Life in limbo down at the Crafar farm

BY CHRIS GARDNER

Allan Crafar hasn't lost his sense of humour. "House arrest, we call it," he says with a laugh about the trespass notices served by the receiver, KordaMentha, after his empire of 16 central and lower North Island dairy farms came crashing down last October.

He and wife Beth have been living in their Reporoa farmhouse since, but Allan can't enter the farm land over the fenceline. Nor can his son Robert or brother Frank.

Mrs Crafar can, but they say she has been chased off by security guards.

Receivers are negotiating with preferred tenderers after attracting 50 bidders for all or part of the 16-farm portfolio. Interest from overseas companies, particularly Chinese company Natural Dairy, has attracted intense debate about the ownership of New Zealand land and businesses.

The Crafars, however, remain remarkably upbeat and full of fight despite the nine months their lives have been in limbo and the impending sale of everything for which they have worked over 40 years.

They went from milking one house cow to 20,000, with the farms valued at $500 million at their peak. During that time they also raised five children.

However, the problems started with multiple prosecutions for dirty dairying and culminated in Rabobank calling on KordaMentha last year. Now, Mr Crafar says, they are $216m in debt.

They're an interesting couple. Mr Crafar is rough and ready, his conversation peppered with expletives. Mrs Crafar is tender and motherly, offering morning tea as we talk and soup for lunch. She does have steel, though, and finishes her husband's sentences for him.

They're a formidable pairing and met 40 years ago on a blind date. He took her and his mother to see Gone With the Wind in Whanganui.

The morning tea is placed on the dining room table – its glass surface featuring an aerial photograph of the farm. Another photo hangs on the wall.

Mrs Crafar passes her husband a piggy bank. It features a baby pig sitting on a mother pig. On it he has scribbled, in descending order: "Farmers, EW [Environment Waikato], MAF, Banks, Receivers, Rates". "IRD" and "GST" are off to the side.

"That might have just got me into hanging mode," he jokes again. "They just love me, eh? You know those fellas have got no sense of humour. We went down basically because I was quoted in the paper as saying, `When the productive have to ask the non-productive in order to produce, you know your culture is doomed.' That stuffed it."

My tea is served in a mug with a cow on it and behind me a cow pops out of a cuckoo clock to mark the hour. "The bloody cow," Mr Crafar says. "Every bloody hour she yells at us."

He is easily distracted, leaping from one side-splitting anecdote to another. I suggest he tells me his story chronologically.

"Chronologically?" he asks. "What does that mean? I never went to school that day."

The phone rings constantly during our two-hour interview. The first time Mr Crafar says: "That will be a couple of hundred million coming in, I suppose. I need more than that, though."

While he's on the phone, Mrs Crafar can get a word in. They have had no income for nearly a year and it has been hard.

"I think we are very lucky that we have got a strong family, otherwise we'd all be in the loony bin or something worse," she says.

Their son, Glen, is sharemilking on the farm and has helped his parents out with regular loans. Locals have also helped with food parcels.

Mr Crafar returns and says: "There's one bastard, sends me a bloody thing every week, or every few days. He sends $100. It's got on there Allan Crafar, dairy farmer, Reporoa, I don't know who it is. And he sends me all these cuttings out of papers and writes across it, `They're useless buggers' and `Why don't you sue the Government?' I don't know who he is but he sends a bloody hundred or two dollars every week. Cash, in a bloody envelope."

The response from the rural community has had a big impact on them. Mr Crafar says it has left him speechless at times (though that's hard to believe).

MRS CRAFAR is convinced they have fallen foul of a national conspiracy that involves everyone from the Government down because of the negative publicity about their dirty-dairying prosecutions.

"They have been after us, because we're tall poppies. I suppose they just want to make an example of us," she says.

"Allan speaks his mind, as you have obviously picked up already, and they don't like that because he's supposed to just roll over and say, `Yes sir, no sir' ... a lot of people can't handle that. He jokes about something which is actually quite serious ... But a sense of humour helps to get us through as well."

Mr Crafar admits they're not "angels" but says they always tried to do their best. "We spent more money and time on effluent than most people would ever do."

However, they became a big target because of the size of their operation. "You are running a hell of a risk because you can't be on every farm every day. Unless you can look out the window and see the bloody effluent system yourself you are running the risk ... they say you can't contract out responsibility.

"That's the law, they say. So that means if one of the Government workers makes a mistake, Mr Key is going to jail, does it?"

