Murray King grew up on a dairy farm, studied at Lincoln College through the turbulent agricultural downturn of the 1980s, and emerged into a sector shedding workers faster than it was producing them. After a stint in farm management consultancy in South Canterbury, helping farmers either stay in business or exit with dignity, he returned to the family property in Nelson. It was there, managing the home farm and looking for more, that Nuffield entered the picture.
He’d already completed the Kellogg Rural Leadership Programme, which gave him a taste. He’d read Jim Collins’ Good to Great and absorbed its argument about sharpening the saw. What he needed was a nudge, and someone gave him one. Murray applied for the 2003 Nuffield Scholarship, was accepted, and spent 24 weeks travelling the world. Sarah held the fort at home with a two-year-old and a pregnancy. It was not a small ask. With more than two decades of reflection on what followed, the leadership roles, the networks, the business insights that shaped his thinking for years to come, “you probably can’t afford not to do it,” is how he frames that leap now.
His research topic, staffing solutions for New Zealand’s primary industries, reflected a real pressure of the time: low unemployment, talent walking off the land, and a sector struggling to professionalise its people management. His scholar report pulled few punches. It argued that agribusiness needed to treat HR as a strategic discipline, not an afterthought; that the essentials were simply recruit, motivate, and retain; and that leadership on farm required self-awareness as much as technical skill.
One moment stood out above the rest. Driving through the Idaho desert, Murray came across a vast centre-pivot irrigated potato crop, a thriving enterprise built on sunshine and water in the middle of nowhere. It crystallised something: that controlling the controllables was the real game in farming. Water storage became a cornerstone of his subsequent business thinking, and later of his chairmanship of Waimea Irrigators Limited.
