History

The business is a division of Mitchell & Webster. Ross Mitchell and Jock Webster have been farming together since 1972, and Ross's son Peter joined them in 1995. The home farm and birdseed processing business is in Airedale Road Weston, just out of Oamaru.

Topflite Birdseed started with one paddock of it's cropping operation in sunflowers and now more than a third of it's 900 hectares supplies customers all over New Zealand.

Topflite began to specialise in birdseed production in 1975, having previously grown sunflower for oil. They put in one paddock of sunflowers under contract for birdseed and the business literally grew from here. Half the gross income is now earned by producing sunflower and canary seed.

Other crops grown are wheat, barley, ryegrass, rape and kale with other seeds being bought in as needed to achieve an average annual production of around 800 tonnes of birdseed.