ROAD TO DAIRYING
Moving on up By Tony Benny
This month we begin our Road to Dairying series, where we’ll chat with farmers who are relatively new to the industry and take a look at their journey so far.
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eter O’Connor always knew he wanted a career in dairy farming so when he finished his university studies, he jumped right in. His quick rise up the career ladder has been recognised with his naming as top dairy trainee in the 2022 Dairy Industry Awards. Brought up on the West Coast, O’Connor is a third-generation dairy farmer and his father and uncle farm near Westport. Another uncle, Damien, a former dairy farmer too, is Minister of Agriculture. O’Connor boarded at St Bede’s College in Christchurch, working on the family farm in the school holidays and went straight on to Lincoln University. “I thought, ‘Well if I don’t go to university out of school I’ll never get there. If I have a gap year I’ll end up driving tractors or dairy farming somewhere else so I went straight to Lincoln University,” O’Connor says. Although he was a top student, he always wanted an outdoor, hands-on job and was never attracted to corporatetype roles. “In high school I liked maths and physics, so that kind steered me towards thinking about engineering. However, I went to an engineering open day for school-leavers at one of the firms in Christchurch and I realised if I did that I’d be sitting at a desk and that didn’t really spin my wheels, so I thought, ‘Oh well, off to Lincoln I go’,” he says. When he finished university, graduating with First Class Honours, O’Connor spent a summer working for a silage contracting business co-owned by
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Canterbury famer Peter O’Connor is the 2022 Dairy Industry Trainee of the Year. And after only a year in the industry, he is moving into a management role on a 400-cow farm near Lauriston.
well-known large-scale Canterbury dairy farmers Leighton and Michelle Pye. “I was talking to Leighton one day and he goes, ‘What are you doing after the season finishes?’, and I said I was going to go dairy farming. ‘Oh really’, he said, ‘One of my contract milkers is actually looking for a 2IC’,” he explains. “I’d sort of had a 2IC role in my head. I didn’t want to be holding myself back for a season while I got the experience, I wanted to take a bit of a dive into the deep end I suppose.” The opportunity soon came with an interview with contract milker Steven Ketter. “I think Leighton must have given me a good reference and Steve offered me the 2IC job which worked out really well, so after the contracting season finished at
the end of April, I had a month of milking and drying the cows off and whatnot and got into it,” he says. “I’m happy to admit I was light on practical experience in some aspects, like springtime with calving cows. I’d always been around it but hadn’t really done it myself. I had a lot to learn there, just what to do when things go wrong with down cows and calving difficulties and what the best way to fix them is.” He learnt fast about dairy farming Canterbury-style and its differences to farming on the West Coast. “I tell people I came to Canterbury to learn how to make milk because production here per hectare is probably at least three times more than what we do on my home farm,” he says. “People have said farming in
DAIRY FARMER
July 2022
