Dairy champion Scott and Jeanette Shaw

Mad about milking

By Ross Nolly

Getting off-farm can be difficult for some farmers, especially if they don’t have a team they can call on.

Small farm owners or those working in a one-person operation can often find it difficult to get off the farm, especially as the herd needs to be fed, shifted and milked. And, a farm is a big asset to entrust to someone to look after while you’re away.

More and more farmers are beginning to realise just how important it is for them to get away, even for the day, to recharge their batteries and experience some much-needed quality family time.

Accounts of farmers going on holiday and wondering aloud repeatedly throughout the day, “I hope everything’s alright at home”, are commonplace. While farmers may physically leave their farm, mentally, they don’t or can’t leave it and enjoy their holiday.

A reliable relief milker eases the mind and Taranaki farmers are benefiting from Stratford-based Moo Mad Relief Milking Services run by Scott and Jeanette Shaw. Over the past 19 years, they have been giving farmers the break they need and in the process have gained a reputation as reliable, knowledgeable folk for farmers to entrust their farm to.

The couple are better known as Mooman and Moolady, and when people mention Scott by name, they often receive a quizzical stare, followed by “Oh, you mean Mooman”.

His iconic blue ute stands out around the district due to its signwriting and unique “4COWZ” number plate. Not to be outdone, Jeanette’s number plate is “M00MAD” and their runabout sports a “M0OMAN” number plate.

They enjoy the cows and milking so much, they chose a cowshed as the venue when they got married.

Jeanette left school to pursue a nursing career and Scott was brought up on his parents’ 80-cow Stratford dairy farm, the Stratherrick Ayrshire stud. He began milking at the tender age of seven and 50 years later is still cupping cows.

“I milked morning and night vowing I’d never be a dairy farmer. I wanted to be a sheep farmer. I left school in 1982 when the sheep industry was in a downturn and no one was taking on inexperienced staff. So I joined the Federated Farmers Farmer Cadet Scheme,” Scott says.

Federated Farmers initiated the cadet scheme in the 1970s. It was a threeyear course where cadets studied for trade certificates, with practical training provided by approved farmers. The scheme was a general agricultural course, but mostly focused on dairying.

He spent six months at Polytech while being billeted on an Inglewood dairy farm and attended school during the week from 9am to 3pm, as well as milking to pay for his lodgings.

“I did six months at Polytech, from January to June and was then taken on for the following 12 months as a first year cadet. I hoped a sheep farm job would come up, but nothing did, so I stayed on that farm,” he says.

“At the end of that season, when the first cadet was due to take over my job, I still hadn’t found a drystock job. I took a dairy job in Manaia for a year and attended Polytech monthly to do my Trade Certificate theory.”

Federated Farmers usually sourced jobs for cadets and kept an eye on how they were doing. But Scott found a job that didn’t work out and only stayed there for three months before Kath Corlett, the cadet scheme’s “mother”,

“It’s important for a farmer to have complete trust in their relief milker.” Scott Shaw

Taranaki couple Jeanette and Scott Shaw have been operating Moo Mad Relief Milking services for 19 years, giving farmers a break when they need it.

found him a 350-cow farm manager’s job at Urenui.

“I’d only done two years training, but worked there until finding another manager’s role at Motunui, where I stayed for two years. I then took on a 29% sharemilking job at Pukengahu,” he says.

“Dad suffered a stroke so I left the job and leased the family farm for two years. I tried to find a handy 50:50 job to run in conjunction to raise equity and get ahead. I couldn’t find anything so I took a 50:50 job at Rongotea in Manawatū.”

Nineteen years ago, after sharemilking on other Taranaki farms, they decided to take a year-long hiatus from farming and move to town before reassessing things.

Scott decided to begin relief milking to make it easier to return to sharemilking. Jeanette returned to full-time work running the Taranaki Base Hospital’s day ward and endoscopy unit.

“Six months later I applied for a recently vacated clinical nurse leader role. After being in that role for 12 months I became nurse manager of the day ward

Continued page 30

Scott and Jeanette Shaw are better known as Mooman and Moolady.

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and endoscopy for 15 years. So Scott was pretty clever sending me back to work,” Jeanette laughs.

The second and third seasons had very poor spring seasons and farmer stress levels were running high. Consequently, Scott had 27 sheds on his books and did four milkings a day.

“I told Scott that if he was going to do that many milkings, he may as well be sharemilking,” she says.

“He was working harder relief milking than if he was running a farm. The next season he cut back to 18 sheds.”

Two years later he was approached by farmer Grant Boyde who was standing for the Fonterra Shareholders’ Council to enquire whether Scott would be available when needed. Boyde was on the council for five years so Scott cut his shed numbers back during that period.

“After that I got started up again, but was voted in as president of the Taranaki Stock Car Club, which I did for four years, and the business suffered because of that. The two just didn’t work due to the hours I needed to spend at the track,” Scott says.

