| 57 nzdairy “There’s so much compliance, like with everything, but it’s taken the joy out of farming for me. So for me that was the final impetus for putting it on the market. I didn’t want to milk cows and deal with staff any more.” DAIRY PEOPLE » Nigel Rawlings The farm just out of Otorohanga that the Rawlings family has just sold has been in his family for over 100 years, it’s part of their history as well as part of New Zealand’s broader history. One of the Mangawhero Road Soldier Settlement blocks, it was given to Nigel’s grandfather Thomas Geoffrey Rawlings by the government on his return from the First World War in 1919. “They were all 70 acre ballot blocks and they all had water access from the Mangawhero Stream at the time, the road more-or-less follows the river,” explains Nigel. “They were all cut over Kahikatea swamp. The trees had been milled for butter boxes and things like that so it was all stumps and swamp basically.” Nigel’s memory of the stories he was told as a child is being refreshed with the clean out of decades of photos and old farm gear from the sheds. His grandmother Ethel married Thomas a year or so after he’d settled. By then he’d built a little house and moved out of the tent under one of the remaining Kahikatea trees he’d been living in. As the story goes, “my grandmother used to say ‘if I could have left after six months I would have gone, but it was too far’,” recounts Nigel with a laugh. “It was hard work. Some of the guys who got the ballots took one look at the farms, went back to town, hopped on a train and never came back.” Thomas eventually took over two or three of the other ballots, and he and Ethel had four boys and a girl including Leonard, Nigel’s father. “My grandfather was quite an entrepreneur. In the early days he made most of his money growing vegetables on the higher ground which he sold in town. Then he bought another nearby farm and started a quarrying business supplying most of the metal for the local roads.” By the time Nigel and his former wife Yvonne bought the farm off his father Leonard in 2004 the home farm was around 240 acres (100 hectares), milking 240 Jersey and Jersey Cross cows. Three years later they leased a further 40 hectares and increased the herd to 400. They bought a 100-hectare run off 10 km’s up the road, and five years ago they bought 40 more hectares and went up to around 500 cows making the most of their 40 a side herring-bone shed. Like most farms in Otorohanga they’re summer safe and according to the land-agent they’ve got the best soil in the district which Nigel thinks is probably true.Running the farm in the last few years was made easier with help from their daughter Jess (30yrs) who’s the local fertiliser rep for Ballance, and her husband Rick, an electrician, who Nigel and Yvonne Rawlings and family. End of an era for the Rawlings family Virginia Wright discovered a love of farming once she talked him into giving it a go. “He’s been running the farm for the last two years basically. My younger daughter Caitlyn (25yrs) has been on the farm for the last 18 months and on and off before then. She loves farming and might stay on with the new owners, whereas my son Mitchell (28 yrs) was never interested, says Nigel. “He’s working in banking in Auckland.” The combination of his marriage breaking down, Jess and Rick having a baby boy and deciding to give farming a break for a year, and Nigel’s increasing disillusion with the way farming’s going, were all factors in the difficult decision to sell the farm after 35 years of farming . “There’s so much compliance, like with everything, but it’s taken the joy out of farming for me,” says Nigel. “So for me that was the final impetus for putting it on the market. I didn’t want to milk cows and deal with staff any more.” While it’s obviously a wrench there’s also a sense of relief for Nigel, helped by the fact the the buyer is another local Otorohanga dairy family who’s already looking at how to improve things. “I’m really pleased they’ve got it, I think they’re going to do some neat stuff with it, improving the shed and putting electronic collars on the cows to make things easier,” says Nigel. In the short-term Nigel’s looking forward to a life without 5am starts and not being tied to a routine. After taking a break he may well put his years of experience working with the land to good use, doing small block contracting, helping others make the most of their lifestyle blocks. 40 Turongo St, Otorohanga 07 873 8673 www.pumpn.co.nz Patented Product Kurt Dunn Director M 027 4436 878 | E kurt@kdelectrical.info 7 Lawrence St, Otorohanga | PO Box 42, T.A 3840 ELECTRICAL C O MM E R C I A L / R E S I D E N T I A L / R U R A L Farm Maintenance / Cowsheds New Homes / Alterations / Rewires
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