A Day in the Life: Waihi Bush

7:15am - Crawled out of bed. No fog today, only a lovely clear sunrise through the trees. I stepped into my lambskin and wool slippers (second-hand for wwoofer use, complete with holes in the toes) to brave the really cold bathroom before picking up some fruit for breakfast: kiwifruit, apple, tangerine. (A book I’m reading on preventing and curing cancer says that fruit is best eaten on an empty stomach, specifically alone for breakfast, in order to maximize its usefulness as a cleansing food. So far it is, well, cleansing.) I crawled back into bed where it’s warm to eat my cleansing fruit, and then ventured into the main room to open the drapes and start a fire in the wood stove.

Waihi Bush is a farm near Geraldine, about five kilometres from the foothills of the Southern Alps. The cows, the sheep, the calves, and Monty (David and Lorina’s friend who lives on their property in a house bus) all have a breathtaking view of the soft brown mountains, which get a lovely dusting of snow now and then. The main crop is usually flax - they press the seeds to make commercial flax seed oil - but this year David is giving the land a break and putting back lost minerals into the soil by sowing mixed grasses - plantain, alfalfa, and chicory. David buys cattle for the winter who eat these grasses and provide an income, so my work centered around the cows.

At 8:30am I was down by the silos to begin feeding out, the daily feeding of the 40-odd cows and 30-some calves. Jim, a semi-retired farmer who works mornings for David five days a week, and I filled up eight bags of flax pellets (everything that is left after the oil has been pressed out of the flax seeds) and loaded them on the trailer behind the big green Deutz Fahr Agroplus 100 (that’s 100 horse power for all you non-tractor drivers). Jim drove the old blue Ford tractor to the stack of hay bales, and I followed in the Deutz. (Yes, I did! I drove a tractor! Never mind that it was a three-year-old lean, mean, easer-to-drive-than-a-car machine - it was a tractor. With really big wheels and lots of funny gears and levers and things.) Fortunately, today the forklift on the Ford was fixed, so we didn’t have to climb on top of the hay and push down a 400-kilo bale onto the trailer with our legs like we did yesterday. But we had our work cut out for us anyway.

Feeding out begins with moving the hay from the huge stack of hay bales onto the trailor behind the Deutz. Then we move the cows from two neighboring paddocks into one so that we can drive the tractor in and throw the hay down and feed them their flax pellets without running over any cows and free from fear of being run over by a bull. Today, however, the bulls were so feisty that Jim had to chase three of them through the gate with the tractor. We gave up on the fourth and decided to feed the calves first and see if he had calmed down by the time we had finished.

But the calves pulled a fast one on us after we fed them their flax pellets. Two days ago we moved the calves from the paddock with the poplars to share the paddock with the sheep. This was my first experience herding calves, and it was quite fun - I walked behind them and Jim drove the ute on the side to make sure none of them made a run for it. Lucky for us, none of them did. They all walked dutifully into the paddock with the sheep, and we separated the sheep from the calves (wouldn’t it have been funny if the calves were actually goats?) with a movable electric fence. The fence consists of what looks like a big roll of tape with lots of tiny wires in it, and thin white posts called standards. As cows are grazing animals and eat only the best of the grass around them, farmers use these fences when they want to make the most of the pasture available (the cows will eat more grass per square meter if they are given only part of the pasture each day). Each day Jim and I moved the standards about eight paces over, rolled out the electric tape, and threaded it through the loops at the top of the standards. Connect the tape to the fence with 6000 volts of power running through it, and voila! New pasture for a day.

Usually the calves are so busy eating the flax pellets that they don’t even notice us moving the fence. Today, however, I made the mistake of asking Jim when was the last time he had been back to Scotland. We were both so engrossed in the story of his nephew’s wedding that we didn’t notice them sneaking past us into the paddock with the sheep, and before we knew it they were frolicking at the other end of the field. Jim muttered a fewtold me to walk down to the end of the paddock and move the calves back up the far fence. Right. I mustered up all my calf-herding knowledge and started walking. Jim joined me in a few minutes, and we spent a good while yelling things like “Hup-hup-hup!” and waving our arms and clapping our hands to get the calves back to their side of the paddock. Whew - all that hullabaloo required an extra biscuit for morning tea.
Lunch was fresh-baked-and-still-warm-from-the-oven potato bread and pumpkin soup that Monty (a chef) brought over. In the afternoon I helped David with the fence that he is putting up in the bush (woods) behind the house for the goats. I learned how to make a figure-eight knot, which I formed in seven connections of 12-gauge (a little thicker than a hanger), high tensile (really springy) wire that I ran along the top of the fence and which will later have about 6000 volts of electricity running through it. It took me a few tries to get the hang of twisting the wire in the right way and to figure out how to best hold the pliers, and then David looked at my handiwork and told me I’d done it just slightly wrong. But after connecting seven correctly, I think I can now put it on my resume.
Before dinner David gave me a second go at milking Thelma, the mama goat. It’s harder than it looks! Last time I got about three drops in the bucket (the rest went in my sleeve), but this time I managed to get a steady stream from both teats for approximately 3.4 seconds. (And it all went in the bucket, not my sleeve.)
Hannah, who turns 15 in September and who can manage a clutch better than I can, came home from her netball match just in time for tea (dinner). I happened to mention that I didn’t know exactly what netball was, and she launched into a full tutorial in all things netball, complete with a diagram of the court and a demonstration of much you can move when you are holding the ball (only swivelling is allowed, not stepping). New Zealand, Hannah told me, has the best netball team in the world. Except she said it with a kiwi accent, so it sounded more like “New Zuhland has the baste nateball team in the wayld.” Who knew?