Country Life

Erin Middleton owns the only hair salon between Kaikoura and Amberley. The Cheviot hairdresser, who is also an emergency first responder, says she enjoys listening to her clients stories as much as cutting and colouring their hair.

Erin Middleton owns the only hair salon between Kaikōura and Amberley. The Cheviot hairdresser, who is also an emergency first responder, says she enjoys listening to her clients stories as much as cutting and colouring their hair.

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This week the Country Life team meet a shearer nicknamed Bo Peep who's found her dream job and they explore a food forest in the Hokianga.

The Country Life team meet a shearer called Bow Peep who's found her dream job and explore a food forest in the Hokianga.

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Shearer Brya Harrison, aka "Bow" Peep, gives lifestyle-block owners a helping hand with their sheep.

Carol Stiles

Lifestyle block owner Gary Petersen says the most difficult thing he has to do on his tiny farm is open a gate for his 13 woolly lawnmowers and walk them through it.

The rest he leaves up to Brya Harrison a.k.a Bow Peep. And, yes, she does have a "w" in her version of the name.

Brya used to work as a professional shearer in the UK and on large stations in New Zealand, but she's now turned her attention to providing services to small-block owners.

She has two young children and the hours are more family friendly, she says.

"I love that multiple times a day I'm seeing different clients and sheep that I've been shearing for years."

Brya has about 100 clients - mainly dotted around Auckland's southern border, and near her home close to Putaruru.

When Country Life tagged along she was 20 minutes from home, working with her very keen but ageing and almost deaf dog Bear to muster Gary's tiny flock. The sheep needed a drench, and for three, a tidy up of their rear end.

Bear likes to give Brya a hand, even though he's ageing and almost deaf

Brya says Gary's the dream small block owner.

"He's one of the ones that knows his limits but is still really responsible for his animals. You can't get much better than that!"

Gary's just sacrificed timber destined for a woodshed to build a decent set of yards.

Brya helped with the design.

"So many of my clients either don't have yards or have yards that are whipped up using a few gates or a pallet here and there. It's lucky I have a very smart dog Bear who understands what we are trying to achieve but even so, sometimes we are running around for 20 minutes, 30 minutes to get the sheep into the makeshift yards."

That's stressful for the sheep and the people involved.

Sheep waiting to be shorn

Brya says one of the most common mistakes her clients make is not getting sheep shorn at the right time.

"So a lot of the time I am turning up and a sheep has advanced flystrike."

Brya has about 100 clients with small flocks

Other challenges are not knowing how many animals a property can safely sustain, or breeding from animals with defects that will be passed on to their off-spring.

This 1.6 ha property is Gary's 11th life-style block.

While he loves having green space around him and can often be found chatting to the sheep, he doesn't want to be a farmer.

He says he thinks Brya will be back this month or next to shear the sheep, but she'll ring him and sort it…

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Jared Hiakita has been germinating a seed of an idea while nurturing his food forest at the off-grid family farm in Hokianga. The seed has grown into a charity which will grow and donate fruit tree seedlings to local marae so locals can grow and harvest their own fruit.

It's hoped a fruit tree nursery taking shape in the Far North will help local people rely less heavily on supermarket shelves.

Jared Hiakita is co-founder of the charity ōNuku and is driving the venture on the north side of Hokianga Harbour, where he lives off grid in a "tiny house" with his young family.

The pandemic and extreme weather events have made people realise how quickly food might become scarce, he says, so his social enterprise wants to help more locals grow their own.

The plan is to nurture and donate fruit tree seedlings to marae and kura in the area and also sell the trees in order to fund the donations.

Knowledge has been lost, according to Hiakita, who also wants to help restore gardening skills.

"My uncles told me these amazing stories about their gardens that they had growing up, that my Nan and my Koro were responsible for, and that they would have to go and pitch in to maintain.

"By the time I was being told these stories, that's all they were. They were just stories. It wasn't real anymore because like everyone else, they got caught in the wave of urban drift and kind of moved away from that way of life."

He hopes the nursery will be operational by the end of the year with fruit trees being propagated from a 300 square metre shade house and potting shed, being built around the corner from the home he shares with partner and co-founder Rangimarie Mules.

"Since Covid I've definitely noticed a huge rise in people's interest and desire to learn how to grow food so that we can get through, you know, hardships."

The nursery will become headquarters for not only propagation but education.

"It'll become an orchard in itself and just a space of learning, a space where resources are created and disseminated out to the community."

It's not Hiakita's first venture into humanitarian work. In 2019, the Muhammad Ali Centre in the United States picked him out as one of the world's top change-makers for his work providing free education and resources to Maori.

