Chapter 8 - Hawera

Len contacted me and said that a farm of 66 acres on the outskirts of Hawera was being auctioned and he thought it might suit us. I had owned the Hunterville property for 5 years. I paid £10,000 for it as a going concern. I had put in £4,000 and the State Advances bridged the gap. My equity had grown to about £8,000. The property to be auctioned was the Goodson Estate property and I bought it for £200 per acre. The Guardian Trust lent the balance to complete the purchase, but I also had the input from the sale of the herd to Joe Buhler, who was to be my 50/50% milker at Hawera.

Photo above : The Hawera Farm 1962.

When I told Heather that I had bought the Goodson Estate property she exclaimed “What! £200 per acre”. I assured her that one day I would get £300 an acre and she made me promise if I was offered £300 that I would take it and sell the property. Just short of six years later Joe Buhler offered £300 an acre so I sold to him. Early in 2008 Joe bought 13 acres and a 66 years old house opposite the cow shed for $680,000, i.e. $52,000 per acre.

When I went to Hawera it was on the understanding that I would understudy Len Newall for a year receiving about half the salary that I would get when on my own. Len Newall was the contractor supervising the 50 odd farms under the control of the Guardian Trust. To my eyes Len was on a PR exercise, he was quite frail and appeared to be satisfied with the status quo. A glaring example of that was in regard to the JJ Patterson farms. The farm houses had not been painted for 14 years and he passed that buck on to me. Also he was on first name terms with the six female beneficiaries of that estate and was happier giving them maximum dividends at the expense of the farm improvements. The majority of the Patterson Estate farms were Maori leaseholds but they all had compensation for improvements.

As some of the other farms were being managed or share milked by beneficiaries of the deceased owners, unless I could see glaring examples of mis-management, I tended to be the friendly inspector offering advice where I thought it would be appreciated. There were about 10 farms in this category.

With the 39% sharemilkers which all the JJ Patterson milkers were, they did not own the milking herd but were paid half the value of the calves at weaning, also half the proceeds of the pigs. My involvement was to see all stock were adequately fed and kept healthy, ensuring veterinary treatment for any lame or unhealthy looking stock; keeping an eye on milk test results for bacterial infections and sudden fluctuations in milk yield which could forewarn of bloat or metabolic infections.

All 39% sharemilkers and the sheep farmers had to fill out monthly returns showing stock on hand, additions, losses, and sales with room for comment about production and health. If the 39% man owned a tractor he was paid a percentage of the running expenses. The owner paid for the fertilizer for the 39% milkers.

The 50/50 milkers owned the herd and plant but did not get reimbursed for the use of their tractors and implements. The milking plant was owned and maintained by the farm owner as was the water supply and cost of conversion to tanker collection. The 50/50% man shared the fertilizer cost unless it was specified differently. .

An innovation I liked to introduce as an incentive to the 50/50% agreements when new contracts were being drawn up was to offer an extra 5% or 10% if the production exceeded the previous best figure. Or else offer to supply an extra ton of fertilizer for every 1,000lbs. of butter fat above best years. The Hawera Office Manager Campbell, did not like that, but the Palmerston North manager approved of the incentives for the milkers on the three farms under his administration.

Campbell openly said Taranaki farmers were little better than French peasants which did not help when he was dealing with them. In my view it was no way to boost their morale or to make them feel proud to work for the Guardian Trust. Campbell was a Public Trust employee before he came to the Guardian Trust and he did not leave that skin flint attitude behind. Contrary to the expectations of the Guardian Trust Head Office, he did not mix socially with the business people or farmers of the district.

As the JJ Patterson farms were all on 39% the Guardian Trust, as executors, was responsible for the maintenance and, if possible, the improvement of the herds and it fell to me to buy young bulls to mate with the heifers on the dry stock farms. To look after the heifers, i.e., drenching for stomach worms and spraying to get rid of lice, I used to get all the sharemilkers to come to the Winks Road dry stock farm. I felt that they appreciated the camaraderie of the boss working with them. Previously this had been done with hired labour. The same approach was used with the haymaking, but the feeding out on the dry stock farm was done by the two adjacent sharemilkers.

