Year in city convinces Dayna her future rests in country
Former head girl at home on farm
If there was any doubt Dayna Rowe was a country girl at heart, then it was dispelled as she made her way in the world after leaving Te Puke High School at the end of 2016.
The 2016 head girl, the latest to feature in our series of articles catching up with former students, headed to Wellington in 2017 to study performing arts at Victoria University.
“I’d lived rurally my whole life and I thought that going and having this big city life would be what I would want,” she says.
“But every time I left the farm to go back to Wellington, I was in tears. I missed it so much and I hated living in the city.”
When she returned home for summer at the end of her first year, she got a job on the farm.
“I was just spraying weeds and doing odd jobs, and one thing led to another, and three years later, I haven’t actually gone back to university.”
Dayna says many of the people she met in Wellington didn’t understand country life.
“I guess a lot of people there didn’t understand my background or what made me tick.
“I was friends with a lot of people from Auckland and Wellington and they’d never experienced country life and didn’t understand.
“We are quite different people, we work in different ways.”
Dayna is now settled back in the Bay of Plenty with her partner Henry and is about to become manager of the 1000-cow family farm in Pongakawa.
“He’s not from here but we both just love being here. We do a lot of water sports and outdoor activities in our downtime, so we love that we are five minutes from the beach and half an hour from the lake.
“We can do all sorts of things in our spare time. It’s a nice central location and it’s not so rural that you are too far away from anything, so you don’t feel you are away from the world here.”
Dayna’s early schooling was at Pongakawa School, a typical rural school.
At high school, she enjoyed the fact that students were given leadership opportunities.
“The school gives a lot of opportunities for kids to show leadership — not just in leadership roles — and I think it’s quite cool for that, and that gives a lot of students the confidence to go out there and take control of situations and do things they wouldn’t normally think of doing.
“I definitely wouldn’t be going to manage a 1000-cow farm at 22, but I was always given the confidence to be my own person and believe in myself at school and I think that’s important in how far I’ve come in my life.”
Dayna was heavily involved in the arts at high school.
“I spent lot of the time in the performing arts and PE departments,” she says, adding there were too many teachers who influenced her to single any out.
“I’m still in contact with all of them. I talk to them regularly and they are very supportive people in my life.
“I also think all the leadership stuff that I got to do at school had a huge impact on how I work on the farm now.”
Dayna can’t see a time when she won’t work on the farm.