Farmers on the edge
In the horror of the mass slaughter of his cattle, a crushing blow for Ben Walling came in the killing of his children’s pet calves.
‘‘Having to actually shoot the kids’ calves, pet animals ... it is pretty tough.’’
Mycoplasma bovis hit Walling’s farm, near Lumsden, in northern Southland, in mid-December.
‘‘It wasn’t an overly flash Christmas to be honest. Over that time period we had quite a few animals die. I got to the stage where I went around and starting shooting them myself.’’
Down the road, near Gore, Bernadette Hunt endured two months of stress and uncertainty before her family farm was declared clear of the disease by officials. The hardest part was protecting her young daughters, eight and four, from local gossip.
‘‘It was really tough on the kids. We sheltered them from it as much as we could but I was conscious of my [older] daughter getting on the school bus and my neighbours’ kids making some comment to her about our farm having the infection. We let her know what was going on because who knows what people would have been saying to her.’’
Stud breeder Graeme Dyke lives next to an infected property in Pahiatua, in the Tararua district, and has been helpless as clients walked away from his business.
‘‘I had to send a cheque back to a brand new client last week and that hurts. He’d bought his bull and written the cheque at my table. I’d put it in the bank. And then I had to phone and tell him what happened.
‘‘Here’s the cruncher. I said: ‘Hopefully next year, don’t forget about me’. He said: ‘Graeme, to be quite honest even if things are sorted you definitely won’t see me next year, maybe not in two years but I may come back in three.’ It’s the stigma of living next to an infected farm. It’s the future I’m concerned about."
Grief and despair
The discovery of M.bovis in July last year sent waves of grief and despair throughout the farming community. As of this week 300 farms were locked down, with the infection present on 39 properties.
The Government ordered the slaughter of 23,000 cattle – and the fate of thousands more will be sealed on Monday when Cabinet decides whether to opt for eradication or management of the disease.
Those already living under the shadow of the infection have continued to work through the daily grind of farming, only to see carcasses heaved into landfills, or entire herds are loaded on to cattle trucks for the slaughter-house.
They are left with unpaid bills and mounting debt, and in an already fragile state are now wrangling with bureaucracy to squeeze money out of the Government’s complex compensation scheme.
‘‘I’m in the hole for $1.3 million and counting and we will get up to $1.8 million or $2 million by the time we’ve finished,’’ Ben Walling says.
So far he’s had an interim payment of $74,000, but if the payout doesn’t come soon, he won’t be able to restock in time for next year.
‘‘It’s crippling. For four years we have worked night and day to build up our stock asset ... when you talk as farmer about a million here or there it sounds like a hell of a lot of money but we turn over $3m out of a farm and if you make $100,000-$200,000 a year you are doing pretty well and that’s you, your partner and everyone else working from daylight to dark.’’
Bernadette Hunt has hired a farming consultant to help her make sense of the compensation scheme. ‘‘You have to try and remove the emotion from it, it has to be completely objective and make sense to someone sitting in an office in Wellington.’’
The payout might cover financial losses, but the emotional scars will take longer to heal.
Hunt, 41, says she and her husband, Alistair, struggled as the weather turned and feed began to run out. The couple were also caring for an additional 300 heifers they’d been grazing for another dairy farmer, that became trapped by the quarantine. At a time when they’d usually be offloading stock ahead of winter, around 1000 cattle were confined to the farm.
‘‘We were hamstrung in the normal farming decisions you’d make and that took an emotional toll. April was very wet so [the cattle] were churning up and
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