Farming hard slog but I love it
Maybe I am tired from the end of the season. Bar a short break at Christmas, I have milked every day since the payout dropped to $3.90 a kilogram of milk solids a couple of years ago, leaving me skint.
But you know what? I have actually enjoyed it.
Now thankfully the milk price is $6/kg, and there is hope of survival. I just have to keep on milking those cows and paying that lease.
I have little time for stories of people on Struggle Street – hard but true.
When I was 36, I left a bad relationship with no one and nothing much behind me, except two daughters aged five and 10, a clapped out old Honda Ascot and a 15-year-old farm dog.
In order to be housed I took on a low salaried farm manager job milking 130 cows, even though I had limited experience. Over the past 17 years I have scraped and scrimped and worked my way into leasing a dairy farm in Northland and owning – in conjunction with the ANZ – 210 cows.
To do this I have been through moments where I have neglected my children, my health and my sanity, and somehow managed to come out the other end smiling.
I am at the mercy of the international milk prices, weather and land lease costs, so any management I do is tweaking, and 17 years of hard yakka is a long, hard slog for someone to have as big an overdraft as me.
Now aged 52, I have to look hard back and wonder what was I thinking?
I am now at the age where I should at least own a house and if I don’t it is a pretty risky situation to be in – because one day you wake up and realise you are no longer young and bulletproof.
In my eyes, someone my age should be in a position to help their kids out with a loan or subsidy to buy their own house.
I am so far off that it’s not even funny.
My life is obsessed with my own survival, let alone anyone else’s. I have stayed in farming this long because I truly enjoy it and relative to my other (limited) options it’s always seemed like the lesser of two evils.
At least I can put petrol in the car and pay my power bill.
One day this will all come to an end – whether it’s my health and physical fitness, or my marginal business gets screwed over by the new Government’s misguided plans to make agriculture in New Zealand pay for the world’s climate change woes.
I bought my daughter a bread maker for her 26th birthday present so she can make her own bread and hopefully save a few dollars towards a house deposit.
I feel bad that is the best I can do (and secretly hope the prospective new house has a granny flat).
Life can be tough, and it is good to work hard and be hopeful for the future.
Sometimes you get the feeling that you did your best, and it still wasn’t good enough because you have nothing to show for it.
Lyn Webster is a Northland dairy farmer.