Life in a goldfish bowl

By JON MORGAN - The Dominion Post

Farming under the scrutiny of neighbours in lifestyle territory has its downsides, but it's a good incentive to keep the place tidy, say a Kapiti Coast couple.

Tom and Abi Richmond  farm deer, cattle and sheep  in lifestyle territory at Te  Horo, an hour north of  Wellington on the Kapiti  Coast. With a long road frontage  and hills that dominate the landscape, they feel the judgmental gaze  of the world upon them.

This has its good and bad points, Mr Richmond says. "On the positive side, it encourages me to keep the place tidy. And there's added security in having so many eyes on the place."

But at times such well-meaning neighbours can be a bit too over- protective. "A calf might sneak through a gap in a fence and be sitting happily by herself in another paddock, but I'll get calls saying she is in distress."

Such calls increase at calving and lambing time. He links the increased scrutiny to a rise in environmental awareness and people's unfamiliarity with farming practice.

He notes that some people are happy to call on his advice when it comes to which stock or crops to use on their holdings. "I don't mind too much about being their unpaid consultant, but I don't like being taken for granted."

Ironically, he has his own complaints about his farming neighbours. The hills of a farm down the road are reverting to gorse after being sold to an absentee investor. "The people who farmed it before battled hard to keep it free of gorse; now all their work has been wasted."

He and Abi, who farm with his parents, Jock and Jan, on 485 hectares, have no intention of cashing in on the lifestyle block trend that has seen Te Horo farms divided into small parcels over the past 10 to 20 years. They lament the loss of good farmland.

"Any landowner of any size has a duty not to cut it up," Mr Richmond says. "It's the future generations we're thinking of. We can't be sure our kids will want to follow us, but someone's kids will."

And they are strongly opposed to the idea of productive land going into the conservation estate. Whareroa, the former Landcorp farm at McKay's Crossing, is now owned by the Conservation Department and Mr Richmond is disgusted by its condition. "It used to be clean land, but it's one big gorse nursery now."

Their farm was a conventional sheep and beef unit under his father and grandfather until 30 years ago when the first deer began wandering out of the bush. The task of taming them and building up a herd is now almost complete.

They have 500 hinds that fawn in bush hideouts on the hills and the weaners are fattened on the flats. "Every year they are a little quieter. They're like a big mob of pets."

Sheep are also run on the hills, but mainly for weed control. They eat the ragwort that has encroached from lifestylers' unkempt paddocks and are also another income stream. Mr Richmond buys 200 ewes each year, puts a blackface ram over them, and finishes the lambs, selling offspring and mothers.

Cattle fit neatly into the system; the 80 cows and 34 heifers circulate around the farm from late autumn, cleaning up the coarse grass that is unpalatable to sheep and deer before going up to the hills. The herd is an exotic mix of south devon, charolais, simmental, hereford and angus, and is mated to a south devon bull. Mr Richmond says the different breeds introduce a hybrid vigour that stimulates growth. Some years, extra cattle are bought to fatten.

The cows will soon be brought to the flats to calve, joining the previous generation of 95 steers and heifers now tucking into a crop of oats and ryegrass. Everything bred on the farm is finished to slaughter weights, the 120ha of flats seeing a constant flow of young stock.

The hinds will fawn on the hills in November and stay there till March. Then comes the most difficult task of the year - rounding up all the deer to bring down to the flats to be separated. "They like to play hide and seek in the bush," Mr Richmond says. "It's just their natural instinct."

A good team of dogs is essential. Once the deer are mustered, the weaners stay on the flats while their mothers are pushed back up the hill. They call forlornly for a few days and then settle down.

For the next eight months Jock and Jan tend the weaners, making sure they get the best feed on the farm, quality high-clover pasture supplemented with barley grain, till they reach slaughter weights.

The flats have a high fertility, the legacy of 30 years of manure from a broiler-chicken-growing operation that ended 10 years ago. Hatuma Lime's dicalcic blend of superphosphate and lime is used to reduce the soil acidity and release the stored phosphorous.

Tom Richmond is a big fan of dicalcic, first used six years ago. "The first difference I noticed was the earthworm activity whenever I dug into the soil. The clover also came back in places I had never seen it before."

He has also noticed an improvement in animal health that he puts down to the improved pasture. Drench use has dropped. The hinds are drenched once a year and for cattle ticks, and the weaners get a mineralised oral drench at weaning and another six weeks later. The highly infectious lungworm is also a danger and if one cough is heard among the 450 weaners, all are brought in for a drench.

Animals are not the only earners. Mr Richmond has built up a contracting business with neighbours Richard and Kevin Best. It started with a silage mower bought for his use, but soon he was helping out other silage harvesters. Then he joined with the Bests, who had their own gear, to take care of the district's harvesting. They bought a square baler and decided to form their own company and now have a big selection of equipment for big and small jobs.

"The lifestyler won't realise it, but half a million dollars of equipment passes through his paddock just to do 20 bales, and the next day it will be up at Taihape doing 300 to 400 bales."

The Richmonds feel they are farming as environmentally efficiently as they can. "We're not applying a lot of chemical nutrients," Mr Richmond says. "We're supplying a product that's as natural as possible. I think the meat buyer can be happy it won't be high in phosphate or nitrates and trace elements."

It is a lifestyle they love, even though at times they feel as if they're in a goldfish bowl. "We've got 1200 acres (485ha), which is a big farm around this district, and everyone must think we're pretty well-off. Like most larger landowners we might be asset rich, but we're cash poor, so to speak, and nearly all of the profit goes back into the farm.

"For us, it's all about the simple pleasure of preserving an open space and the bush and making good economic use of it. Our lifestyle is also our business."

WHAT IS DICALCIC?

Dicalcic is made from a 45-year-old recipe developed by Joe  Topp, mixing calcium carbonate (limestone) 50-50 with  superphosphate in a watery slurry. This is left to react for 30 days  while the acid in the superphosphate is neutralised by the lime. It sets like concrete and has to be ripped and pulverised through  a crushing plant before it can be used.

The result is a water-soluble fertiliser that does not pollute waterways. Hatuma Lime,  based in Central Hawke's Bay, has financed research into dicalcic  since 2002 and is currently involved with the Agricultural  Research Group on Sustainability, using 15 monitor farms to study  the place of a healthy soil biomass in a whole-farm system.

The aim is to lower energy input costs, improve the quality of  production, build resilience to economic and climatic shocks, lift  pasture and soil quality and improve farm management.