“Farmers usually want you on weekends. But on Saturdays I arrived at the track at 9am and didn’t get home until 2 or 3am on Sunday morning. I was pretty busy milking during the week, but not to the extent that I should’ve been. I was fortunate that Jeanette had a fulltime job.”

When his stint in the top job of the car club ended, they got the business up and running to its full potential again as farmers became aware they were back relief milking.

“It’s important for a farmer to have complete trust in their relief milker,” he says.

He tells his clients, “If you can’t leave on Friday and forget about the farm until you return on Sunday, you may as well stay home.”

Scott’s original business model was to have milking staff throughout Taranaki and he would “float” as needed. But he found it difficult to find enough reliable milkers. Jeanette left nursing in February 2021 and until November accompanied Scott to get “her hand back in”. In December she took on a casual job at a covid testing centre.

“That 10-hour a week job turned into a 54-hour fortnight. But I love it. I feel like I’m contributing to help stem this pandemic. I’m a nurse and no matter what else I do, I’ll always be a nurse. There’s a pandemic occurring and I felt as though I wasn’t doing anything to help fight it,” she says.

“I now work five days a fortnight and if we don’t have any milking jobs that I am needed for, I can pick up more shifts. My hours allow me to do morning or afternoon milkings.”

Since the country came out of the first covid lockdown in 2020, Scott’s workload has gone through the roof. He’s unsure why, but since then more farmers seem to be taking time off.

He also rears calves, does day work and feeding out. During the last two winters he shifted up to four herds a day. Cupping cows doesn’t bore him because he milks in so many sheds and no two days are the same.

“The basics of cowshed operation are still the same. Even in the new-fangled sheds the differences usually only amount to turning a few extra taps or pushing a few buttons. I usually do an initial milking with the farmer to familiarise myself with the shed before milking on my own,” he says.

“Your herd is your livelihood and you’re entrusting that livelihood to someone else. You need a milker with the experience to circumvent any problems,” Jeanette says.

Farmers look for reliability and a solid knowledge base in their relief milkers. But there is a nationwide shortage of relief milkers.

On a farm where he’s regularly worked for 19 years, he once began relief milking when there were only six cows in at the start of spring. When the family returned there were only six left to calve. He also worked through the beginning of AI one year.

“That’s a big responsibility because I was entrusted with the farmer’s next season,” Scott says.

He prefers working with smaller herds and most of his sheds are single-milker operations. He enjoys getting to know the cows and seeing the herd development occurring over the years.

“We’ve been fortunate to have had very good clients. Many aren’t just clients, they’ve become friends. Of the clients we’ve lost, the vast majority have retired. Word of mouth has been our best advertising,” Jeanette says.

“It’s a balancing act getting the correct number of sheds. We don’t want to be run off our feet or let farmers down. January to March was always the busy period, but last winter we worked for two-and-a-half months without a break. We milked until June and started again in August.”

Many of their clients are young farming families. Often, one parent works full-time and the other on-farm. They need a relief milker to enable them to attend events and spend time with their kids. There’s a growing trend for farming families to try to spend more off-farm time with their

Scott and Jeanette relief milking at Dolly’s Fresh Real Milk, which sells raw milk direct to the public. “There he was, draped over a barbed wire fence holding a calf. I asked him what he was doing and he replied ‘Waiting for you to come for the calf’.” Jeanette Scott

children, and Scott thinks it is a positive trend.

He has three words of advice for farmers using relief milkers: keep it simple.

One thing he finds frustrating is taking on a new job only to find that the cows are at the back of the farm. Yet he could see that the close paddocks had recently had cows in them.

He doesn’t mind getting cows in, but the extra time it takes has led him to sometimes charge per hour instead of per milking. Next time he will arrive to find the cows are in the close paddocks because the farmer doesn’t want him spending an hour on the bike.

“I’m sometimes told that milking takes two hours, yet it took me three. But when talking to a neighbour they’d tell you that there were usually two milkers and it always takes two-and-a-half hours,” he says.

“You then know that they just want the cheapest price. If the farm is some distance from Stratford, I’ll charge an hourly rate from when I get into the ute until I get home.”

When you work on so many different farms, “situations” can occur, Jeanette says.

“I was still a newbie, sitting on the bike when Scott went behind a hedge to catch a calf. I thought it was taking a while, so went to find him,” she recalls.

“There he was, draped over a barbed wire fence holding a calf. I asked him what he was doing and he replied ‘Waiting for you to come for the calf’.”

“The calf had raced off through the fence, so I’d straddled the fence to catch it because you only get one chance to catch them. But the fence was high and tight, so I was left stranded holding the calf,” he says.

Although Scott has an agricultural trade certificate, more important is his decades of experience.

“Farmers know their cows are in good hands,” she says.

“I’ve lost count of the times that Scott has spotted an issue. He has the knowledge to deal with it at the time. We’ve been there and know what it’s like trying to find a reliable relief milker.” n

Scott grew up on the family dairy farm and has many years of milking experience. Scott carting buckets of milk to the storeroom.

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