Waimate, South Island, New Zealand 6 December 2008

We stayed with Hayley, Ritchie and their two girls, Annie and Cara for one night in Waimate although we could have easily stayed longer.

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While Hayley and I have emailed and spoken on the phone, we’d not seen each other for about 11 years but it felt like we’d seen each other yesterday.



Hayley and Ritchie moved here from up in the North Island 3 ½ years ago and they converted the property from a sheep and beef farm to a dairy farm. Anyone involved in farming knows what this entails and it is a huge effort and had to be completed before the cows started calving. The farm had to be divided into suitable sized paddocks (they mapped and divided it using GPS), races created, water and irrigations systems had to be installed, milking shed built and so on. They built up their herd from 600 cows to 1200 over a couple of seasons. To put it mildly it’s a huge operation and, having worked on dairy farms and knowing how tough it is, I’ve huge respect for them both. They’re highly successful and the operation they have in place now milks over 1200 cows every day in a highly modernised 60-bale rotary shed, employs 8 staff and has a turnover of millions and millions of dollars.

Staff spend about 10 hours in the milking shed every day. Someone has the unenviable task of taking off the cups and doing the health checks - a tough, mundane but hugely important job. With cows worth around NZ$2,800 maintaining these animals and their productivity is paramount.



This is what a rotary milking system looks like and the staff have to be in the shed at 4:30am every morning and aren’t finished until about 8:30-9:00. Then it starts all over again with the afternoon milking at 2:30pm.



We headed down to the shed towards the end of milking, found our way blocked by the irrigation pivot and as a result had to find different way around to the shed. We got a bit lost on the way and had a fun time negotiating our way down a couple of cow-s**t covered races with the car fishtailing around a bit (I was driving – too fast). We found our way there eventually and after briefly umming and ahhing about it, Euan decided to get geared up and try his hand along side one of the other staff, a chap from Indonesia.



This is one of four irrigation pivots that are on the farm and Hayley and Ritchie employ someone who works full-time maintaining and shifting the irrigation systems. As you can see, the pivots (this is one of four) just roll over any 2-wire electric fences in its path and this one blocked the race at certain times during its cycle. This pivot takes five days to do a full cycle before heading back the way it came, pumping water out 24x7. The water usage figure for the property is about 120lt water/cow/day. I’ll leave you to do the math but it’s a lot of water!



Some of the benefits of living on a property like this can come in the form of accommodation (but equally it can be a downside with some pretty awful homes offered!) and we reckon that Hayley and Ritchie have definitely won on this deal as their home is pretty incredible. It is immense and my wee London flat would have easily fit into two or three of the rooms!



The hallway itself was easily as wide as my lounge, if not wider, and the house is kitted out with a stud that must be about 15ft high.



To cap it all off, the coast is about 400m away from the house and we could hear the roaring of the surf from our bedroom that night. A wonderful sound and when Ritchie took us down to the sea we saw exactly why the noise was so loud. The beach was large flat pebbles and there was a steep drop-off into surf that you would be mad to go into. The pebbles were literally picked up from a depth and dumped from height onto others and the noise was fantastic. A pretty wild sort of place.