Family fun and commitment at Elsthorpe
A Central Hawke’s Bay farming family has fenced, leased and worked its way to farm ownership. Kate Taylor reports.
Logie grew up on a farm and our kids have always been very involved with what we do and we do so many jobs together as a family as well.
Kate Laugesen
Young pheasant chicks will be making their new home on an Elsthorpe farm dam this Christmas. But the Laugesen kids might not be there to see much of them. They’re hoping to repeat last year’s summer holidays and camp out the back of the farm.
Planting native trees, regenerating wetlands and restoring birdlife is a huge bonus of farming for Graeme, who’s known by all as Logie, and Kate Laugesen and their children – Phoebe, 15, Maddy, 13, and Jack, 9.
‘‘Of course we like shooting the ducks too,’’ says Logie, laughing.
‘‘Not the pheasants though Dad,’’ adds Phoebe, with a stern look at her father, who agrees. They have ordered pheasant chicks from a firm in Hastings to release on a dam on the farm.
‘‘They’re neat-looking birds and Dad’s always wanted some,’’ she says.
It’s morning tea time in the October school holidays at the Laugesens’ 243 hectare property, Maronga, where they’ve farmed for 21⁄2 years.
The kids are touting a flier advertising sheep manure for sale by the trailer load – they cleaned the woolshed and dug out manure for the first week of the holidays to earn a trip to Lake Waikaremoana in the second week – and Kate has printed off a detailed pictorial diary of the development work they’ve done on the property. It’s a great record of clearing drains, spraying rushes, replacing pine shelter belts with native trees, cleaning dams, building culverts and subdividing paddocks – complete with new names, such as Phoebe, Madeline and Jack.
The family has just returned from a farm tour with the parents on a ‘‘side-by-side’’ and each of the siblings on their own two-wheeler. The two girls are experienced riders and Jack is keen to keep up. Even a tumble doesn’t dent his enthusiasm.
They’ve grown up farming, says Kate, who is a director at Hawke’s Bay firm BM Accounting.
‘‘I’m in charge of the mornings, getting the kids off to school and Logie has them after school, so they’re used to getting off the bus and going out on the farm.
‘‘They can move stock on their bikes and they certainly know how to open and shut gates for us,’’ she says, laughing.
‘‘Docking is always a family affair. The kids have literally grown up doing stuff on the farm.’’
Living, working and playing on the farm is a huge part of the Laugesen family philosophy.
‘‘Logie grew up on a farm and our kids have always been very involved with what we do and we do so many jobs together as a family as well. I work full-time so we all help when we can when we’re needed. It’s our farm,’’ she says.
Phoebe now has her own dog, a huntaway named Jimmy, and can take over tasks such as drenching when she’s home at weekends or holidays from boarding at Napier Girls’ High School, where she is a member of its Teen Ag Young Farmers Club.
Maddy and Jack are at Elsthorpe School, although Maddy will join her sister in Napier next year.
One of the things they most love doing, apart from riding their motorbikes, is planting trees. Erosion control poles are planted in winter and a lot of work has been done fencing and planting several waterways and dams.
It’s shade in the summer and erosion control when it’s wet, explains Phoebe.
‘‘We also put poplars on some of the dry areas because the stock camp in the shade, drop poo and create more topsoil. But we will have to manage them so we don’t end up with big, messy ones.’’
The back dam mentioned earlier is part of a retention dam system for the Makara flood mitigation scheme. When water levels are high or flooding, the basin fills with water. Their first spring on the farm saw 240 millimetres of rain fall in three days that definitely put the scheme to work.
Phoebe makes fun of the fact Logie is always pointing out trees he planted on the neighbouring Edenham as a youngster, then turns around and points out a couple she’s planted.
‘‘It is nice to think they’ll look back and see the results of their hard work,’’ says Logie.
He and Kate were born and bred in central Hawke’s Bay.
Kate grew up in Otane, where her parents owned the local store. She studied accountancy at Massey University and worked in several Hawke’s Bay firms before settling with BM Accounting, where she has been a director since 2014.
Logie grew up in Elsthorpe – his parents Rex and the late Peggy managed Edenham Station for the Nilsson Estate for 23 years. It is now owned by Landcorp. After going to Smedley Station cadet training farm for two years, he shepherded on a couple of farms in the Omakere area before heading overseas where he did a lambing beat, did a season’s shearing and drove tractors in Scotland.
He bought 60ha at the Elsthorpe end of Atua Rd in 1995 (about three kilometres away from Maronga). It was behind a 40ha block his parents had bought years earlier and he ran them in partnership with Rex for a few years.
Logie and Kate bought a lifestyle block in 1997 and built a house on River Rd, east of Waipawa.
‘‘We leased one farm near that when Phoebe was a baby and then another farm three years later,’’ Kate says.’’ ‘‘Logie was fencing full-time from 1995 until 2006. We continued with one gang for about a year after that but stopped because Logie was now full-time farming with about 486ha to run.’’
The family still leases 242ha at Patangata but the management of the original 244ha block was taken back by the owners in July. They sold the lifestyle block at River Rd in October 2013 and took over Maronga from the Addis family in April 2014.
The Laugesens run 1000 romney ewes that are bought from James Kilmister in Hunterville as five-year-olds every January.
‘‘We know the farmer and the property. We know they are genuine ewes that have been mouthed and uddered properly.’’
The average lambing is 145 per cent with an early lambing date of mid-July due to early dry conditions on the Patangata lease block.
‘‘We try to get as many away off their mothers as quick as we can, just over half usually. We start picking on November 20 at about 17-18kg (carcassweight). The ones that are left go on the lucerne, there’s 31ha of that, and we grow them out to heavier weights that could be 20-22kg. It depends on the season.’’
They hold about 1500 trade lambs through the winter before shearing them and putting them on the lucerne to finish before being killed in September-October at 22-24kg. Normally they supply Progressive Meats, but supply Te Kuiti Meats as well depending on weights.
This is the second season Maronga has grazed 205 dairy heifers from a farm at Onga Onga.
‘‘It works in well with what we do but they do require top-quality feed. They come in at about 100kg from the dairy farm at the start of December and we take them right through to the following May, so we have two age groups from December to May. The older ones are with the bull at the moment and they’ll go back to the farm on the first of May.’’
The farm also grazed 150 cows from the same farm this winter.
‘‘The pasture here didn’t traditionally have cattle on it so we’re working hard to turn that around. We’re putting in new grass every season, which means we have the crops to put the cattle on as well. This winter we had
20ha of kale, which will go back into hunter for the summer. We have 31ha of new grass at the moment and that’s increasing all the time.’’
As well as his own fencing experience, Logie is grateful for the time he spent driving tractors in Scotland as he does all the farm’s ag work, except drilling and baling.
In a new move this season, the farm has a contract with Brownrigg Agriculture to grow
5-6ha of squash.
‘‘It’s in a tile-drained area and the pastures are all very old. It’s another good way for us to get new grass in.’’
The third cattle stock class is
150 R1 wagyu heifers and steers sourced from Wagyu Grazing.
‘‘Before we started doing the dairy grazers as well, we could have up to 800 wagyu animals across the blocks. Every year, Tim and Erin [from Wagyu Grazing] have helped us out with anything we needed. We also just had wagyu here [Maronga] to start with because we sold our breeding cows to help buy the farm.’’
The couple bought 40 angus breeding cows about 10 years ago and bred that number up to 128 by the time they were sold in March
2015 to help buy the farm. They also used the block on Atua Rd as security. Rex still owns one and leases the other from Logie and Kate.