Change is funny. People probably see me now and think I'm pretty confident about
some of these things. Back then your back was against the wall. You had no
choice but to commit to it. You had to make it work.
Once you've been through that process it gives you the confidence to do the next thing and
the next thing, be it the hill country development or the bull beef thing or the irrigation. It's just
having that mindset that things are always going to change. There's not a constant on this farm.
Matthew Tayler here, with my wife Shona and my kids. We farm Lorne Peak Station, just
out of Garston, developing a 5,600 hectare property and wintering somewhere north of 20,000 stock units.
My grandad came up here in 1960 with 3,500 sheep, a horse, and a handful of cattle.
My dad and my uncle came along and they bought a few neighbouring places.
Dad would probably put more emphasis on growing the business
by buying more land, rather than the stock performance, which
at the time was probably the right decision.
Initially it was just me and dad here, store
stock property, then we did the farm succession stuff about 12 years ago and that's when we
dissolved that partnership between dad and his uncle and cousins.
Probably given my background, you know, I went to varsity and did something different
but I learnt how to learn. I can read a book and I can go and ferret it out on the internet.
Initially that was probably how I learnt.
I had a good TFO [Technical Field Officer] at the start, so I didn't seek out people to come on.
Now that I've got a bit of confidence, we did the Beef and Lamb
Innovation Farm and all of a sudden you had scientists and experts coming onto the farm.
Surround yourself with good people that share values and are rooting for you. That
just speeds that process up so much quicker. So we started with the fodder beet and we
got good at growing that, that was an easy win at the start. Then we started doing a
bit of heifer mating. Fodder beet let us get heifers up to weight, so we did a bit of that, and that led
us into Beef EQ and we started a relationship there with the meat company. So the lucerne and the
cultivation let us build an engine room that then let us get more out of all the surrounding hill.
So some of the most profitable stuff we've done, and it's not the stuff that people can see,
is the 10,000 or 15,000 tonnes of lime that we've put on in the last 10 years.
Fertility that we've built up and then the pasture renewal that's gone with it.
It's not the sexy stuff, the big shiny stuff, that's the bit that's actually where the money has been
made. I definitely haven't got it right, what and where we've spent our money and when.
In hindsight I would do them differently again, but at least we had a crack.
What I did at varsity was finance and economics, and there's a whole theory, option
theory, that options have a value, even if they never get exercise, they've still got a value.
The value of the farm isn't just what we actually physically do, it's all these options.
The irrigation thing, now that we've secured it
we've got that option for maybe myself and my kids in 20 years time, that we could be doing
cherries, or some kind of horticulture or something. We've built
that option into the business, and even just little day-to-day tactical options, that's worth something.