I’m originally from Germany. I came to Hamilton at seventeen for an exchange year, went back and finished school in Germany, and then was back on the plane three days later. I promised my father I’d be back within a year. I broke that promise. I never went back.
I went to school with Will that year in Hamilton. He was in my group of friends. When I came back, he was farming in Morrinsville. He took me out to dinner, I moved in with him two weeks later and we’ve been together ever since. I went to university for a year up in Auckland, but it cost me all my savings because I was an international student. I always travelled back to the farm and worked on the weekends to help Will out. I’m a complete city girl, but my grandparents had some land where I learned my work ethic. After that year, we decided that I would throw in the study, and we went off and got another job, contract milking 500 cows for Will’s father. Then we got a 50/50 job not far away. I reared calves that year that I was in uni, but that was my only experience of farming.
At eighteen and nineteen years of age and having only been together as a couple for a couple of months, we had set out a goal of wanting to own a thousand cows’ worth of land by the age of thirty. We had it written up on a piece of paper stuck to the fridge so it became imprinted into our subconscious. We thought, “Right, let’s go all in. Farming is going to be what our family carries.” We got married at twenty-four, and then I had my first child the year after. We were in Ngātea at the time, on the Hauraki Plains, and we grew our herd size moving around the district. We started with 240 cows, and every two years we shifted to another job, bigger herds. So that’s what we did for our first ten years.
The kids were on farm with us, they never went to daycare. We didn’t really go on holiday. We didn’t spend money. We saved everything we could. We worked hard, but we enjoyed it because it was our thing that we did together. It was a really great time, but the land was too expensive. So we thought, “Let’s look up in Northland.” My husband went up and saw the first part of the farm that we bought. He said, “It’s rundown and needs a lot of work, but the bones are good. The ground is good. I think we can make this work.” So we bought it.
My husband’s father was with the same bank for thirty years, so we had the same bank. Then we bought the farm next-door to ours. That was vendor finance. Our bank manager at the time was not aligned with us, so we approached Rabo. Tina, our bank manager –she’s vibrant, she’s energetic, she entertains all ideas. She said, “Right! Of course we can make this work.” We love having a bank that is focused just on ag. They helped us get the farm into our own name.
So that’s now three farms in total. The first two farms, we actually brought them together, but then added on other land, which made the two farms bigger. They were all run down. Honestly, it was an absolute mess. They were pretty much farming thistles rather than rye grass. But that was our opportunity to get into farm ownership. The last farm was beef, but we converted it back into dairy. As a farmer, you can easily find yourself on a negative-thoughts spiral if you focus on the things you can’t control, like weather, payout, interest rates – but what can you gain from that? When we had five days of no power, our newer farm had a generator, so we could walk all the cows from the three farms down there and milk them. We’ve got gas in our house, so all the staff would come every day for dinner. Our staff happiness is important; that the animals are well and fed; and that we get the milk in the vat so we can get paid and the business stays up and running. It’s those three things that we quickly focus on –and having fun with the kids. I’m now a certified life coach and training to be a functional health practitioner, helping other women in midlife. We give a lot as farming women. We’re definitely the backbone of the business. It doesn’t mean you have to burn out and that’s it. That can be rebalanced; you can find your energy to keep going.
Rabobank is New Zealand’s only specialist food and agribusiness bank, and is committed to supporting Kiwi farmers, growers and food producers. Talk to a Rabobank Agribusiness Manager today – rabobank.co.nz/ourpeople.
This story appeared in our Kōanga Spring 2024 Edition.
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