Their story is rich with ironies. Mr Crafar is under medical advice not to eat or drink dairy products. His parents died in their 50s and that led to a warning for him.

He also hated milking the house cow at their Whanganui home – so much so that his first farming ambition was to become a sheep and beef farmer.

"I'm not allowed to have cheese, the nurse said. She said I'm going to die because ... my old man died when he was 55 and my mother had a stroke when she was 53. She said, `You're a high risk, you're going to die.'

"It would save me a whole lot of bloody hassles, wouldn't it? You're not allowed to eat any dairy products, and I said, `Hold on, I'm milking a frickin' house cow.' What am I going to do with the milk, the bloody pigs can't have it all."

Mr Crafar says he fluked School Certificate, in Whanganui, and joined the Farm Cadet Scheme.

"I started off from school with 80 bucks from the thrift club. My old man died when I was 11 and I had to milk the bloody house cow ... and I wasn't that keen on it. Lady Fay, she was called, and she was a pedigree jersey."

His plans to enter the sheep and beef sector fell flat because there were no jobs. "Funny enough they were in the doldrums then and nothing's changed.

"We went into the cadet scheme on January 1, 1969, and my job entailed catching the tanker by 6 o'clock in the morning. It was the old Kai Iwi Dairy Factory and only had 18 suppliers and they all had to be picked up by the Manawatu Dairy Company tanker before he started picking up their suppliers, and it all had to be done by 8 o'clock in the morning.

"We were the biggest supplier, I think. We had 218 cows. We were only on $14 a week, $2 off a week for board and 80 cents for tax and any mistakes and there was $1 off.

"I burst out in boils, all over, because I was straight out of school and it was pretty hard going. I could not afford enough boil patches to cover all my boils, because you lived in the house with the boss in those days, like part of the family. One pay day he [the farm owner] tells me, `Your sheets have been dirty and we'll take $1 off for that."'

He helped his older brother, Frank, out on his Taranaki farm and decided then that he wanted to buy more cows. "We thought, `Imagine if we could get to 300 cows."'

Years later, at a conference in Tauranga in the late 1980s at which Mr Crafar was the guest speaker, Mrs Crafar added an extra 0 to the Towards 300 sign as he told the crowd: "The brain's only a muscle and the more you exercise it the bigger it gets.

"If you don't use it it becomes a mucus producer and runs out your nose. In my experience a banker's brain is a pea-sized object floating in a sea of mucus."

What happened next gives an insight into Mr Crafar's combative nature. "Mate, the first person to jump up at question time was the area manager for our own bank at the time, ANZ. `Oh, I take exception to that, we've loaned a lot of money to a lot of different people.'

"I was on the other side of the microphone and I said, `It's question time, cock, sit down.' The whole bloody theatre roared with laughter. He did not know what to do ... needless to say we weren't with ANZ that much longer."

THE couple say the receivership hasn't changed the way they live. "We don't live lavishly. We never have. When we first started out if you had two T-shirts you wore both of them instead of having to buy a singlet or a jersey. You made do with what you had, and that's what we have done all along," Mrs Crafar says.

Mr Crafar adds: "We get most of our clothes from the bloody op shop at Reporoa. Some bastard's always throwing out exactly what you want."

They're clearly proud of making do with what they have. "We have no beach house," Mr Crafar says. "I wouldn't go to the beach because, look, I can't swim. It used to scare me hearing the sea. It bloody roars all night and I reckon it's always waiting to get you.

"It's like bloody motorbikes, they are always waiting to get you eh? I'm about as far way from the sea as you can get here, and if you went to the sea to a beach house there's only one way you can go, inland, because the other way drowns you."

Mr Crafar switches to a tirade against the Bayleys real estate brochure used to market his properties.

"I read through all these things and I was thinking, `I wonder why this fella's selling these farms,' and then you realise it's you. Jesus.

"If I got control of my farms again, what would happen? Who would be sitting at our gate every bloody day?

"You'd have to shoot every helicopter to take it down. Put wires up to catch the bastards because they are dangerous, those fellas. All their focus is to make an example of people.

"They could work with people, and I'd be happy to work with them, that's all they have got to do. It's a police state, people don't realise it ... MAF are the same.

"They go in there. We had them in our house with police and they spent all day searching stuff and take your computer away."

He remains defiant and hopeful that they can wrest back control of their farms from the receivers.

"Whatever happens, we're going to be the best-known pack of mongrels in the country."

- © Fairfax NZ News