On a merino and beef station a few minutes from Lake Tekapo township, the working day no longer ends when the sun goes down. Once the light fades over the Mackenzie Basin, guides wheel out telescopes, rug up small groups of visitors and point them at some of the clearest night skies anywhere on Earth. For the families who farm this high country land, the stars have quietly become a second crop.
The business behind the tours is Go Tekapo, run by director Steve Berge across Balmoral Station and Mt Hay Station, which are owned by the Simpson family. The farms carry about 10,000 merino sheep and 600 cattle, and they are still farmed hard by day. Alongside the stock work sits a growing list of visitor experiences, including horse trekking, quad bike rides, real musters that guests can join, a petting zoo, farm accommodation and the stargazing arm, Silver River Stargazing.
Berge told RNZ’s Country Life that the shift into tourism was not part of a grand plan. “This wasn’t strategically planned, it was more out of farming wasn’t doing so well,” he said. The thinking since then has been simple. “Basically anything that we can do on farm, or close to farm, we’ll have a crack at.”
That willingness to try things has turned a hard patch into a strength. Wool and meat prices swing from season to season, and a run of poor returns can leave a high country operation exposed. By building experiences that visitors pay for directly, the farms have spread their risk across more than one income stream without selling up or walking away from the land. The animals people come to see are the same animals that earn a living in the yards and on the tops.
The stargazing works because of where the farms sit. Lake Tekapo lies inside the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, which earned its dark sky qualification in 2012 and remains one of the largest reserves of its kind in the world. Tight local rules on outdoor lighting keep the glow of towns to a minimum, so on a clear, moonless night the Milky Way stretches from one horizon to the other in a way most New Zealanders never see from a city.
Guide and business manager Sam Blair, who runs the Silver River tours, said the timing of the best viewing sits neatly with the New Zealand off season for other outdoor activity. “Milky Way season runs May through ’til, like, October, for the world,” he said. “For us in New Zealand, that’s our winter.” That means the tours draw people into the district during the colder, quieter months, when farm cash flow and tourist towns can both use the lift.
The visitors themselves have changed. Berge said demand had climbed since the pandemic and that overseas markets had grown quickly. “There’s a lot more tourists after Covid, and especially the Chinese market has grown substantially,” he said. To meet that demand the stargazing tours are offered in Japanese and Mandarin as well as English, and the telescopes on offer include large Dobsonian instruments that gather enough light to show distant clusters and nebulae in real detail.
What strikes many of those visitors is not the technology but the setting. Berge said farming looked much the same the world over, and that people responded to something the Mackenzie has in abundance. “I think farming around the world, is pretty similar,” he said. “I think the thing that strikes people here is that pure, scenic beauty.” Some of the guests are farmers themselves, and a few turn up specifically to see whether they could run a similar sideline on their own land back home.
The model on show near Tekapo is one a lot of rural New Zealand is watching closely. Farm incomes have been squeezed by high costs and uneven commodity prices, and diversifying beyond the farm gate has moved from a fringe idea to a mainstream survival strategy. Agritourism ventures let a working farm earn from its scenery, its animals and its way of life, while keeping the core business of growing food and fibre intact. Done well, it also gives townspeople and overseas guests a rare, close look at how the country actually feeds and clothes itself.
There is a wider benefit too. Dark skies are a resource that costs nothing to keep and a great deal to lose, and every lighting bylaw and shielded lamp in the Mackenzie protects a view that draws people from around the world. A farm that earns money from that darkness has every reason to defend it, which lines up the interests of farmers, tourism operators and the astronomers who prize the reserve. For once the pressures point the same way.
For the Simpsons, the Berges and the guides who work the night shift, it adds up to a living built on the same patch of ground worked twice over. Sheep and cattle by day, star clusters by night, and a steady stream of visitors who leave with a memory of a New Zealand sky they did not know still existed. The reporting on the operation came from RNZ’s Country Life programme.
Have you taken a stargazing or farm tour in the Mackenzie, or is your own farm looking at diversifying beyond stock? Share your experience in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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