Chapter 7 - Hunterville

There were 40 acres of flat between the County road and the main trunk railway line (Wellington to Auckland). On the east side of the railway line there were 12 acres of near flat, non-flooding land, then 30 acres of easy hill. The balance of approximately 87 acres was mostly north facing hill rising to 100 metres along the south boundary. There was some scattered, stunted manuka on the hill section while the low hill was infested with rushes. The previous owner had allowed the south side neighbour, Froude England, to graze sheep on the hill and he had allowed the boundary fence to deteriorate. After I took over the farm Froude re-aligned the fence on a better line at his own expense. The fence was on a ‘give and take’ line, but Froude took more than he gave.

Heather and I moved there in May taking over the dairy herd and I thought we were in business, but the first visitor was Eric Onion, the dairy inspector employed by the Dairy Division of the Department of Agriculture, who informed me that the shed did not meet their hygiene requirements so I could not supply milk. I pleaded with him to give me 30 days grace, which he did but I had to have some money to buy timber, cement, concrete blocks, so I went to the local Bank of NSW (my father-in-law’s bank) and the manager had been a guest at our wedding. But he gave me the bum’s rush. I went across to Mr. Maunsell, Manager of the Bank of NZ, and he asked if £500.0.0d would be enough. I was delighted and thanked him profusely. I got busy and renovated the shed. I erected a new concrete block exterior wall, re-laid the floor and tidied up the surroundings which were quite close to the hay barns. After being milked the cows used to gather in the shelter of the hay barn and the surrounding mud was very sticky.

There was no tractor and for the first few days we fed out by putting four bales of hay on the wheel barrow and Heather pulled on a rope tied to the front. Then we bought a battery and put it in the Maxwell truck – it had been cut down from a car. My father had a Maxwell in the 1920’s and he claimed it was the worst vehicle that he had ever owned, but it served us well and was surprisingly mobile in muddy ground.

In our second year we bought an International B250 wheel tractor and started developing the easy hills. That was when my father sent the two ton up from the South Island. I had fitted spade lugs to the rear rims of the B250 and, by and large, that gave the tractor stability and traction. I used the two ton for ploughing and some cultivation and sowing the seed on the cultivated ground.

Above: Bill ploughing with the 2-ton at Hunterville 1956 - Main Trunk Railway in background

When ploughing through a rough creek the rear final drive on the two ton broke. Gough, Gough and Hamer had no spares for a vintage tractor so I bought a whole tractor in Rotorua for £25.0.0d and had it railed to Kaikarangi, the rail siding just north of our boundary, but the train derailed and the tractor was wrecked but the Railways still sent the broken machine on to Kaikarangi. Luckily the part I wanted was not broken. The Railway Department paid compensation so the exercise did not cost anything and I got the two ton going again. The two-ton was a very reliable starter. It had a Bosch magneto and crank handle starter. If any other tractor had a flat battery the two ton would tow start it. Even now in the Waimate Museum I delight in showing off its ease of starting – if there is petrol in the tank.

At 4 am one morning in November I received a telephone call from Maurice Henwood whose dairy farm was about two kilometers up the valley. Like us, his farm was on both sides of the Porewa stream that ran through the Paukiore Valley before it drained into the Rangitikei River above Marton. Maurice asked if I had any stock on the flats. For some reason I had put them across the railway line which was on higher non-flooding land. He said that although it had stopped raining there was a record flood on the way. I told him it was still raining where we were but when I looked out of the door the noise that I had thought was rain was being generated by water going under the house! The whole flat area from the road to the railway line was under water except for the sleeping platform in the pig house. Eventually we built a new hay barn on the knoll adjacent to the piggery. We were able to milk mid morning. The flood had devastated Hunterville township and the water was about a metre deep in most of the shops. Heather’s uncle owned the service station and the water was deep enough to cover the dials on the petrol pumps.

The Catchment Board then came to light. They wanted to put in a flood control scheme. The first task was to clear the willows out of the meandering Porewa stream and they wanted a cash contribution of £250.0.0d.from us. There was no way I could afford that amount. The 60 cows in the herd were worth £4.0.0d each. Being on town milk supply meant that 40 cows were being milked all the time while the other 20 were waiting to calve.

