9 minute read
21 Women of the land
Women of the land
November is the start of the season for showing off all things agricultural and pastoral. The Nelson A&P Show is gearing up for its 127th show, and despite nervous jitters about Covid, planning has been in full swing since last year. This month we’re going slightly rural, in honour of the region’s women of the land. Tracy Neal reports.
Chickens crowd and strut the paddocks of Willow Creek Farm in Upper Moutere like concertgoers at an outdoor rave.
The happy hens now number 6000 and are the lifeblood of the Macquet family’s free-range egg business. It has helped to shape 23-year-old Aimee Macquet, who grew up in the peaceful rural enclave. Her parents moved to New Zealand from South Africa, where they ran a specialty vegetable farm, and eventually bought the property in Upper Moutere. They started the egg farm with 1500 chickens, and it’s grown from there.
“When we first moved here Dad was commuting to Wellington for work so my job was to get up early and feed all the chickens before catching the bus to school. “I’d come home and help with all the endof-day chores, like cleaning up all the hen houses.”
Aimee says feeding is now automated, which is just as well – 6000 hungry hens are not to be messed with.
AIMEE JULES
The farm runs mainly Hy line brown chickens – a mix of brown shaver and the Hy line variety. “We used to get them when they were 14 weeks-old which was a major family mission. “We’d have to drive over to Blenheim where they were raised, catch them at night, because it was only possible in the dark, put them in cages and drive them back to the Moutere where we’d unload them all.”
Aimee says it meant a 7pm start, and a return at 1am, two nights in a row. “We couldn’t fit them all in one trip. It was always a giant family debacle.” The farm now raises its own chickens, freighted in at the tender age of one day old. Chickens are said to be the closest living relative to dinosaurs. While that was news to Aimee, she has noticed some unusual responses from friends visiting the farm.
Aimee Macquet
“Some are terrified of the hens – I have to piggy-back my friends through the paddocks, they’re so afraid.” Aimee, who goes by the name Aimee Jules as a photographer for this magazine, discovered photography as an off shoot of her industrial design degree. “I’ve applied some of my product design learning on the farm. We designed all the tunnel houses and the nesting boxes. Honestly, it’s quite a fancy chicken farm.” Aimee has acquired her mother’s love of horses, and the pair often ride together. She says while the land has helped to shape her so far, she’s not sure it will shape her future. “I love the land. We have a stand of native bush where we go quite often as a family and sit on a chair we built at the top of the paddock where we look out over the whole farm. “It’s a paradise, and mum and dad are very proud of what they’ve built. I do love it here, but I also see it’s a lot of work.”
The show must go on…Covid permitting.
The show’s organisers are once more nervously watching daily Covid announcements, hoping the 127th Nelson A&P Show will happen as planned on the 20th and 21st of November.
Nelson A&P Association manager Annette Robinson said as this issue went to print, that all fingers and toes were crossed.
“Currently, I feel we are in the butterfly games, flitting around. The bottom line is, we’ll have some sort of show, barring us being plunged back into Level 3 or 4 lockdown.”
The show's notable and historic cancellation was in November 1918 when Nelson was in the grips of the Spanish Flu pandemic, and the showgrounds in Richmond were turned into a temporary hospital. The show, which was launched in 1895 by Prime Minister Richard John Seddon with the words, “we must keep pace with the times”, has evolved into more of an education event, Annette says. This is because of changes to people's lifestyles, and as young people become less aware of basic food production. "Things like where milk comes from, or what does a little lamb look like - a lot of people just don't get the opportunity to see and feel those sort of things." All going to plan, the woodchopping will be a star attraction of this year’s show, helped by Canterbury competitors looking to Nelson now that the Christchurch show has been cancelled.
Ocean swell from a northerly storm crashing on the beach at Cable Bay was Barbara Stuart’s first memory of the farm she was to call home.
The Banks Peninsula farmer’s daughter eventually became a strong advocate for sustainable land management practices in the Nelson region, and a voice for rural women. She had met husband-to-be, Ian Stuart through mutual friends when she was head cashier at Whitcoulls in Christchurch, and Ian was farming in Lincoln. They’re now retired, having handed daily management of the 900-hectare Cable Bay Farm to their son Sam and his wife Anni, but it’s been a successful team effort for decades.
