FARMSTRONG
Farming hasn’t always been easy for Oxford farmer Darcy Bishop but despite that, he has overseen substantial growth on the family farm.
Text does the trick Getting time off-farm is a big issue for many farmers. But a group of Canterbury farmers have found a solution – texting each other to arrange short breaks.
O
xford dairy farmer Darcy Bishop has never forgotten the advice his father gave him. “Dad always taught me in farming you should always take time to smell the roses,” Darcy says. Easier said than done, however, when you’re as busy as Darcy is. This third-generation, dairy farmer milks 945 cows on 285ha near Oxford in Canterbury. Darcy’s overseen substantial growth in the family business, and it hasn’t always been plain sailing. “We’d just scaled up our operation to progress as a family. So, we took the plunge and came down south. It was a $7 payout when we decided to make the move and by the time we arrived, it had
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suddenly dropped to $3.90, so that was really tough. If someone had told me it was going to be like that, I probably wouldn’t have carried on farming. It was stressful,” he says. That’s when Darcy realised he needed to start taking care of himself as well as the farm. “That experience really taught me that no industry is always ‘up’. There are going to be fluctuations in the market. You’ve got to learn to live with that and still be able to enjoy the ride as much as you can,” he says. “Scaling up like that also made me realise there’s no limit to the number of hours you could put into an operation like this. To avoid burnout, you need to be proactive and do other things and
get off-farm. After all, you’re only young once. You’ve got to make the most of that.” Luckily, Darcy’s mate Ben Peake, another dairy farmer, was on the same wavelength and came up with a simple but effective solution. Occasionally, he’d randomly text his local farmer mates a short message “tools down” – and then suggest a time and place to meet offfarm. It worked. “It was a bit of a shock at first,” laughs Darcy. “But getting that text definitely made my ears prick up. I guess it just took off from there.” Now when things are a bit quieter onfarm, Darcy and half a dozen mates will flick each other a text and then head out for an afternoon lunch, a run or a bike
DAIRY FARMER
May 2021
