Sheep one side, cows the other, pigs roam free
Family values drive Sentry Hill Organics. Kate Taylor visited Tom and PJ White to find out how differently they do things.
There’s a lot of laughter at the White family home in Ashley Clinton – much of it aimed at themselves. ‘‘We just do things differently,’’ says Phillippa White, known locally as PJ. ‘‘Yep, we’re definitely not followers,’’ adds her husband Tom. ‘‘We’re not leaders either though,’’ interrupts PJ, with a shake of her head.
‘‘We’re just doing our own thing and that can take people a bit to get their heads around. Some still can’t figure it out. We’re quite irregular in our farming practices.’’ Tom agrees. ‘‘We’re both from farms – this is my family farm and PJ grew up on a dairy farm in Whanganui – but we don’t have any pre-conceived ideas. We make it up as we go along.’’
Ashley Clinton is a farming community in the foothills of the Ruahine Range in Central Hawke’s Bay. Tom and PJ have been farming 220ha family property Sentry Hill for nine years. Their business includes trade beef and lambs, dairy cows, pigs and sheep’s milk cheese. They’re also certified organic. At any given time, it’s hard to know how many stock units are on the property. They don’t have official production figures for a section of their business or by hectare. That’s not how they operate.
They do it for enjoyment and because of its low impact on the environment, PJ says.
‘‘We’re not organic by default. We do use guano, sulphur, salt and boron as fertiliser and also dolomite and lime in the past, depending on annual soil tests. We’re still low-input though. We don’t make silage or baleage now – why would we? Just to carry more stock. ‘‘We bring animals in when we have too much grass and don’t carry as many when we don’t.’’ They milk 16 mixed-friesian-jersey cross cows, many of which have been raised on the farm. They calve twice through the year to keep the milk supply up.
‘‘We started by buying empty, still-in-milk, organic cows so we could use their milk straight away.’’ The reason they need organic cows and run an organic system – they are certified under Organic Farm NZ for domestic trade but not export – is for the pigs.
There are 80 to 100 berkshire pigs, plus about 70 piglets. When quizzed about numbers, Tom laughs.
‘‘Have you ever tried to count free-range piglets?’’ They have had the two main sows for eight years and one lucky boar named Vernon. ‘‘Everyone wants a pig on a farm,’’ says PJ, still laughing. They sell two to three pigs a week to The Organic Farm Butchery in Hastings. ‘‘Our porkers average 65kg on the hook. They live in the paddock and we don’t ring them or do anything to them. They certainly do a lot of cultivation for us,’’ Tom says, inciting another laugh from PJ. ‘‘They do turn the ground over but we plant barley or maize or sunflowers once they’ve been through. They eat a ridiculous amount of greenery. Their favourite mixture is cloverbrassica crops, which usually have chicory and plantain in them, that they’re break-fed in summer.’’ The couple make no effort to contain the piglets until they’re big enough to do it properly. A training pen helps with ‘‘electricity respect’’, PJ says. ‘‘A good day on the farm is when all the pigs are in the paddocks they’re supposed to be in,’’ Tom adds. More laughter.
Milk is pumped into an old cafeteria on a trailer, transported to the pigs and mixed with farmgrown maize and barley.
Arriving at Sentry Hill in time for the early-morning milking sees PJ already working in the fourstand herringbone while the cows and their calves, which remain with them until weaned, are brought in quietly by Tom. ‘‘Milking is the most fun part of the day,’’ PJ says. Some of the cows produce A2 milk, which is the Whites’ choice of milk at home. ‘‘We also have specific cows we prefer our milk from.’’
The cows share a shed with east friesian ewes – cows on one side and the sheep on the other.
The Whites are building up to a pure east friesian herd with numbers at 42 this season. ‘‘We fell upon them actually. Uh-oh, it’s another long story,’’ Tom says with a smile. Long story short, they started with one ewe and the ewe lamb she arrived with is still being milked today. The cheese inspiration came later. ‘‘I’m always looking for something else to do,’’ PJ says.
‘‘You can stop now,’’ Tom replies. More laughter. PJ says she had been buying sheep’s cheese and milk powder because one of their children was dairy intolerant. But an overseas trip ignited a pipe dream. The farm has frequent Wwoofer (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) visitors. One couple invited the family to their wedding in France.
‘‘They happened to live in a village where they milked sheep. I came home and got four sets of cups inserted into the cow shed. We milked about 12 ewes the first year and I started making cheese straight away.’’
The two sides of the shed run from the vacuum pump. ‘‘It was a bit of a hillbilly installation to start with. We’ve modified the plant over the years and it’s still pretty basic but it does the job.’’
PJ has never been on a cheesemaking course.
‘‘I made some very average cheeses in those first days. It was trial and error and a matter of
We don't have any pre-conceived ideas. We make it up as we go along. Phillippa (PJ) White
working through different recipes.’’
She entered the New Zealand Cheese Awards last year as a home cheese maker and took home a gold for her quark, silver for her feta and bronze for her pecorino as well as winning the overall award for the home-crafted category. Her achievement drew the interest of Auckland-based cheesemonger Calum Hodgson from Sabato.
‘‘He contacted me to ask if I was thinking about turning it into a commercial venture. I sent some samples to him and he said, ‘Hell yes’.’’
Enter the Ministry for Primary Industries and a change in food laws. ‘‘The following 11 months were a struggle. The laws were changed and new rules made but then they had to train people to enforce them. It was March 2017 before I was legally allowed to sell my cheese.’’ The bulk is taken by Sabato and some restaurants in Hawke’s Bay have Sentry Hill’s cheese on their menu. The most popular is the cheese called ‘‘The Cheese with No Name’’, a small, round cheese shaped like camembert. She also makes feta and quark, which are devoured regularly in the White household, as well as hard cheeses if she has the spare milk or time. Her newest product is yoghurt. Because she is self-taught and still building experience, the trial and error factor remains. But the pigs eat everything that doesn’t work, as well as any by-products, so there are no disposal issues. It’s another loop in the business, she says. On the trading side, the farm is carrying 90 R1 and R2 dairy-cross or red devon-cross weaner steers this season plus some other trading cattle (quarantined for 48 hours to be able to graze alongside the others).
They rear 150-200 calves a year (not organic) down from 1000 when they first took over the farm. They are reared on milk powder, kept on separate land to the organic animals and sold at 100kg liveweight.
Other crops on the farm include the 26-seed cocktail mixture that follows the grain.
The mix includes chicory, plantain, yarrow, fescue, lucerne, Italian ryegrass, linseed and many clovers, some of which PJ says she didn’t even know existed.
Forage hedges on laneways will be planted in the future.
They are the fifth generation Whites to live on the property – PJ and Tom took over from his parents John and Irene. PJ trained as a primary school teacher when the children, Ben, 14, Rosie, 12 and George, 16, were younger but has never taught in a school, preferring to be a stay-at-home mum. She is on their local school’s board of trustees while Tom is a volunteer firefighter and also works as a mechanic in Waipukurau through autumn and winter.
A history question sees PJ reading from an old hand-written ledger. She reads from an early entry in 1948 when development began after World War II.
‘‘First stumped and ploughed. Top dressed with super and lime in various amounts.’’
‘‘So much detail,’’ she adds. More laughter.