Back from the brink after an outbreak of TB
Andrea Fox meets a farmer on a journey back from the devastation of bovine TB.
Stu Husband survived a brutal stabbing and many a flaming building but it’s been farming that has scarred him most.
The Tauhei dairy farmer, Waikato regional councillor and Federated Farmers Morrinsville chairman is picking up the pieces of a life devastated four years ago by events around a TB outbreak in his herd on a leased farm at Te Aroha.
He lost 200 cows to the disease and, in the bitter aftermath of selling the rest of his herd and leaving the farm, a lot of his faith in human nature.
Husband’s reluctant to name names and rehash the past too deeply; recollecting the grim time leaves him shaken and grieving again.
Suffice to say seeing off calf club cows which were ‘‘part of the family’’, being treated ‘‘like a leper’’, having his kids come home crying after schoolyard taunts, and some shocking disillusionments about people have left their mark.
The former Mt Eden prison officer – scene of his stabbing: the butcher’s knife sliced between his liver and lung – and south Auckland firefighter doesn’t cave easily to pressure but recalls ‘‘I lost the plot for a while and said that’s it, farming’s over’’.
‘‘Two more years on that job and I’d have been on a flat farm at Waitoa. I’d have been on a nice 150 acres milking 150 cows which had always been my dream – I don’t want to be the richest guy in the graveyard – and with a nice family life.’’
The reality was the father of six, who at the tail end of the TB drama was elected to the Waikato Regional Council on a hopeful platform of making a difference to the TB regulatory regime, salvaged enough to finance a house and one acre at Tauhei.
‘‘I hated that house because of the way it came. It wasn’t my home. But farming’s in my blood so I lasted about two months there going mad before I asked the kids if they wanted to go dairy farming again.’’
The kids said okay and Husband’s recovery began with a sharemilking job with 110 cows at Te Hoe. But the daughter who was going to help him run the farm as he juggled a full three-day-a-week commitment to the regional council as a second-term councillor became pregnant.
‘‘So I’m back in the cowshed. I enjoy work but I couldn’t physically run the farm and do the council and I was completely rundown. We couldn’t afford labour.’’
So Husband finished the yearlong contract at Te Hoe, a neighbour bought his cows, and it was back to the hated house at Tauhei.
He sold this in January last year and rather than rush into an investment decision, accepted the offer of friend and neighbour Hugh Vercoe to bunk down in his woolshed. With him went son Taylor, 16, Husband’s only child still at home.
‘‘It was just one room but it was cool because we really bonded over six months. He’s the only one of them interested in farming and I said to him there’s a farm for sale which was wrapped around the old (hated) place, shall we have a crack?’’
Taylor said yes, the bank said yes (Husband had some money from house ownership elsewhere and savings) and he bought his present home, a 120 hectare effective rolling-to-steep property on Tauhei Rd, in time for last dairy season’s kick-off.
The farm is rundown, money’s tight, but it doesn’t matter: it’s his.
He and his herd manager Natalie Wareham are milking 200 cows twice a day for supply to Open Country Dairy. The previous owner carried 300 cows but Husband says the farm can’t sustain that number. ‘‘It’s very comfortable with 200 and the young stock on.’’
All young stock will be kept onfarm – never again does Husband intend to lose control of his cows.
The crossbred herd is autumncalving. ‘‘With these hills it’s better not to be milking in summer because there’s no grass,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s great to have your break in summer and I don’t mind milking in winter. And there’s no trudging around in the mud after calves.’’
The plan is in four years to have converted the herd to recorded jerseys.
When Husband took over the farm it was split calving with a town supply contract.
The cows he took over in May last year were light, and he immediately switched to only autumn calving and once-a-day milking, reverting to twice-a-day once they’d gained condition and got in-calf.
Production as at early May was 50,000kg/milksolids.
Husband aims to finish this season on 65,000kg and hopes to eventually lift production to 75,000kg. Calving started on April 1 but from next year mating will kick off from June 1 for a midmarch calving start.
All but 15 of last year’s calves had eczema and had to be disposed of.
That was when Husband ‘‘made the best decision of my life’’.
‘‘I’d been wondering what to do because I didn’t know what was what and money was tight. Would I do AB or put a hereford bull over them? But nothing does a better job than the bull so I got (leased) a line of hereford bulls from Steven and Theresa Stark at Pukemore Station and put them out last season and I’m getting $300 to $400 for the calves.
‘‘With the calf money I’ll be able to buy 25 three year old cows. So I think I’m going to do this for a few years, sell the calves and that money will buy my replacements. I’ll be able to buy the best cows that way.’’
To support his efforts to build a jersey herd he’s switching semen companies from LIC to Samen, a small bull business at Morrinsville.
‘‘This country’s too wet in the winter for big friesians. I want to go to big frame jerseys and I’ve talked to a few guys about these Dutch genetics and they say they’re really good cattle. I want to be a jersey farmer – I just love jerseys – but the small ones are just too small for me. I like a bigger cow, I think you get a better fat-toprotein ratio on the bigger cow.
‘‘You can almost get friesian litres out of a bigger jersey. I hope that’s how it works anyway.’’
Husband’s been a jersey fan since his earliest farming days.
Born and bred in Auckland – his father was a builder there and his grandad a beef butcher at the Auckland Municipal Abattoirs – he always had an itch to farm, spending school holidays on a family cousin’s dairy farm at Hawera before signing up for Federated Farmers’ farm cadet scheme. After graduating Husband soon concluded he wouldn’t be ever buying a farm on worker wages. So at 23 he chased the good money offered by the prison service for eight years before being stabbed by a jail visitor. Recuperating under an ACC alternative work scheme, he worked on Ralph Bax’s dairy farm at Hikutaia before returning to the prison service. Threatened with another stabbing – this time with a piece of wire – he called it quits and joined the fire service, first based in Gisborne, where he worked on a farm on his rostered days off, and then in Auckland where he got a lower order sharemilking job in Waiuku.
Working two jobs was part of his plan to own a farm. In 2007 after eight years with the fire service he was offered a sharemilking job at Te Aroha, eventually leasing that farm and entering the TB nightmare.
Husband reckons the coping mechanisms he learned in the fire service helped him survive the Te Aroha experience.
‘‘The fire service trains you to think quick and change direction fast to find a better way. It also teaches you that even the boy who’s just finished his training can have a great idea. So my (farming) plan is evolving. Nat (herd manager) hates it because I change my mind.’’
Husband is a hands-on local politician in his patch. Cyclone Cook – the second to hit New Zealand in as many weeks recently – hit the Hauraki Plains hard, with severe flooding stranding hundreds of livestock.
Husband, who reckons as a dairy farmer with a working dog he’s a rarity these days, was in hot demand after convincing sceptical local dairy farmers that stranded cows could be ‘‘dogged’’ out and made to swim to safety.
‘‘I took Buck out and we got stuck in. They had to be dogged hard but we got about 200 out. Regional council on the tools.’’