Running the Farm

I remember writing when I was little that I wanted to be a farmer with my dad. Our farm currently is 710 hectares, which is split over three farms – a dairy farm, a drystock and winter crop, and a 300 hectare sheep, bull, beef, cereal-cropping and winter-feed block, which is the home farm. From the original home farm, my dad and his two brothers expanded up to 3,000 hectares, made up of many different farms, and were predominantly breeding ewes and lamb finishing, along with cereal cropping. When I was in my early teens, deer were added to the mix and we even dabbled in ostrich fattening for a handful of years. One of my uncles split off the partnership, so around us we have my two uncles and my cousins, who are all amazing support.

When I left school, I started working fulltime on the farm straight away because it was still a big partnership at that point, and they were needing people. But I was basically just a farm boy helping out, then going off overseas and doing work in Aussie, as long as I was home for lambing each year. That was all that my parents needed – I could work anywhere I wanted, otherwise. I fancied myself as a tractor driver for a while. I went to Aussie and drove a spray rig and a seeder and then ended up in the Kimberleys and worked on a station up there. I ended up spending two weeks semen testing all the bulls with the vet, so that was a cool experience.

Then in 2014, my parents decided to convert one of the farms to dairy when the irrigation scheme started. So I was like, “Right, cool. I’m back for good now.” And then a year later my dad passed really unexpectedly, and I went from “just the boy” to absolutely thrown into it. It’s nine years ago now, but I still get a bit upset about it. He actually went for a triple heart bypass and the surgeon put a stitch too deep and they didn’t look after him. They pushed him into another hospital – they knew that it had gone wrong – and that’s what happened.

My mum was already terminally ill with motor neurone disease. So it was about six months after Dad died, completely out of the blue, that my mum passed. She did a lot family-wise, but she didn’t do anything on the farm. She reared the lambs, but she didn’t do book work. She was already sick. My dad did all that.

I’d done one season of calving and had just started the next one when it all happened. So yeah, it was basically just myself, learning to farm. It was a massive change. Luckily, we had really good people like our Wrightson’s reps around us, and all the contractors we use. Everyone was just amazing at helping me find my feet, and luckily our manager then was my best friend and she was amazing. I wish I could ask my dad questions every day, but my uncles and my cousins are really good. I think the main thing I learned is to just be the person who asks the silly questions.

Two weeks before my dad went up for his bypass, I met my husband, Bryce, at the start of calving. I’d kind of seen him a few times and then he just basically moved in with me after a couple of weeks. He was actually working in forestry – he wasn’t farming at all. So the first couple of years we were together, he carried on with that. And then when I was mid-pregnancy – and I think it was just coming into lambing – he gave up forestry to come back to the farm to help me. He’s learned so much, you’d think he’s been farming all his life! We got married in 2017, and our boys, Lachlan and George, are five and three.

Every year I forget how busy spring gets, but lambing is still my favourite time. We do really intensive lambing, so my thing is saving every single lamb possible. In any sort of bad weather, our sheds are full of anything I can pick up that needs help. We’ve only got 700 sheep, which is not very many, and somehow I still manage to get 115 pet lambs off them. Everyone’s like, “Is it even worth feeding them?” And money-wise, no, but we’ll always do it anyway. My parents did it. It’s just what we do. My mum was vegetarian, and a huge animal lover. So as kids we got taught quite early that if you want to hunt it or you want to kill it, you eat it. And my dad was at uni, in his fifth year of becoming a vet, when his brothers told him he needed to come back to the farm. He was a big animal lover too, wanting to save everything and do what he could.