather, took that over.
‘‘Unfortunately it was sold, and they moved down to Southland [and] that’s where I grew up.’’
Bagrie attended Dacre Primary School, where he was in a ‘‘huge classroom of, I think, two or three in my year’’, James Hargest High School and then Otago Uni, studying marketing and psychology.
It was there, when he was 20, he met his now-wife, entrepreneur and chef Nadia Lim, at one of the most romantic places in Dunedin (the Captain Cook Tavern) during one of the most romantic times (O-Week).
After graduating, the couple migrated to Auckland where Bagrie — keen to pursue marketing — worked for Fisher & Paykel appliances.
He left about four years later, around the time Lim became the second winner of MasterChef New Zealand, in 2011.
Subsequently, the couple decided to work together on ‘brand Nadia’.
‘‘We had no business plan, we had nothing to sell, so it was actually quite a challenging couple of years, but we were young, we had no kids, so it was all good.’’
Next came My Food Bag — a meal-kit home-delivery service — founded by the couple, along with Cecilia Robinson, Theresa Gattung and James Robinson in 2012.
Then, in 2016, ‘‘I spotted Royalburn for sale on Trade Me’’.
Founded in 1887 by Irish migrant William McKibbon, the 485-plus hectare station, on the Crown Terrace, originally grew wheat and barley for bread and beer.
Bagrie says the opportunity was almost too good to be true.
‘‘I always wanted to move to Queenstown … and it was kind of a dream, a genuine dream, to move back to the land, to move back to a farm.
‘‘So with Royalburn, the location being so central to Arrowtown, but also to Frankton and the airport, I thought if we can make it work, it’s a bit of a no-brainer.’’
Fair to say, they’ve made it work.
They ran it conventionally for the first couple of seasons, before deciding there was a ‘‘deeper opportunity to supply food for the local community’’.
Today, the station’s growing more than 700 tonnes of spray-free seeds and cereals, an organic market garden sprawls across 8ha, they have several thousand sheep, millions of bees, a handful of cattle and an increasingly large flock of chooks, which produce world-class eggs, for which there’s a waiting list in Queenstown and Wānaka.
There’s also an on-site abattoir and butchery, and a new wedding and events venue’s just been completed.
Growing enough food to feed at least 20,000 people, the farm-to-table operation has a heavy focus on circular waste streams and sustainability.
It’s also award-winning.
Last year, Royalburn won the primary sector award for its lamb at the New Zealand Food Awards, the first time it entered.
Stocking top-end restaurants all over the Queenstown-Lakes and in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, in early 2022, the couple also opened Arrowtown’s Royalburn Farm Shop.
‘‘I really do feel a sense of gratitude, especially towards the community of Arrowtown … and all the chefs.
‘‘We just came in here and they really, truly supported us and that’s been the ticket, really, for us to continue with it,’’ Bagrie says.
In retrospect, he reckons they came to Royalburn with ‘‘a healthy level of naivety’’, but pays particular credit to their GM, Michelle Wallace, his ‘‘right-hand woman’’ with whom they’ve built an ‘‘amazing team around the vision’’ — sustainable food production with connection to the environment which ensures longevity for the land and the livestock.
It’s that sort of attitude which helped Bagrie secure a highly-regarded Nuffield NZ Farming Scholarship.
He flew out on Tuesday to spend this month in South America, after which he’ll come back for a bit before heading off ‘‘basically indefinitely’’, through Australia, Africa and Europe.
‘‘It wouldn’t have been possible without Nadia.
‘‘Certainly, my team’s rallied around me, but it’s going to be a challenge for Nadia and I have to say a shout-out to her for all the support thus far.’’
Bagrie’s looking at ‘‘fairly wide research topics’’ — how can agriculture turn waste streams into resources, and what the future of food production is.
On the latter: ‘‘My humble opinion … is we should be looking, as all communities should, at food security and the ability to be able to grow local produce and local food.
‘‘You tend to think of [Queenstown] as skifields and adventure pursuits, but we do have great land and, believe it or not, a relatively-good environment for growing produce.’’
