I was sitting in the car park picking up kids at kindy and Lance was in the South
Island buying bulls, and he told me that he was going to spend about $15,000 on this
bull, and I thought "oh that's okay".
Then the next message said $41,000, and I nearly
choked because we had just bought this farm!
That was our first bill, so a pretty big jump for us.
You either go or otherwise you keep wondering if you missed out. It's going to do wonders
for our stud so that's pretty exciting, but I took a few deep breaths when I walked into the kindy.
I'm Janelle, and I'm Lance, and we're farming with our family here in Strathmore.
We're farming roughly 1900 hectares over three different blocks. We've got about 5,600 ewes,
590 cows, with a Hereford stud. This is the breeding block here,
the new bit down the road will be the Angus breeding block.
Mum and Dad are still running the home block. He does the day-to-day stuff there.
Every day we're in contact with them discussing what's happening with fertiliser, buying stock, selling stock.
I'm the fourth generation of Downses to be breeding Herefords. We're just trying to
do our own thing now with them, and it seems to be going good. Succession is always tricky,
and there's a lot of stuff to work through. I think Kevin and Gene have done it a really
good way. We've done it in little bits. I took over the books and all that sort of
stuff, and then you started taking over some of the decision making. We just try to keep
Kevin in the things that he wants to do, like the stud bulls, and he rings the
wool people, and he rings the agents and gets prices. He makes sure we're not getting ripped off.
It's a big thing letting someone else take over, especially after being in charge for
so long doing everything, and then all of a sudden someone else is making the decisions.
I can imagine it's pretty hard. You'll never get Kevin out of it even if you tried.
I probably take it for granted a bit, if I'm second guessing anything he's only a phone call away.
The Douglas kids club, we were yakking, Laura and I, and another couple of mums.
We were talking about how the kids sort of miss out in these rural areas, because it's so far to drive
them into town. You can't just nip them down the road for swimming and gymnastics and what have you.
So we just sort of started with doing something on a Thursday. We started with wrestling
so we borrowed some mats. All of a sudden we had 25 kids there.
Then we had all these dads starting to turn up to help take the wrestling, and then it just
grew and grew, so we decided to do something different every term. We moved on to gymnastics,
Then we hired a local Taranaki tennis player, he came out and took tennis, and this term we're doing rugby.
It's good for them all to catch up, and even the parents come along.
Then afterwards the kids play around for a while, while the parents have a beer. It's good to catch up
with all the neighbours and just work out what's going on. You don't have to go to town,
you don't feel like you have to have a shower, or get dressed up, you just rock on up, lend a hand
and there's no expectation, it's just all easy. Getting dads off the farm makes a difference.
We're so lucky, I wake up every morning, I look out here
and I think how, you know, but we're doing that every day.
Our kids just have no idea how lucky they are. They just have the most incredible lifestyle.
We're just so lucky to be able to provide that for them. I don't think we're missing out on much.