Making farm pay the angus way
Oxford farmers Owen and Margaret Thomas are still innovating and have no plans to move off the land, writes Tony Benny.
Margaret Thomas is the fourth generation of her family on the 107 hectare farm a few kilometres from Oxford that she and husband Owen took over in 1963, four years after they were married.
Owen was a townie but moved from Christchurch to Oxford with his parents and started working on farms in the district, eventually meeting Margaret. When they started out they milked cows and had a landrace pig stud on the farm, between Coopers Creek and Eyre River, sending their cream in cans to the dairy factory at Tai Tapu about 80 kilometres away and feeding the skim-milk to the pigs.
‘‘I found a 1968 Tai Tapu dairy company payout cheque the other day,’’ Owen says. ‘‘It was 26 cents a pound.’’
With 50 cows, plus the pigs, that was enough income to bring up four daughters but over the years they built up their herd. ‘‘When we started, the cows all had names but we finished up with about 290. All we did was run faster every year.’’
They replaced their old walkthrough shed with a herringbone and then the cream cans were replaced by a tanker which took whole milk, meaning there wasn’t skim milk available for the pigs anymore. Then their accountant pointed out the pigs were no longer paying their way.
‘‘In those days you didn’t get a lot for pigs and the two things clashed, when you should be doing the cows, you’re doing the pigs or vice versa,’’ recalls Margaret.
‘‘They’d always be farrowing when we were calving and usually there was just the two of us.’’
They were able to sell the landrace stud to a buyer and in 1980 they used that money to drill the first of three wells now irrigating irrigating the farm, giving them some security from droughts which beset Canterbury all too often. Owen and Margaret are used to seeing the nearby foothills-fed rivers go dry but this summer is one of the driest they’ve known.
‘‘There’s only been two years since we’ve been here there hasn’t been water in Coopers Creek in the spring time and this year was one of them,’’ says Owen.
’’There was no water in the springs this year and also when we had the big drought about 1988-89.
Margaret said that was the first time she could remember that there hadn’t been water.’’
But those dry riverbeds can quickly become flood-swollen when the rain does come and Margaret remembers one flood well.
‘‘I said to Owen at night, ‘I can hear that river, it’s coming awful close’, and he said, ‘You needn’t think I’m going to go out and have a look now’. Like, he’s a townie so he doesn’t worry about that.’’
Owen interjects, ‘‘It was in the middle of the night, so I don’t know what I was going to do if I did.’’
‘‘I said, ‘I can hear it, it’s just out there’,’’ Margaret continues.
‘‘In the morning when I got up the debris was about seven feet high up in the willows. It was gone in the morning but so were the fences,’’ Owen laughs.
‘‘They were only two wire electric so it wasn’t a big deal.’’
Like other farmers, Owen was an enthusiastic user of superphosphate to grow more grass but he became disenchanted with it as he saw his soil structure deteriorate. He replaced it with chicken litter, collected from a nearby chicken farm, which he says not only grows grass but builds humus as well.
‘‘It holds the water and we only started irrigating at Waitangi weekend,’’ says Owen.
‘‘The centre pivots on Canterbury’s big dairy conversions have been running since early summer. We haven’t got any sophisticated technology, all we do is go out and dig a hole. If you get a handful of soil and it sticks together, it’s wet enough. If it won’t stick together in your hand, it’s too dry.’’
Margaret’s parents would be pleased to see a return to simpler methods, she thinks.
‘‘They just believed in natural ways of doing things. They were green before there were green people about.’’
’’Before it was real trendy,’’ Owen adds.
‘‘Not in a stupid way like some of them are now.’’
They dairy farmed for 45 years when Canterbury went though enormous changes as thousands of hectares of what had been sheep, beef and cropping country was converted and that was the beginning of the end for them.
‘‘When you’re on a small farm in this day and age, it’s very difficult to get staff,’’ Margaret says.
They moved into rearing dairy heifers and selling them in-calf, spotting a demand for young stock by dairy farmers in spring.
‘‘The first couple of years were alright and then two years in a row we got done,’’ Owen says.
They ended up making virtually no profit on animals they’d had for 12 months when buyers reneged on the contracts they’d signed. They moved to angus cows.
Margaret had grown to like angus when she was rearing dairycross heifers. They now have 160 angus breeding cows, 30 heifers and 125 calves and breed twice a year to make the best use of their one bull.
While other farmers their age have long since retired and moved to town, Owen and Margaret Thomas are still working, with Owen spending three hours a day in summer shifting their three-gun irrigators and then moving stock as well.
And they show no sign of giving up farming yet.
‘‘I just couldn’t live anywhere where there are miles of people, it’s not my thing. I’m so used to being peaceful and quiet.’’