Starting Over

When the dairy herd that Morgan Campbell and her husband had spent ten years building was struck with a devastating disease, their lives were turned upside down. In the wake of such a loss, Morgan struggled with depression and feeling disconnected from life. But with fierce determination and courage this businesswoman and mother has built a new life for her family.

The sun and the birds aren't up yet, Morgan's young daughter, Sage, is still asleep and the chooks don't need feeding till later. With a steaming cup of coffee and some easy tunes playing on the radio, Morgan, 36, has a few hours at home in Makikihi, South Canterbury, that are all her own. Raised by a dairy farming family in the remote wilds on the West Coast of the South Island, getting up early is an ingrained habit for this businesswoman and mother. "We had a free-range life growing up," says Morgan. "It was the best upbringing and the farm and the bush were our backyard. If we wanted to visit our friends, we would just hop on our ponies and ride the ten kilometres to go see them!"

Today, Morgan's home is nestled under the Hunters Hills, where she runs 2,000 laying chickens as part of her business, Good Life Eggs. But before this she was a dairy farmer and sharemilker, dedicating her career to the animals she raised and cared for. Then in 2017, Morgan's life was irreversibly altered when Mycoplasma bovis, a disease that can cause a range of serious conditions in cattle, struck New Zealand. "We were the first people in the country to lose our dairy herd to M. bovis," Morgan explains with a heavy tone. "In one month, all of our cattle were culled - 1,700 animals. The hardest part was that they looked beautiful in health. Our lives were completely broken. It's a scar that we will carry forever."

For a long time, anger and grief overwhelmed Morgan and she struggled with depression - often feeling like a stranger in her own body. "Mental health issues were something I thought other people had - not me," says Morgan. "But I loved our cows. Our herd was like family to us. They weren't just a number; they were our life and those were very dark days."

In 2018, Morgan had a new reason to fight for a fresh start - after five years of grueling IVF treatments, Morgan discovered she was pregnant. "Nothing really explains the feeling of when I found out I was carrying Sage. After that amount of time - for us to finally have a positive result - it was just the best thing. I was still doing home pregnancy tests at twelve weeks just to make sure they were right," she says with a laugh. "And I knew I wanted to create a different lifestyle for myself and our family. Our life had been at a standstill for a long time. We were in limbo and we really needed to find some joy again. Those years were a hard slog, but we never gave up hope."