A drop to drink for drought-stricken farmers
A clogged silage wagon tried to tear the Pahiatua dairy farmer%26#39;s arm off when he reached into the chute to clear it. %26quot;I got picked up by the spikes. I should have been going round and round, but I ripped it out.%26quot;
He doesn%26#39;t mind that eyes are drawn to the old scar. %26quot;It%26#39;s awesome, man. I love it.%26quot; And it didn%26#39;t put him off farming. It%26#39;s 10 years since he threw in his six-month teaching career and took the offer to work on his partner%26#39;s family farm in northern Wairarapa. Now, at 30, he manages the farm, plus some land of his own.
He%26#39;s a big, muscular Maori guy, wearing a retro t-shirt and a groovy beanie, with an infectious laugh and a thoughtful way of speaking. %26quot;I don%26#39;t fit the mould. I don%26#39;t look like a farmer, but I love the shit. I%26#39;ll never do anything else.%26quot;
What about the drought?
The drought is no good. Stress is high and tempers are short. %26quot;The dogs get it mate. Poor old dogs. Get away back, ya mongrel!%26quot; But dairy farmers like Christie are partly protected by deliriously high milk payouts. It%26#39;s the sheep and beef farmers he pities. People like his friend Dominic Bambry, 24, whose family%26#39;s farm is in Pongaroa, 50km east of Pahiatua.
Today is all about the drought. Christie and Bambry and about 1700 other farm owners and workers are being treated to a feed, beer and a little entertainment in the grounds of the Tui brewery in Mangatainoka, half an hour east of Palmerston North. Everything is free, supplied by sponsors. The purpose is to cheer the farmers up, and they need it.
Last year%26#39;s dry weather was bad enough, but a second parched year is multiplying the misery. No rain, or rain at the wrong time, means not enough grass growth. And lack of grass has a complex array of effects on animal growth and farm business strategies, all of them bad. Add in the other usual suspects such as a high dollar, high interest rates, expensive fuel and global economic weirdness, and non-dairy farm businesses face tough times. For many, next year%26#39;s income is already stuffed, even if it rains every day from now till winter.
Bambry is as broad-shouldered as his friend (they played rugby together) and looks a bit like Ashton Kutcher. He was working as a joiner in Palmerston North, but quit to help on the 700ha farm run by his father and older brother. %26quot;Mum and Dad%26#39;s biggest wish is that it would go to all four boys… It would be heartbreak if my father lost the farm. It was originally his parents%26#39;. He%26#39;s lived there all his life. What else is he going to go to?%26quot;
Bambry knows of guys who have already put up their farms for sale because of the drought. There are plenty of hard-luck tales, but usually about someone else. It seems no one wants to moan about their own situation. So apparently, there%26#39;s a guy round Mangatainoka who shot every single one of his sheep the other day no grass, no money for supplementary feed and no buyers for lambs that needed further fattening up, because no one has the grass to do it. Someone else knows of a farmer in their district who killed himself recently, but he%26#39;d rather not say any more about it.
%26quot;You%26#39;ve had farmers committing suicide since time began. It%26#39;s nothing new,%26quot; says Hilton Dickens. He%26#39;s 74 and skinny, a sheep and beef farmer whose sons now run the Alfredton farm that%26#39;s been in his family since 1948. He%26#39;s seen big drys before in 1981 the rain didn%26#39;t come until May 21. Things could still come right this year if the rain comes soon, but there%26#39;s no question, this drought%26#39;s %26quot;a biggie%26quot;.
These days there are telephone helplines offering drought management advice, assistance with finances and counselling for farmers who are getting close to the edge. It didn%26#39;t used to be like that, says Mangatainoka farmer Kerry Fergus, 57. When he was young, you turned to football. %26quot;You%26#39;d forget about everything on the day of the rugby, and the next day you were too sick to worry about anything else.%26quot; And before TV changed everything there were dances someone would get on the piano and someone else would haul out an accordion.
The funny thing about farmers, says 24-year-old Amy Roydhouse, who works for agricultural service supplier Williams and Kettle, is that when life is good they keep to themselves; you%26#39;d get a big turnout to a social event like this only if they were hurting.
THERE WAS a huge turnout.
