Raised in the small Southland town of Mataura, Andrew Mockford’s parents managed the local freezing works’ farm.
"I grew up on a farm where irrigation fell out of the sky."
His early education was at a small primary and intermediate school of 40 pupils before heading off to be a boarder at Dunedin’s John McGlashan College.
Straight out of high school, he signed up with the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) in 1999, serving for just over 15 years.
The air force was good to him.
For the first half of service he was on the tools as an avionics technician — like an "auto sparky", but for aircraft.
The RNZAF sent him to Antarctica for a month, support operations in Afghanistan, assist with the Sumatran tsunami response and a long list of overseas exercises.
An abiding memory was being part of a delegation unveiling a Kiwi memorial for World War 2 in London’s Hyde Park.
Another deployment saw him go to Gallipoli for the 90th anniversary commemoration of the Anzac landing.
In the second stage of his military career he entered management and leadership after taking a commission as an engineering officer.
As the head of a technical training school, he was in charge of 20 staff training an intake of about 100 technicians.
The military’s esprit de corp — a sense of loyalty and pride shared by members of a group — never left him.
"If you have got the spirit and morale of your people high you can go on and achieve pretty great things ... The thing through the military I really picked up was the importance and value of people. Everything is achieved through people."
Looking back, he sees the leadership and technical background developed in those years provided him the asset management skills to work in other directions.
This was to play in his favour when he left the air force to start working for Trustpower, now Manawa Energy, as its southern regional production leader in charge of managing hydropower schemes and other infrastructure in Otago and Canterbury.
A brief stint for Airways NZ as its South Island maintenance manager was followed by executive and senior roles at Canterbury’s Opuha Water Ltd for more than five years and then Rangitata Diversion Race Management Ltd (RDRML) in mid-2023.
Today his "day job" is the chief executive of MHV Water.
"I’m in the thick of a large irrigation scheme and we are providing irrigation water across 60,000 hectares in the Mid Canterbury area. We look after about 220 shareholders’ properties in terms of water delivery plus the environmental programme that we manage both for farm environment plans and our research programme looking at how we keep improving the environmental performance of the area."
He will continue with the executive position as the new chairman of IrrigationNZ.
The roles were complementary as it was good to have the connection with shareholders and farmers to then scale that into IrrigationNZ for everyone, he said.
Mr Mockford was an elected director on the board for two years before serving the past year as vice-chairman under former chairwoman Keri Johnston.
Now he takes on the lead job for an industry body representing nearly 5000 scheme, service, water user, irrigator and many other members.
He said the organisation would continue to focus on managing irrigation schemes well and improving irrigation.
