Pathway of an 'ordinary bloke'

BY JON MORGAN

Ross Burnett fears he is a relic of a bygone age and that young dairying hopefuls will have to settle for less.

Ross Burnett admits that, at one time, he would have been considered an ordinary bloke. He worked his way up through the dairy industry system, from Flock House to cadetship to farm worker, to sharemilker and then ownership.

But it's different now.

"Sadly, those days are behind us as an industry," he says. "With the size of farms and the cost of cows, and the debt needed to service it all, only those with family help or who are the very best performers can hope to achieve farm ownership."

Good, dedicated young people coming up through the ranks can still make their mark, but in farm management, lower-order sharemilking and equity partnerships.

Mr Burnett realises that he is lucky to have benefited from the system, but it is also clear that he - with the crucial help of wife Ann, who died four years ago - has worked hard to succeed.

In another way, he also fears he is becoming a relic of a bygone age. Farming on the sand belt between Sanson and Foxton, on Manawatu's west coast, he is one of the few who hasn't opted to irrigate his farm, or to use loads of supplements, or build feed pads to chase extra production.

"I was brought up on the sand country before these things were available, and I learnt how to spin out my pastures as long as I could. It's a low-cost system, and it has made New Zealand dairying what it is."

However, he is far from being a stick in the mud suspicious of change. In his new milking shed, he has added a meal feeding system to plug pasture feed gaps in early spring and summer. He also grows turnips during the summer dry, and adds chicory and plantain to new pastures.

He is careful with his money, though, and admits that he might have looked at irrigation if it wasn't so expensive. His attitude comes from a lifetime of counting pennies and saving hard.

Today, even though he has a new home and a new milking shed, he drives a seven-year-old Toyota, and the big plasma television set in the lounge was won in a store promotion. The 44-a-side herringbone shed was built over two years by a couple of builder mates, with his help, for the very reasonable price of $850,000. He still has his first tractor, bought second-hand 30 years ago, and his "hard decision" to spend $64,000 on a New Holland TS90 five years ago is still fresh in his mind.

Mr Burnett was brought up in Palmerston North, and his love of the countryside's open spaces and farm animals was nurtured by holiday visits to his uncle's dairy farm at Morrinsville. In 1971, at 16, he left school for the Flock House agriculture course, where he spent five out of six weeks on the farm, learning practical tasks. The sixth week was spent in the classroom.

Then he joined the farm cadet scheme and started on a trade certificate in farming. For five years, he moved around dairy farms at Glen Oroua, Hunterville, Whanganui and Santoft, learning his trade. While his old school friends were spending their money on cars and flash clothes and chasing girls, he was living on the farms, getting up before dawn to milk the cows and saving every penny of his low wages.

Twenty per cent of everything he earned was taken from his pay packet and put into a government-backed farm ownership account. The money was locked away until it was needed to buy land or cows. When that time came, the Government added a 50 per cent top-up.

The account grew slowly, and farm ownership seemed like a faraway dream. "I was just a kid from town and ownership didn't seem real," he says. "All I could do was do my best and see where it led me."

When he had completed what was virtually an apprenticeship in farming, he took a break and went haymaking before returning to the milking shed. He spent two years on a 200-cow farm at Longburn, and a season on another at Himatangi.

During this time, he married Ann. She worked at the big Motor Registration Centre in Palmerston North and, with three or four nights' overtime a week, brought in a useful wage, which the young couple added to their savings.

They got their first big break almost immediately when they were offered a last-minute sharemilking job by Himatangi farmers Alan and Heather Greig. The catch was that as sharemilkers, they had to own the cows. Two hundred were needed - and, preferring to keep the farm ownership account for the future, they could only raise enough from the bank to afford 170. In a rare move for the time, the Greigs agreed to lease them the other 30 cows.

That was in 1982. They stayed there for seven years. The Greigs were experienced and supportive, and the young sharemilkers learned from them. "They had come up through the sharemilking system, too, and were able to teach me quite a bit - I hadn't had a lot of managerial experience," Mr Burnett says.

The job was really for two people, but Ann's wages were crucial to their savings plan.

"I opted to do it all myself. It was really pushing the boundaries of what I could handle, and some days were pretty full on. Ann used to come home and drive the tractor for me in the dark while I forked off the feed for the cows."

After a couple of years, they had a second-hand feed wagon to add to the tractor, and their assets began to grow. They paid off the cow loan, began to rear calves off the farm for extra money, and benefited from several years of a steady milk payout. This was needed when Ann stopped work to have their two children - Duncan, now 25, and Sarah, 22.

By 1989, they had saved enough to afford a farm. They found it a few kilometres up the highway at Makowai, a 62-hectare, 160-cow property. Mr Burnett still has the Rural Bank purchase application form which shows that he and Ann paid $593,000 for land, stock and plant. By then, they had built up $205,000 in assets, including $27,000 in the farm ownership account, to which the Government added $14,000. He was 34.

They walked their cows up the highway to the new farm and settled in. The interest rate on the bank loan was 17 per cent, but their fortunes soon changed for the better. They produced 39,000 kilograms of milksolids, way above the farm's 25,000kg average - and after a tough decade, the economy picked up, the Tui dairy company made a record payout of $3.59 a kg, and interest rates fell to 5 per cent.

For the next 10 years, they made steady progress. Cow numbers increased to 200 as they added a 32-hectare lease. As they improved water reticulation and drainage and started a regrassing programme, production lifted. By the end of the decade, it was up to more than 70,000kg. They were also chosen to be a Tui focus farm, and the extra attention from farm advisers and field days also brought improvements.

One was increasing the size of their 12-a-side shed and lowering the time spent milking from seven hours a day to five.

Then, in 2001, came their next big step, the purchase of an 82ha neighbouring farm. It came out of the blue, Mr Burnett remembers.

"The owner came to me one day and said, 'I'd like you to buy my farm, and this is the price'. I went away, thought about it and said, 'All right'. It was as simple as that."

He put a manager, Jason Halford, on the new farm and set up a friendly competition between them to see who could perform the best. Mr Halford won. "Jason was a good guy. He had a lot of skills in managing pasture, and I learnt from him."

Over the next few years, they experienced the high of the 2001-02 "perfect year", when grass growth, a record payout and high beef prices coincided, and the low of the 2003 drought, when they had to go looking for grazing around Dannevirke.

In 2004-05, Ann became sick and Mr Burnett's concentration wavered. "It was the only time I thought of flagging away the farming lifestyle."

In more recent seasons, drought has hit again and production has fallen. However, this year rain has come when it has been needed, and he is hoping for a return to the normal 160,000kg output.

He took two years between 2007 and 2009 to help with the new cowshed, which handles the farm's two herds of 300 and 150 cows respectively through a circular yard controlled by a rotating backing gate that keeps the two herds separate in the yard.

At the start of the last season, he handed over milking duties to manager Shane Robertson, who has since graduated to being a lower-order sharemilker, receiving 23 per cent of the milk cheque.

Now Mr Burnett's life is less hectic, although he is still on call as a relief milker. His days of working from five in the morning to nine at night are behind him, but the memory is taking time to fade from his body clock.

"I'm waking up at 5.30 every morning, but then I roll over and go back to sleep for a couple more hours. I have to admit, it's quite nice."

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