“I always said Ian does all the work and I do all the talk.” Barbara was familiar with steep hills and tough land to farm, such as those surrounding Lyttelton Harbour, but the sea rolling into north Nelson – the soundtrack to the Stuart family farm, was different. “Ian brought me home to meet the family. We arrived late at night because back then it was a long drive from Christchurch. “There was this northerly sea coming in – it was roaring all night. I’d come from a small bay in Lyttelton Harbour where the southerlies brought the storms, but here, it was coming from the north and it was different.”
The Stuart family has farmed the original Cable Station site since the early 1930s and has re-shaped the farm with land additions and subtractions over the generations. Barbara’s involvement in an array of community groups has helped guide many in the rural sector. For 18 years she was the Top of the South regional coordinator for the New Zealand Landcare Trust, helping farmers reduce their impact on the land by boosting efforts to farm more sustainability. She has also been involved with Rural Women NZ which collaborates with the Top of the South Rural Support Trust and Federated Farmers.
Barbara Stuart
Barbara and Ian have ridden the highs and endured the extreme lows of farming, while at the same time suffering the worse blow imaginable with the loss of their son Evan at Cave Creek on the West Coast in 1995. He was among the 14 who died after a viewing platform they were on collapsed and fell 30 metres into the ravine below.
Barbara’s love of the land has never waned, but she is concerned for the next generation. “It’s getting tougher and the public’s expectations of how people farm is becoming greater. “They’re challenging times for our young people who are a huge resource for this country. We don’t want to lose the ability to produce food.”
ABBY DAVIDSON
Barbara Stuart at Cable Bay.
Rebecca Hayter with Hokey Pokey.
A farmlet by the sea in Golden Bay/Mohua was a calling for Rebecca Hayter. The New Zealand author and award-winning journalist grew up in the “bay”, which beckoned her back in late 2015 after a long media career in Auckland. The former editor of Boating New Zealand magazine says she had no clue about what might be involved in running a 10-acre property. When interviewed for this story, Rebecca had spent half the previous night under a plum tree in her orchard, cuddling a tiny, newborn lamb from the rain, while its mother looked after its twin.
Rebecca’s commitment to the move was confirmed once she found the right property, which she felt straight away had been developed with love. “Most of us have a deep-down dream of living on the land and having chooks and a vegetable garden. It’s a bit idealistic, but for me it was a flame still burning and I wanted to pay attention to it and make it happen.”
Rebecca Hayter
Rebecca says that when she sole-owned a yacht, she found that the biggest roadblock to a task was lack of confidence. The same applies to running a lifestyle property, she says. “It’s easy to fall into the thinking that men drive tractors and use the chainsaw and the women mow the lawns and do the garden, but you have to get over that and say, ‘Well actually, I’m going to drive the tractor and use the chainsaw’. “It took me two years to get up the courage to buy a chainsaw and now I’m like Paul Bunyan (lumberjack folk hero) chopping down trees all over the place.” An unexpected delight has been the sheep which graze on seaside paddocks. “Don’t tell my cat, but yes, I think my favourites are probably the sheep.” Rebecca says owning land is like a relationship with any living being. “The land gives you so much – obviously it gives you food, but it also allows you to be part of a living community, where you get to see the weka teaching their babies how to find worms, you see eels and pukeko in the wetland; everyone’s got their friends and their enemies and they’re just trying to survive.” The challenges, she says, lie in the ongoing maintenance, but the overall experience creates a rich resource for her writing, including her award-winning column, High Heels and Gumboots, which ran in North & South magazine prior to its recent reincarnation.
“It’s about a city girl who comes to a lifestyle block without a clue about what she’s doing, but bumbles along from one disaster to another, helped along by her chooks, her sheep and her neighbours.” Rebecca says the local community is hugely supportive, with advice on everything from composting to caring for sheep and nurturing native seedlings which flourish on the farmlet she’s named Oceanspirit.
