NZ Dairy Winter 2021

| 49 nz dairy DAIRY AWARDS » Hayden Goodall Top farm manager city boy no longer Hugh de Lacy H e thought it involved just riding round all day on a motorbike chasing cows, but Tauranga- born Hayden Goodall found there was a lot more to dairy farming than that – and it offered him a future that wasn’t available in the building industry he started out in. That future is now, after he won the Bay of Plenty Dairy Manager of the Year title in the 2021 round of industry awards and went on to finish runner-up at the National awards in May. Hayden’s knowledge of farming was zilch when he answered a Trade Me advertisement for a dairy worker on Matt Gow’s 215ha farm, milking 700 cows, near Matata in the Bay of Plenty. After leaving high school Hayden had taken up a job installing insulation in housing sub-divisions, but four or five years in the building industry and the ar- rival of his first child had him looking for something that would offer his wife … and him a better future. “I was looking at farming or commercial fishing, but the fishing would have taken me away from home for three weeks at a time, whereas farming seemed to offer a home and a future,” he says. His candid application to Matt Gow, confessing a complete ignorance of farming, got him an inter- view and a look around the farm, and his positive attitude won him the job. “I quickly found that there was a lot more to it than riding round stuffing cows in a paddock and milking them when you felt like it.” Even the necessary detail in the after-milking wash-up was an eye-opener to him, and the two milkings a day involved little time on a motorbike. But he didn’t mind the work, and from starting out as a farm assistant for Matt Gow in 2014 he was able after four years to take up a second-in- command position on another farm milking 500 cows. In the meantime, in 2016 he had a crack at the Bay of Plenty Dairy Trainee of the Year Award, and was pretty chuffed when he finished third. “I quickly found that there was a lot more to it than riding round stuffing cows in a paddock ...” Bay of Plenty Dairy Manager of the Year Hayden Goodall (top) went on to finish runner-up at the National awards. He contract milks on Matt Gow’s 215ha, 700-cow farm near Matata AFFCO is proud to support Hayden Goodall BayVets Clinic Phone: 07 304 9184 40 Bridge Street, Edgecumbe. Proud to be associated with Hayden Goodall Mi lking Machinery | Water Pumps | Stainless Welding Proudly Suppor t ing Hayden Goodal l Bevan Thomas 027 604 6040 bevanthomas13b@hotmai l .com The next year he won it, and that spurred him on to raising his sights to his successful tilt at this year’s Dairy Manager of the Year Award, with brought with it a plethora of advantages. “The main thing was that I was able to return to this awesome farm” (Matt Gow’s) “as contract milker, starting at the beginning of the current season. “As a result we’ve been able to map out a full career path that should see us with a 50/50 sharemilking agreement within the next five years,” Hayden says. “We don’t want to be farm owners but would like to own, say, a 100ha run-off block that we can raise the young stock on for the contract herd. “We’re going hard to make money now and get management and systems in place for that.” Another benefit of the Manager of the Year Award was the $8000 worth of prizes that came with it. “We were lucky enough to score a new Honda farm-bike and a heap of farm tools which have been hugely useful in making the transition to contract milking.” Hayden’s earlier success in the Trainee of the Year award got him involved in administering the local round of awards whose value he is promoting to the three staff he has working for him. Now with three children – Amelia 10, Lilla 5 and Lincoln 2 – Hayden still manages to find time to going hunting deer, wild pigs and, yes, wallabies, of which there’s a colony in the bush near Rotorua. It’s a far cry from stuffing insulation batts into house-frames, and Hayden’s a city boy no longer.