As an activist for zero waste and affordable housing, he is living his principles and showed Country Life his solar-powered home surrounded by a flourishing food forest.

On terraces below his home, he practices a dense and varied food growing system known as syntropic agroforestry, learnt with the help of the Lotz family, previously featured on Country Life…

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Four of the country's champion endurance motorbike riders are offering lessons around the country on how to ride farm bikes safely. They're hoping the fundraiser will help them get to Spain in October for the world's premier off-road motorbike event, the International Six Days of Enduro.

In just 18 months, Kylie Dorr has turned her hobby - racing dirt bikes - into prepping for the world's premier off-road motororcycle competition.

And to get there, she and her teammates are offering courses to farm workers on how to ride their farm bikes safely..

Dorr is heading to Spain in October to represent New Zealand at the International Six Days of Enduro, the world's largest annual off-road motorcycle competition, established in 1913.

Listen to the interview with Kylie Dorr on Country Life

It has been a struggle for the four-person team to get sponsorship for the event so the champion riders are hoping people will sign up for their courses, being run in conjunction with Agricademy.

Seventy percent of the money raised will go to the riders and the aim is to run the courses longer-term to help other riders race internationally.

It will cost each rider $30,000 to $40,000 to get to the Spanish event, Dorr said.

"It's a huge cost, being so far away from the rest of the world, to get riders overseas and we have such an amazing talent pool of young riders.

"Per capita New Zealand has one of the highest levels of world championship level riders ... and I think a lot of that's attributed to our rural background and the fact that we have a lot of kids growing up on farms, learning how to ride bikes at a young age, and so we want to encourage that every way we can and help get these riders overseas and on the world stage."

Dorr owns an artificial insemination and pregnancy scanning business working in Otago, Southland and Canterbury.

Aside from that, she runs a busy household and has to fit in training sessions before and after the school run and work day.

The enduro event in October involves six days of racing, eight hours a day, across farmland, forests and hill country. The riders have to do all their own bike maintenance en route.

"I thought with my farming, agriculture background and the skills that myself and my teammates have as enduro riders, that we could use those to help farmers out and to give back in some way while fundraising at the same time."

Four top riders, sprinkled around the country, will be taking the courses and are prepared to head to a farmer's property to help farmworkers on two-wheelers negotiate hazards like creek crossings or irrigation drains…

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A South Wairarapa riverside farm is turning into a rich classroom, offering lessons in science and the environment, maths, language, and legends of the land.

A South Wairarapa riverside farm is turning into a rich classroom, offering lessons in science and the environment, maths, language, and legends of the land.

Over the past few months, local schoolchildren have been heading down to the lower reaches of the Ruamāhanga River, bordering Ruamāhanga Farm.

They look for insects and fish, help to plant trees on its wetland, and sometimes just sit on its banks and listen to its stories.

Join a school day by the river at Ruamāhanga Farm

When Country Life tags along, the morning starts as usual with karakia and children taking pretend snapshots of the landscape, describing their "photos" and introducing themselves.

Then, after being warned about electric fences, with gumboots and backpacks on, a happy scramble of nine to 11-year-olds heads off through the paddocks and down to the banks of the awa.

Sitting on eco-friendly woollen tree mats, looking out over the river, they tune into a story about the water's journey, with the noisy calls of real birds swooping over its banks woven into the kōrero.

Storyteller Rod Sugden says he tries to incorporate real-life happenings into the tales to keep the story lively and the children engaged.

"We feel that these stories convey hidden messages, you could say, stories that can give children and young people a deeper sense of themselves, others around them and the world in which they live."

Later, the children file down onto the gravelly riverbed and meet Kara Kenny and Maddy Glover from the conservation charity Mountains to Sea Wellington.

Soon, they are all crammed around buckets of river water, identifying tiny fish and river insects and learning the difference between mayflies and stoneflies through an action game.

Measuring water clarity with long pipes is a lesson in maths as well as science. Later, language and poetry will come to the fore when the children write about their experiences back in the classroom or in the new bell tent set up on the farm.

Kenny says her own childhood memories exploring the region's rivers with her grandfather sparked her interest in freshwater ecology.

She loves tailoring her riverbank lessons to the "ebbs and flows" of whatever has happened, even if things don't quite go to plan.

After fish traps set the night before for a biodiversity survey were found to be empty of eels and trout, she switched to explaining the phases of the moon and told a Māori legend involving the maramataka…

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This week Country Life meets a farmer who's been on a 35-year quest to breed the perfect cashmere goat.. a chat with a dirtbike enduro champion who's helping farm workers ride their two wheelers safely.. and a riverside farm restores its wetland and gets kids excited about freshwater science.

