Living the good life after 'bovis'
ON a lifestyle block in rural South Canterbury, Kelly and Morgan Campbell are living the good life.
Residing in their dream home, surrounded by hundreds of happy hens, their seemingly idyllic existence belies the rollercoaster ride they have lived the past few years.
Morgan Campbell arguably summed it up best by saying: ‘‘it’s a crazy story . . . with lots of kinks and curves . . . along the way. Dead cows, IVF and chickens.’’
July 22, 2017 is a day that is firmly etched in their memories; the date when the bacterial cattle disease Mycoplasma bovis was declared in New Zealand. It was to have a devastating effect on their sharemilking operation.
But they have come out the other side and Mrs Campbell — who previously thought she would never exit the dairy industry — has made the transition from cows to chooks with the establishment of freerange business Good Life Eggs.
‘‘What’s the saying, where you make the most out of a bad situation? We’ve bought our dream house, a block of land, we’ve got a pretty cool kid, a career we’re loving and we’re strongly focused on being more sustainable and farming our hens in the same fashion.’’
Mrs Campbell had always been involved in the dairy industry. She grew up on a dairy farm on the West Coast and working in the sector was all she ever wanted to do.
‘‘That was the dream,’’ she said.
She moved to the east coast and met her husband Kelly, and the couple managed farms, contract milked and sharemilked.
Then they got hit by M. bovis. The outbreak of the disease, Mrs Campbell stressed, was ‘‘no fault of anybody’’ — ‘‘it was just an absolute freak thing to happen’’— but the effect was devastating for the couple, who were sharemilking in South Canterbury.
They were the first in New Zealand to send their cattle to slaughter. Depopulation started in November and took nearly a month. It was, as she succinctly put it, ‘‘a shitty shitty time’’.
‘‘My cows were more than cows. I just generally was a recluse that lived with my cows. I loved my cows,’’ she said.
The couple owned about 575 cows and leased a further 400, but the animals sent to slaughter numbered about 1700, including young stock and beef animals.
‘‘It was awful. There’s no way to explain how I coped. I remember people asking if I was OK — honestly, I lived in a different realm at that time,’’ Mrs Campbell said.
‘‘I don’t really know how to explain how it all happened. It was a living nightmare. It was an odd feeling. It was happening around you but you kind of didn’t really absorb it,’’ she said.
Sarah Barr, who was at that time involved with the South Canterbury Rural Support
Trust, was her ‘‘lifesaver’’, checking on her every day and ensuring she was fed.
The Ministry for Primary Industries’ handling of the M. bovis response has been widely criticised by those caught up in it, and Mrs Campbell concurred, describing it as ‘‘bullshit’’.
It was three years before they were fully paid compensation — ‘‘because they didn’t know what a 50:50 sharemilker was’’.
It was probably the worst farm to be done first, because it was complicated with lease cattle and runoff blocks but ‘‘they just couldn’t work it out’’.
‘‘You had to stand up for yourself. If we didn’t, where would we be now?’’
Their cattle were dead and they had no income, so they took the first job in the dairy industry that was available. However, in such a damaged state, it was difficult to say they loved doing it, she said.
Amid the stress and heartache, there was a shining light — the birth of the couple’s daughter Sage in November 2018 after a fiveyear journey through IVF treatment.