The Catchment Board wanted to use a drag line to clear the willow out of the creek but having seen the damage that a drag machine could do to the creek banks I said that I would remove the willows myself if the Catchment Board paid me. I bought a Clinton chainsaw with a swivel carburetor for £112.0.0d. The carburetor was fitted inside the handle and no matter what angle the blade was on the carburetor was always on the level. As the chainsaw would not cut the tree trunks which were under water, the Catchment Department supplied the gelignite and I would tie three or four plugs of gelignite together with a detonator under a trunk or limb and with a Cordex fuse cable attached to the detonator, light the exposed end of the Cordex which was out of the water. The time it took the fire to travel down to the detonator gave me sufficient time to get out of the way of the explosion which would cut through the tree. I then pulled the severed tree to the fire side and cut it into long lengths that I could lift onto the fire. At one stage I kept the fire going for 11 days by stoking it at all hours of the day and night. When I had finished the creek banks were intact, there was no debris in the paddock and I had a cheque for £118.0.0d and a new chainsaw.

The Catchment Board built about 20 retention dams up the side creeks of the Porewa stream where an earth dam about 20 feet high was built across the valley floor, but each dam had a concrete pipe of under one foot diameter in the creek bed so that when there was heavy rain the flood water was held back and only slightly more than the usual flow passed through the pipe. There has never been notifiable flooding of the valley floor since. There were five dairy farms up the valley and the valley floor was grazed by dairy cows. Now all the dairy farms have gone and potatoes are the main crop of the area.

The highway between Hunterville in the Porewa Catchment and Vinegar Hill in the Rangitikei Catchment had to be re-aligned and there was a comparatively low saddle to be cut through. Drinkrow Construction had the contract and one afternoon they came to me asking if I had a tractor to pull their two bulldozers as they were stuck. There was no way that the two ton would pull them. They were 11 ton and 16 ton each. They said both the motors were running and they did not wish to turn them off as they did not have batteries in them. The batteries were at the fuel dump by the road and they were too heavy to carry up the hill. I said I would go after milking to look at their predicament. They said they could get a Cat D8 up from Wellington at a cost of £100.0.0d. After milking I drove the B250 with the grader blade on the three point linkage up the road and up the hill and across the grass paddock where the bulldozers were stuck like dogs. The big tractor, the HD16, was bogged without having cut a few feet into the crest of the hill and they had used the HD11 (11 ton) to try and either push it out or, by putting the blade under the winch, to lift it out, but it was virtually standing on its nose. Both bulldozers had winch operated blades and rear winches and once the cables were tight there was no way the HD11 could return to the vertical. I hooked a long snig chain onto the rear of the HD11 and onto the B250, positioned the B250 down the hill, asked the bulldozer driver to release the cable and the B250 pulled the bulldozer back to the horizontal. The driver was able to reverse away from the HD16

I then had the driver put the HD11 up the hill in front of the HD16, attached the rear winch strop to the blade of the HD16 and wind in the winch. That lifted the belly of the HD16 out of the morass and in unison they were able to move the HD16 as it stood on its rear end and moved onto the stable ground as the HD11 also moved forward. I did not charge for my efforts but I was given a 44 gallon drum of diesel which was ample reward to me but a cheap service to them. It was a matter of brains and not brawn.

When I took the farm over there were only dairy stock on it amounting to about 50 milking cows. After the boundary fence was fixed I was able to run 250 ewes in conjunction with the milking herd At shearing time I used the Chisholm’s shed next to the Kaikairangi rail siding. This was not very convenient as my sheep had to be driven through Chisholm’s sheep paddocks.

The Watershed Road school about 10 mile away beyond the upper reaches of the Poukiore Valley came up for tender. I won the tender with a £40.0.0d bid. Heather’s Uncle Ron, one of the five dairy farmers up the valley, helped me to dismantle the school. We had stripped the body work and taken the engine out of the Maxwell mud buggy and turned the front of the chassis to take a drawbar. We were able to take the resultant trailer behind the B250 to bring the dismantled school back to the farm. Ten days later I was shearing in it. We were lucky; the building had been prefabricated and built there possibly 50 years earlier. The roof trusses were dove tailed, all the framing was dressed, pinex fixed outside the studs and clad in corrugated iron. We used concrete fence posts for piles and bolted 4 x 2 timber to them then tied the floor joists to the 4 x 2’s. We did not have to have building permits in those days and the shed still stands over 50 year later. Likewise we did not have a building permit to build the hay barn, but we did have the benefit of the suppliers plan and instructions how to assemble it.