Country Life meets a farmer who's been on a 35-year quest to breed the perfect cashmere goat, a dirtbike enduro champion is helping farm workers ride their two wheelers safely, and a riverside farm restores its wetland and gets kids excited about freshwater science.

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David Shaw has been on a 35-year goat fibre journey on his farm in South Otago. It began with 50 multi-coloured feral goats and now, through selective breeding, he runs 700 creamy white goats and believes their fine cashmere fibre is cut out for the world's top fashion brands.

David Shaw has been on a 35-year goat fibre journey on his sheep and beef farm in South Otago.

It began with 50 multi-coloured feral goats and now, through selective breeding, he runs more than 700 creamy white Hēpara Cashmere goats.

"Our animals today are probably producing about three times the amount of fibre than what we did when we first started," he says.

Shaw believes that their fine and fluffy cashmere fibre is cut out for the world's top fashion brands.

"It's very attractive to garment manufacturers because the cashmere fibre is exceptionally warm and light and soft for its weight," he says.

His does (or nanny goats) each grow around 400 grams of fleece a year, averaging 16 microns (the measurement of the diameter of the fibre).

For their first fleece, hoggets produce 180 grams at around 14 microns.

So what would a farmer get paid now for this 14- to 16-micron cashmere fibre?

"Around $125 to $150 a kilo and it's basically our most profitable animal now," Shaw says.

Goats are shorn in early spring.

Having to send the fibre overseas for processing has been a problem in the past.

"After shearing, the coarse fibre needs to be separated from the fine cashmere and it takes a pretty special machine to be able to do that successfully."

Fortunately, Woolyarns in Wellington has come to the party.

The renowned yarn engineers have invested in a fibre processing plant to make an all-New Zealand cashmere supply chain a reality.

Back on the family farm, David says his goat herd does well to complement his sheep and cattle.

Goats graze from the top of the pasture down, whereas sheep graze from the bottom up.

"They take out all the seed heads, all the thistles and weeds. They love things like briar, blackberry, broom, wilding pines, so they're really great at tidying up weeds which would otherwise have to be controlled by chemical means."

Despite years of breeding work aimed at producing white, low-micron cashmere fibre, David is still optimistic about the future.

"The hill country needs to become more profitable and find new strings to its bow, and there's a huge opportunity to actually integrate goats into existing systems and capture the benefits that they can add."

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A round-up of the week's agricultural news.

Designs for a new off-grid geo-thermal powered glasshouse could help growers also reduce their emissions, lobster exports to China have come off the boil and a new tool to help dairy farms slash their emissions.

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New technology is helping farmers to prevent drench resistance and keep sheep parasite-free.

Whether to drench livestock or not is a question a Mosgiel-based tech company is helping farmers to answer - with the help of AI.

Sheep and beef farmers have traditionally drenched their animals to control parasites, but the parasites are increasingly developing resistance to the various formulae - with climate change thought to be partly to blame.

Now, a system using artificial intelligence has been developed by Techion, aimed at helping farmers to make the right decisions and save time as well.

Techion already processes more than 30,000 faecal egg counts (FEC) a year.

To ensure farmers get results back quickly, the company has developed a portable digital microscope to count parasite eggs.

The Micro-I and its supporting AI software enables farmers to do FEC testing on-farm, instead of sending bagged faecal samples to Techion's testing lab.

The samples, mostly from sheep and beef farms around the motu, establish an animal's parasite burden.

So how do livestock make contact with parasites in the first place?

"The parasites like warm weather and rain, so when it's a dewy morning they'll come up blades of grass and wait for the animal to eat the top, and them! That's pretty much how they ingest the larvae," Techion's lab manager and processing whizz Lisa Growden says.

Via the microscope, farmers upload images of faecal samples to the cloud to be expertly analysed by AI and Techion's technicians.

A few hours later, they get the FEC results and based on them, a farmer can decide whether to drench or not.

"There are basically six different actives which can be used by themselves or they might create formulations and use two of them together, or the strongest one is where they put three of those formulations together for a triple drench," sales manager Nicola McConnell says.

Techion staff have seen a spike in drench resistance over the last two or three years and there are hopes closer attention to checking FECs and only drenching when parasites are detected will help alleviate the problem.

"It's been really sad this year that with the Drench Smart tests we do, we've had some farmers who cannot use any of the nine drench actives.

"Drench resistance is an increasing problem now that we're really starting to see the impact of climate change," McConnell says.

Lab technician Terina Geddes agrees. As a farmer, she is also witnessing the change first-hand…

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