Dairy Exporter December 2021

Page 26

BUSINESS AHUWHENUA TROPHY

e h t g n Taki leap to

r e g a man Janet Poihipi and Jack Mihaere.

Words by: Sheryl Haitana

W

hen you start driving east of Opotiki, it can feel like you’re going back in time. The $3-million holiday baches in Ohope give way to small old houses. Winding around the coast road, the land is divided into orchards, forestry and dairy farms and just before the small township of Hawai, is the Tunapahore Maori Incorporation dairy farm. That’s where I find farm manager Janet Poihipi busy cooking pikelets for the meetings she has with this journalist and then the farm adviser. The 53-year-old is preparing to go away on holiday for a month - her first holiday in six years and her anxiety about leaving the cows and calves is growing. Not that she doesn’t trust the relief manager that will step in for the four weeks she will be away, she just doesn’t like leaving the farm and her stock when she goes anywhere. “They’re my babies, I’m always in a hurry to get back to them. I absolutely love being hands-on with the stock – the farm is my pride and joy.” Janet milks 400 cows on the Incorporation’s farm with one 2IC and one relief milker and also runs the young stock on the runoff next door. 26

She admits she might not have the best work/life balance, and her children are always telling her she should have more whanau time. But she is content when she is out working onfarm. “When I’m up at 3am getting the cows in, I’m in my happy place.” It took Janet half her life to find out that her ideal vocation was working on a dairy farm. Born and raised in Porirua, Wellington, to her Maori mother and Czechoslovakian father, she was the youngest of their three children. It wasn’t until she was about 13 when she was visiting her grandmother in Opotiki that she realised she had 11 other siblings to her mother’s first marriage. That was also where she met her husband Whitiaua when she was 16 and the couple moved to Wellington then Invercargill where they spent 22 years working and raising their six children. Janet worked in shearing sheds while Whitiaua worked on a drystock farm. When their first mokopuna was born, they realised their children and grandchild had no connection to their people and culture and decided to move back to the Bay of Plenty. “One day it was like a lightswitch, we needed to go home because they didn’t

know any of their whanau. We packed all our things up and freighted them up. “When we got up here I wished we had come to have a look first. A lot of our whanau were living how they were when we left, still in shacks with no running water.” It was a big change for the children, getting back on to maraes, talking Maori, things they didn’t do down south. “It was hard, our kids wanted to go ‘home’ to Invercargill.” Finding a job was the next challenge and Janet did some work in a kiwifruit orchard which she didn’t enjoy. They got a house in the township of Hawai and the Tunapahore Incorporation dairy farm was just up the road. “I thought I could give milking cows a go. There were sharemilkers on here at the time, Pete and Liz Quarry. “The day I came up to ask about a job, Liz was having twins and the helicopter came because she was having difficulty. I told Pete I didn’t know how to milk cows, but I was a fast learner.” Janet ended up staying on as a relief milker as well as helping Liz around the house cleaning for the next 12 years. When the couple moved on, they recommended Janet to the next

Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | December 2021


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Articles inside

The Dairy Exporter in December 1971

3min
pages 90-92

Gen Z to make their mark

4min
page 89

Tracmap unit eases compliance pain

3min
page 88

Never too late to learn

5min
pages 86-87

A beetle to beat the thistle

2min
page 85

Plants waiting to be weeds

2min
page 84

The art of saying no

5min
pages 82-83

Variety from consulting to composting

7min
pages 78-81

Vet Voice: More to it than

4min
pages 74-75

Fast track to management

5min
pages 76-77

Reducing heat stress over summer

2min
page 73

M. Bovis: It had a head start

6min
pages 71-72

Restoring Horowhenua’s waters

6min
pages 65-67

And now, freshwater plans

3min
page 64

Sustainability: Gaining the knowledge

8min
pages 58-61

Open Country: Online tool for FEP

3min
pages 62-63

When will all this end?

5min
pages 54-55

Social media and anti-vax The dirty dozen

6min
pages 56-57

How to handle Covid-19 coming onfarm

3min
pages 50-51

No Jab, No Job in the milking shed

4min
page 48

It’s a health and safety issue

4min
pages 46-47

Dealing with vaccine reluctance

3min
page 49

Taranaki soft core

12min
pages 34-38

When the lights go red

5min
pages 44-45

Prepare for a virus attack

6min
pages 42-43

Ryegrass: Twelve years of torture

6min
pages 39-41

Benchmarking: Measure it to be sure

5min
pages 32-33

Ahuwhenua Trophy: Taking the leap to manager

5min
pages 26-27

Spending the payout: new kit or cutting debt?

8min
pages 14-17

Ahuwhenua Trophy: Quality on the coast

9min
pages 22-25

Frances Coles loves being an ambassador for Kiwi farming

3min
page 10

Future farming will need to give more than profit, writes George Moss

3min
page 12

What a payout, writes John Milne, but what prices

2min
page 13

Market View: Hedging bets on Singapore

3min
pages 20-21

Global Dairy: All change at FrieslandCampina

5min
pages 18-19
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