A review of New Zealand's experience with assistance to agriculture through the 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent deregulation of the sector in the mid‐1980s provides background to this study. Data for sheep and beef farmers are used to elaborate the variety of financial changes in the boom and bust cycles that followed the policy changes. Changes in farm business stress are examined using some conventional financial ratios. New measures which partition household expenditure between consumption and investment are then developed. These better explain the stress experienced among farm households as a consequence of the readjustment process and provide insight to the impact of the legacy of debt, encouraged by government intervention, on farmers' current and expected household consumption over recent years. New Zealand's experience reveals that farm household consumption stress has been unevenly distributed. This suggests that policy concern, following the removal of government assistance to agriculture, should focus principally on the mitigation of the household distress caused by ongoing farm debt commitment