Mike Casey

Mike Casey is a New Zealand entrepreneur, software developer turned cherry orchardist and electrification advocate, the founder of Forest Lodge Orchard, widely regarded as the world’s first fully electric, zero-fossil-fuel commercial orchard.

Casey’s first career was in technology. After moving to Sydney, he co-founded GradConnection, a software platform connecting university graduates with their first jobs and built it up over more than a decade before selling it to the recruitment company SEEK. In 2019 he returned to New Zealand with his family and capital and a determination to do something about climate change, and, almost incidentally, became a farmer. He and his wife Rebecca bought six hectares near Cromwell in Central Otago and planted thousands of cherry trees, with no horticultural background to speak of.

That lack of convention turned out to be an asset. Doing the numbers on his new orchard, Casey realised how much diesel a conventional operation burned and set out to eliminate it entirely. Forest Lodge became a working proof of concept for electrified farming: more than twenty electric machines, including New Zealand’s first electric frost-fighting fans and the country’s first electric tractor, imported from California, powered by on-site solar generation and battery storage, with no fossil-fuel backup at all. The orchard, which trades its fruit under the Electric Cherries brand, demonstrated something many assumed impossible: that cutting emissions and improving the bottom line could go hand in hand, with running costs a fraction of a diesel equivalent.

Casey’s ambition quickly outgrew the orchard gate. He co-founded a zero-fossil-fuel certification for New Zealand producers and now serves as chief executive of Rewiring Aotearoa, a charity dedicated to electrifying the millions of fossil-fuel machines across the country as quickly as possible, turning his single-orchard experiment into a national movement. In 2026 he was named New Zealand Sustainability Leader of the Year.

Casey’s profile is noteworthy because he represents a distinctly modern kind of New Zealand entrepreneur: someone who applied a technologist’s mindset and a builder’s capital to one of the hardest, most physical industries and used it to make a broader public argument. His work shows that electrification can be practical, profitable and replicable and it sits alongside companies like Halter in a wider story about New Zealand reinventing how its farms run. He also features in Secrets of New Zealand’s Most Innovative Entrepreneurs.

Sources: Wikipedia · EY New Zealand · Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year