From NZ to the UK and Ireland: Sourcing NZ’s Next Season of Tractor Drivers
Words: Richard Houston, Managing Director of Hanzon Jobs Ltd
Scouting the next wave - catching up with UK operators and seeing firsthand who’s ready to take on a Kiwi season behind the wheel.
This June, I packed my boots and headed to the UK to meet seasonal tractor drivers and this time, I brought along a good mate of mine, a farmer from the Waikato. We wanted to get a first-hand look at what the next wave of Kiwi-bound operators might look like. The goal was simple: find switched-on, practical people with the right attitude and ideally, some horsepower under their belt. But as always, it’s a mixed bag.
Along the way, we enjoyed some top-shelf farm visits and a couple of great ag shows - cereals and the Royal Highland Show were real highlights. These events gave us a chance to meet operators, get hands-on with machinery and catch the pulse of what’s happening in UK agriculture. We stayed with a fantastic mix of farming folk. In Devon, we bunked with a young couple working hard to build their livestock business from the ground up. Then in Suffolk, we caught up with a seasoned farm director managing a well-diversified enterprise that had its fingers in everything from cropping to robot calf rearing. We ended the trip in the far north, near Berwick-upon-Tweed, with an old college mate of mine now running his own family large-scale arable operation with real ambition and efficiency. These stops weren’t just hospitality, they were conversations about the future of farming, workforce and the kind of drive it takes to keep things moving.
As for the driver hunt, we met some absolute legends - young operators who’ve grown up on silage wagons and can talk about knife sharpening and gearboxes like they mean it. Those are the ones we’d fly over tomorrow if we could. Of course, there were a few that didn’t quite make the cut, more into the idea of a working holiday than the hard graft. But that’s part of it. Face-to-face beats any CV when you’re trying to figure out who’s going to show up on time when the weather’s turning and the mower’s clogged.
Having my Waikato mate along gave things a fresh edge. He’s hired plenty of drivers over the years and knows what a good one looks like. In Lincolnshire, after chatting with a promising young guy, he said, “That one’s a goer. Bit green, but he listens.”
And he was dead right. There’s real value in that kind of on-the-ground check-in, especially when it’s matched with what the team here at Hanzon knows about the demands of a New Zealand season.
Now that we’re back in NZ, the real work begins. At Hanzon, we’re busy placing the people we met into great Kiwi jobs. We’re matching the dreams and ambitions of these young drivers with the realities of what NZ contractors need - reliable, keen workers who’ll help them through a flat-out season. It’s not just about seat time or licences, it’s about attitude, timing and fit. There’s no perfect match every time, but there’s a lot of potential when the right people are nudged in the right direction. All in all, it was a fantastic trip. Good conversations, a few miles on the road, plenty of rain, plenty of laughs and hopefully, a few game-changing placements for the upcoming NZ season.