The farm had not been top dressed and this included the flats as they were fairly wet and swampy and there was no evidence of heavy vehicles. I had to tile drain the flats, cultivate the paddocks and fill in the old water courses. This development was helped by removing the willows from the banks of the Porewa stream.

The first aerial application of fertilizer entailed emptying hundred weight bags into the loading hopper which was emptied into the hopper of a Fletcher aircraft based at Vinegar Hill very close to where the bulldozers got bogged.

After two applications from the Vinegar Hill strip I missed the annual exercise so I used a Dakota (DC3) based in Wanganui to put on five tons at one hundredweight per acre on to the hills.

I was the advising delegate to the Hunterville Young Farmers’ Club which boasted having had a member, John Lilburn, as the Dominion President the previous year. I guided the members of the Club in running two ploughing matches including the first Atlantic Silver Ploughing match in the North Island.

Through the Young Farmers’ Club I met Neville Crafar, he was a Wanganui boy but had worked originally for Majors at Turakina and then for a number of years for Henwoods who were about a kilometre up stream from our farm. We attended Neville’s marriage to Raye Harris in February 1960 . I asked Neville if he would like a sharemilking job as I thought he would suit the Maxwell Estate dairy farm on Hastings Road. The current share milker refused to spray the buttercup and as the farm was going onto tanker collection next year we could not tolerate buttercup tainted milk going into the vat. Neville was interested but did not have sufficient money.

Heather’s uncle Ron milked 40 plus cows further up the Poukiore (or Porewa) Valley. Ron died suddenly on Anzac Day and I asked his widow Ethel (Ethel was my father-in-law’s sister and Ron was my mother-in-law’s brother) if she would lease the cows to Neville and she agreed. I then went to Bill Myers a cattle trader who lived on Hastings Road a few farms down from the Maxwell Estate. I asked him if he could help my prospective milker for the Maxwell Estate to acquire 100 cows. Bill agreed as it was imperative that the buttercup problem should be overcome. When I asked how we would arrange payment he said it would be no problem and to arrange that when the animals were culled to put them through the Works in his name.

Bill had helped a number of young men get started on farms. There were no formal purchase agreements just gentlemen’s agreements sealed with a hand shake. However, when Bill died suddenly there were a lot of loose ends. Neville assured me that he had cleared his debts to Bill and Ethel. By this time Neville had his brother Frank working on the farm.

When I left the Guardian Trust I had a year as a real estate agent and took Neville down to Palmerston North where I introduced him to a 180 acre farm on Old West Road opposite what is now the Rugby Academy attached to Massey University. By this time Neville and his wife had two boys and, later, added a daughter to the family. They still drove an A30 car

Together with Heather and our two boys, I took over the Shannon farm at the same time that the Crafars took over the Old West Road farm. After they settled in Neville helped me with some fencing and gave me some hay to offset the use of my truck to cart his hay in.

After a couple of years had passed, Neville was joined by Allan, a younger brother, and his mother who had suffered a severe stroke. The house was quite big but was now becoming over crowded.

As luck would have it a Shannon dairy farmer asked if I knew of somebody to buy his farm. He wanted to buy a real estate business in Palmerston North. The first mortgage on his farm was transferable and he would leave the balance on as a second mortgage. Neville fitted the bill and moved in leaving his mother and two brothers on the Old West Road farm.

Eventually these two farms were sold and they moved to the Central North Island and have progressed to being the largest herd owners by numbers on the North Island. They now own 23,500 dairy cows in at least 15 herds and have bought 2,000 acres near our Waitotara farm because of the good soil quality to run some of their replacement stock. Their latest farm purchase is a 1,350 cow farm on the Santoft boundary.