The cherry farmer who drives a Hilux, powered by a Nissan Leaf battery
Sunday, 21 September 2025
It’s taken an electric tractor, a ute converted to an EV and plenty of determination, but an Otago cherry farmer believes he is the first fully electric food operation in the world.
If you ask Electric Cherries owner Mike Casey about his Toyota Hilux that is powered by a Nissan Leaf battery, he’ll tell you it will beat “any other Hilux on the road, even the performance Hiluxes”.
And he is in the process of getting it road-certified to prove it.
“I want to do some pretty cool stuff with it, go hunting and do some adventures in it … to prove this technology can work.
“The whole thing about Hilux conversion is there’s not really any good electric utes in New Zealand. Hilux has got the emotional attachment to a lot of Kiwi farmers, so why don’t we make a Hilux electric?”
At full voltage the Nissan Leaf battery is “more powerful than any motor that’s existed in any Hilux,” he said.
Casey says it is battery capacity rather than power holding it back, but with use on a farm only needing a battery to have minimum range, his conversion is going to be “absolutely perfect”.
The Hilux conversion is just one of 21 EV machines that allow the Central Otago cherry orchard to be completely electric, prompting a recent name change from Forest Lodge Orchard to what the customers commonly call the business – Electric Cherries.
Casey had “never stepped foot on a farm” when he left the bustling metropolis of Sydney in 2019 with his young family and bought a sheep farm in Mt Pisa, 30 minutes south of Wānaka, to plant 9300 cherry trees.
Originally from Wellington, after completing university he moved to Sydney where he created a start-up company that was essentially a job board for university students. It was acquired by Seek in 2019.
Selling his business gave him the opportunity to “reinvent” himself and return to Aotearoa with his wife, Rebecca, and their two children.
He undertook a complete career overhaul, swapping the tech sector for farming, supported by local cherry farmers to build up the knowledge and skills required.
The shift was a “massive overcompensation” for being sick of working in the corporate world in Sydney.
An electric-powered farm made economic sense, Casey said, one made easier by his frustration at the old diesel irrigation pump that was “on its last legs and kept breaking down”.
“I remember being in the sun with my business partner fixing it and being really badly sunburnt except on areas I’d been completely covered in grease [and thought]: why the f… am I doing this when the sun is giving me the signal it’s time to start powering this stuff from the Central Otago sun rather than Saudi Arabian molecules.”
To run the farm exclusively on diesel would have cost $50,000 annually, he said, but with electric machines running off the national grid he could “more than halve that cost”.
When Casey first installed solar power at the farm it halved his energy costs again, and after going “absolutely crazy with solar” in the last couple of years he estimated he had turned a $50,000 annual bill into a $40,000 revenue stream.
The power of going electric set him on a mission that led to him co-founding the charity Rewiring Aotearoa to help communities across the country unlock the upside of electrification.
He said Kiwis collectively spend about $55 million a day on foreign-sourced energy.
“We could be saving a huge amount of money if we changed our machines to electric and ran off energy that we can create right here in Aotearoa.”
He said he would “die a proud old man” if he was a cherry farmer “in the most electric country in the world”.