Free Speech Space with MJ - Farmer James

Farmer James has been described as a “real kiwi, real chat. bloody good bloke who gives a damn about everyone. kicks in where he needs to kick in with all his strength and compassion. more blokes like this needed in our world!”

Watch the video above or read some of the excerpts to see what all the fuss is about.

MJ: Today we’re talking with Farmer James. And you’re watching Free Speech Space with MJ. And James, it’s nice to have you along. How are you today, mate? Farmer James: I’m pretty good. We had golf after work this afternoon with my boy, so Yep, that’s something I’m trying to do three times three times a week. Not as good as yesterday.

MJ: Now, James, you’ve inspired so many people around the country, particularly obviously farmers, and you’ve really made a huge impact on what’s been going on over the last three years. Tell me about what is it that got you to the point where you really just wanted to reach out and start talking to people, start talking to farmers?

Farmer James: I’ve been blessed or cursed with a habit, just something, just the way I am, that I’ve never been afraid to speak up. Like, I’ve always, if something needed said and if something wasn’t right, even if it wasn’t in my best interest to say it, I’d always have to say it. And when the last couple years started to come about, and I’m talking about you know, the mighty virus that’s locked us all down for the last three years basically. I started to think saying it wasn’t quite right and for a while it... I don’t know. I didn’t do much about it to be fair and I was kind of a wee bit disappointed in myself because I’d sort of sat back and... yeah, didn’t feel right about what I was letting it go and not do anything about it and then the protest or the convoy happened and I remember when that happened I was... I’d given all my staff the weekend off and me and Bronson, 10 year old, were working that day he was getting the cows in for me on his wee bike and stuff I went down to the road and watched all these cars go past and I was real disappointed that I realistically couldn’t have gone because I’d just given my full staff the weekend off so it’d be a bit rude to just bugger off and yeah, so when I sort of watched pretty closely on the Tele and Chantelle Baker and I guess who else there’s a few other people Counterspin and that sort of thing going on I was watching and then that on the Thursday. The first Thursday I think it was when the police come in and tried to move the people I was just I remember waking up to that my wife was following as well because she got mandated out of her she’s working at school and I just that feeling of you really need to do a bit more keep happening and I just said to my wife I said just said, Can you book me some tickets to Wellington? I’m going up on Saturday morning cause I had a meeting on the Friday. So basically I got there out of the way, got the farm set up and took off and I didn’t know how long. I thought I was just going for the weekend, but I didn’t book tickets home at the time cause I wasn’t too sure exactly what was going on and got up there and it was nothing like what the media was making out. It was quite a different feeling. I don’t know, just met a whole bunch of really good Kiwis and I guess...

I don’t know, I was just inspired to do something and then at the same time when I got out there I kinda had this feeling that I could have been the person that gets the farmers rallied together cause I know you have just done an interview with Bryce but I got quite famous for calling out Bryce in a video. Not that I have anything against Bryce. In fact, I do quite appreciate what he’s done but I put a bit of a video out.

So I went up to Wellington, had this feeling that I need to be the person to get the farmers to come along. At the same day I had that feeling, Logan Evans, who was part of Groundswell, rung me and said, can you come back and give me a hand to get the farmers rallied up? And I was like, oh, okay, what does that look like? So I come down and called up Logan and said, what do you reckon? And I didn’t know I’m at this stage, literally just a couple more messages on Facebook and a phone call.

Yeah, so I made a video which went quite viral and then got a group together. We’ve created this Straggle Muster, which was Logan’s name and That Straggle Muster page is actually that’s my FarmerJones page.

So when we got up to Wellington, so we got this group together and we got a huge turnout from the Lower South Island, like we got to Dunedin and I videoed everyone coming past.

So when you’re coming into the end, you go over this hill and you look down into sort of the harbour you can see into where Carersbrook used to be and there’s a fire station up on top of the hill. So Logan was up there and I was still back at like the flood free, like the way down by the airport. And that was the line of traffic that we’d done in the Strugglemuster. So that was pretty cool. Yeah, I don’t know how many k’s, would it be like, I don’t know, 20 minutes or so?

Yeah, it was quite the amount of traffic and that was pretty much all part of the convoy and that was called the struggle master. So it wasn’t very well documented apart from what we did on Facebook but we got a pretty cool group all the way up to Picton and then basically three or four days later the whole thing was finished. So only about not that many of us got over to Wellington because they’d tried to stop all the ferries and it was quite hard to get over. I ended up flying over, but it was, yeah, it was a bit of a pain in the ass.