Life of an Auckland farmer
Beckie Trigg grew up on Auckland’s North Shore and never considered she would be fattening lambs on a city-owned farm one day.
Auckland Council has been advertising jobs at its farming operations that could be filled by former city-kids like Trigg.
So how do you get a job managing sheep run by the big city? You might not need as much experience as you would for other farming jobs.
Trigg is a community ranger at Scandrett Regional Park, about an hour north of Auckland city. As a child, she used to go camping in Auckland’s regional parks. She stepped her interest up a notch by being a summer ranger with the council while she was at university.
Summer rangers join the parks for three months to help out with visitor numbers over the busy period.
On the summer programme Trigg, who has a degree in science, picked up farming skills, ‘‘mainly around animal welfare and handling and how to work safely in the yards’’, she said. ‘‘From then, I learnt the rest of it on the job.’’
Auckland Council has farming operations covering 1430 hectares at 19 regional park locations in what the council says is one of the world’s largest urban farming enterprises.
Combined, the farms have
6650 sheep and 1200 cattle, some of the stock is for breeding and some is for finishing.
Farming operations manager Garry Hewson said managing the council’s park farms was, ‘‘sort of like running 20 run-offs really’’. The rangers were parttime farmers, Hewson said.
Much of the rest of the work involved dealing with the public and undertaking conservation efforts. And the farmers aren’t all farmers, Hewson said.
‘‘They are a complete mixture. We have experienced farmers, real crusty ones from the back of Wairoa, right down to people who have no farming experience and they are learning on the job,’’ he said.
Hewson said the council was setting up a new farm management team and was advertising new roles for 700ha of farm blocks that it was setting up. Living on-farm was not always an option for city shepherds but Hewson said
workers had accommodation available, which was negotiated as part of their contracts.
The house at Scandrett is leased by a previous owner and Trigg commutes to the park from Wenderholm Regional Park, about 30 minutes away.
Hewson said having farming blocks all over the region allowed a certain amount of freedom. ‘‘We can move our stock around quite a bit,’’ he said. ‘‘We don’t have to sell our capital stock if we get into [weather] trouble like an ordinary farmer does. So we can move our stock across a huge area from Warkworth all the way down to Kaiaua.’’
Trigg happily spends a lot of time at Scandrett working on her own. ‘‘I get a bit of support from the farming co-ordinator for stuff that I might need a couple of us to help with, like drenching,’’ she said. Trigg manages 20 heifers and she fattens up to 250 lambs to hogget stage. She looks after five visitor baches, two homesteads and their gardens. She also organises volunteers who help with trapping pests and other small jobs.
Along with stock-handling skills, most urban farmers needed people-handling skills too, Hewson said.
‘‘You are potentially shifting stock with people walking around and some people have dogs as well.’’
And that most sacred of rural rules – always close the gate behind you – is not understood by everyone.