Grant and Bronwyn Campbell are Southland born and bred, both growing up on family farms. Grant was brought up on the fifth-generation family farm he now manages at Forest Hill. Bronwyn spent her early years on a five-acre farmlet at Makarewa and then moved to a 260-acre sheep and deer farm, bought by her parents in the 1980’s at Glencoe, for her teenage years. The couple have two sons, Navarre who is now in the USA in the second year of his scholarship and Travis who is in his first year out of school driving trucks for a local rural transport company.

The Kinrae Story

In the late 1800’s a young man saw an advertisement in a shop window in his local village in Scotland. It was offering positions for farm labourers in New Zealand. Though his family had operated Bridgehouse Farm for nearly 600 years, there was no opportunity for Bill Baird to advance to land ownership in his home country. So, he bid farewell to his family and set off for a new life in New Zealand.

Though, obviously there were better opportunities here than in Scotland, achieving farm ownership without initial capital was still a tall order. But he made it and the existing property at Kinrae includes the second block of land he owned in New Zealand. His daughter married Jim Campbell and together they farmed Kinrae from 1946 through to 1967 when their son Robin joined the partnership. In 1972 the operation passed to Lynley and Robin Campbell and in 2005 Bronwyn and Grant took over.

Kinrae means ‘The low hill going down to the flats’ and given the geography of the land it is a most appropriate name, even though Janet Campbell chose the name simply because she liked it and without referring to any dictionary.

The property has mostly been given to sheep production though in the 1960’s and 70’s and again under Bronwyn and Grant’s management cereal cropping has been added to the mix.

Throughout the early 1980’s Lynley and Robin were achieving up 350 kgs of meat and 150 kgs of wool production per hectare, and on this basis began to consider what the next step might be. In 1984 they established the Kinrae stud on a base of NZ Romney Development Group stock. In 1992 the TEFRom (½ Romney, ¼ Texel, ¼ East Fresian) composite was developed after Robin returned from a scholarship in the UK and Europe and saw a market there that demanded high lean growth rates and greater carcass weights and larger muscle areas.