Stories plucked from the 2023 archives: Cosmo's with chooks on a cliff edge, Sally's picking apples and Leah meets a dairy farmer who hails from Japan.

In this summer series, the Country Life team is taking you back to some of the places we've been to over the past year.

Listen to this week's Summer Series of Country Life

Chooks on a cliff's edge

When Anna Penn's flock of 3,000 hardy hens stop pecking and look up, they can watch waves crashing into the shore.

They're residents at New Zealand's southernmost commercial egg farm, overlooking Te Waewae Bay in Southland.

"We're about 1,800 nautical miles from the ice and 35 miles from Stewart Island," Penn tells Country Life.

Crunch-time for Greytown apple orchard

One of the few apple orchards still operating in Greytown is throwing open its gates for pick-your-own harvesting as a way of beating the labour shortage and keeping the operation humming.

Apples were left to rot on the ground last season due to challenges brought on by the pandemic but this harvest the Cooke family has decided to trial PYO at its Molewood Orchard.

It's the first year the Cookes have run the 10.5 hectare orchard since the very early days. You can read more about their efforts here.

How one woman's 'childhood dream' led her to a Kiwi dairy farm

Imagine a love for cows that pulled you 10,000 kilometres down to the bottom of the world.

For Chihiro Hanyuda, that is her reality. The 27-year-old travelled to New Zealand seven years ago with nothing more than a dream of becoming a farmer.

Read more about Chihiro's story here.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details