The farmers come from Hawke%26#39;s Bay in the northeast, from Taihape in the north; from Martinborough in the south, herded into 30 buses in 17 towns and delivered to an extremely well-organised piss-up in a brewery. In Masterton and Eketahuna, Waipukurau and Levin, men in jeans and Swanndris gathered outside Williams and Kettle stores selling %26quot;farm fleck%26quot; Norsewear socks, Skellerup gumboots and drench guns.
When the buses started arriving at Mangatainoka at 3pm, beer was already flowing and the barbecues were already laden with chickens with beer cans up their bums, huge eye fillets, venison sausages, rack upon rack of lamb and really thick mince patties. There were mountains of buttered white bread and vats of tomato sauce.
On the porch of the brewery cafe a one-man band was singing %26quot;The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond%26quot; and in the adjoining yard an electric bull was gently rolling its shoulders, waiting for a new rider. Whenever anyone mounted it a man with a cowboy hat twiddled the control box on his hip, sending the rider into a heap on the bouncy-castle bull-pen. On the other side of the yard a man wearing black repeatedly made a loud, annoying noise with a stock whip, and gave lessons to anyone who wanted to try.
Around 5pm Roddy McKenzie, semi-retired farmer and Masterton district councillor, was trying to explain to the Sunday Star-Times how tough times bring people together, but was drowned out by a hovering helicopter ostentatiously delivering a pallet of beer on a long cable dangling from its belly. (Earlier, three crop-dusters and a biplane made terrifyingly low fly-bys.)
The shout helps keep spirits up, said McKenzie, trying again. %26quot;The good times come again and you%26#39;ve just to hang in there, and learn off it. It%26#39;s like losing the world cup. We%26#39;re going to come back again.%26quot; Until then, there are simpler pleasures.
%26quot;We only came for the Tui girls,%26quot; said Moutoa dairy farmer Dean Bailey, 37. %26quot;We don%26#39;t think they%26#39;re the originals, eh.%26quot;
Bailey had a yellow duck stuck to his hat (in homage to Tui%26#39;s ads in which camouflaged beer-lovers infiltrate the brewery, which seems to be staffed entirely by leggy models) but he was not wrong. The half-dozen %26quot;Tui girls%26quot;, touted in the flyer as an attraction at least on a par with the free food and beer, wore the same short shorts, inexplicable tool belts and high heels as the TV ad beauties, but they had a harder look in their eyes, and were wearing fleshtone lycra tights, ready for the night chill.
Farmer Sandra Short, 40, was more charitable as she watched them in action on the electric bull: %26quot;I wouldn%26#39;t look that good in those shorts.%26quot; The Tui girls, reckoned Hilton Dickens, needed %26quot;a feed%26quot;.
It was a rather bloke-oriented event, but women were welcome, and locals Roydhouse and Katherine Van Tuyl didn%26#39;t mind the gender imbalance. The drought they were worried about, they claimed, was the man drought.
%26quot;We%26#39;re looking for husbands,%26quot; said Van Tuyl, 28, who rides and trains horses in Woodville. %26quot;Marrying a farmer would be really handy.%26quot;
So what was stopping them tonight?
%26quot;There are no hotties,%26quot; said Roydhouse.
What about the drought drought? Any thoughts?
Yes, Van Tuyl said : %26quot;The reason I can%26#39;t find myself a husband is that this drought is making the men so depressed that they%26#39;re just hibernating on their farms. They%26#39;re so upset that the last thing they can concentrate on is finding themselves a nice little partner.%26quot;
They were all running out of time. The sky, a limitless blue all day, had turned to black, and the Milky Way shone with a brilliance you%26#39;d never find in any city. Long-sleeved Swanndris and David Bain-ish wool jumpers came out. Some potential husbands had developed the gait of a cow with mad cow and somewhere someone dropped a beer bottle to ragged cheers (though this crowd was far better behaved than any other drinking demographic you might imagine working its way through 10,000 big free bottles).
By the cafe, the whip guy lifted his game for the closing minutes, balancing on the head of the put-upon electric bull while still cracking his whip. She%26#39;d been a great day, but she was winding down, and at the brewery gates the buses were gathering to take the briefly cheered farmers of the lower North Island on their return journeys to reality.