In retrospect, I made a mistake in having a new walk through shed built on Farm 17, agreeing with Campbell that production per cow was higher from a walk through shed. Another brain storm Campbell had that caused dissention between ourselves and the beneficiaries of the Wilson Estate, a larger than average farm on the Skeet Road adjacent to the Kapuni River, was the building of an imposing gate entrance of split boulders when the money should have been spent on maintenance of farm buildings.

My Hawera farm had a town milk quota i.e. it was supplying milk in cans to the local Town Milk Processing plant where it was pasteurized and bottled before being distributed by vendors around Hawera. My herd at Hunterville had been on town supply which meant the milk there was picked up by a distributor who put the 2 x 20 gallons of milk on the carrier of his Buick car and delivered it door to door around the township. The treatment and bottling produced a better quality product but there was no treatment station at Hunterville and if I was short of milk I used to go to Palmerston North Treatment Station to get sufficient milk for the customers.

Arthur Taplin’s eldest son Dick had set himself up as a cartage contractor and was the first person that I knew of who pulled a trailer behind the truck and we hired him to shift the herd. He was able to take the whole milking herd in one trip from Hunterville to Hawera. He also took the 2 ton tractor but I did not use it much on the Hawera farm except to pull out boxthorn, to roll the silage stack and to pull the wheel tractors and trailer loads of silage out of the boggy silage pit before we had the floor concreted . Boxthorn was a disaster on rubber tyres but it could not puncture steel tracks. The majority of the paddock and road boundaries were boxthorn hedges which had to be cut by mechanical cutter. I also loaded farm implements onto the trailer (the left over of the Maxwell truck) behind the B250 tractor and drove it through to Hawera. I got there in the course of one day.

Our neighbours the Chisholms wanted to buy the Hunterville farm but I sold it to Allister Lambert. We sold the 200 ewes to Murray Pillet from Marton. After they were trucked out the neighbour, Charlie Chisholm came over and said that two of his ewes were in my mob. The Chisholm’s had 350 acres next door and had farmed there for 30 years, they had wanted to buy my farm but the bank would not finance them so I put the accusation about the stealing of his sheep in the sour grapes basket. He could have come forward when the sheep were in the yards as their dwelling overlooked our yards. I sold the young dairy stock at $6. a head, but shifted the dairy cows to Hawera as my appointed share milker had agreed to buy them.

When the Swiss family named Buhler arrived in New Zealand the family comprised of the father and mother and six boys and two girls ranging from 12 years up to 28 years of age. Marie, the elder daughter, was the only one able to speak English. They were very good people with strong family ties. The Buhlers started as 39% sharemilkers on the Patterson Estate some three years before I met them. After two years on Farm 19 of the J J Patterson Estate, son Robert and daughter Marie were able to take on 50/50 sharemilking on a farm south of Hawera. All the income earned by the children went into their father’s bank account and he distributed funds to where they were most needed.

A year later when we moved to Hawera, Joe, the Buhler’s second son, was our 50/50 sharemilker. Joe lived in our back bedroom and ate with us. Both of our boys were pre-school and Joe noted that I contributed to family life by doing some chores. In typical European style he had never made a bed, polished his shoes or dried a dish. One day when I was drying the dishes he said his sisters should marry New Zealand boys but he and his brothers should marry Swiss girls. Shortly afterwards Robert went back to Switzerland and found a Swiss bride and Joe’s younger brother John helped Marie with the milking. Only two of the five boys married New Zealand girls. When we sold the farm to Joe he got John to milk the cows and he went to Switzerland and met and married Bertha.

The farm had three road frontages giving three acres of berm that Joe top dressed and grazed intensively or made hay from it. Joe now has 300 acres that has been bought in 10 pieces. The last was 24 acres which is opposite the homestead. He paid $51,000 an acre for this land, which is a big step up from the $40,000 for the first 66 acres.

The farm estate (Goodson Estate) had been administered by the Public Trust and as I was the new Guardian Trust farm supervisor, I took great delight in tidying it up and adding improvements such as new conventional fencing, new hay barn, adding a vat stand to the milking shed as we went on to tanker collections, repiling and painting the homestead and felling the over mature trees so that we could look out of the master bedroom window straight across country and see Mt Egmont and the flare from the Kapuni oil well. We had town supply water as Hawera water supply lines ran along the road boundary and we drew our water for house and farm from that.

The homestead was an imposing structure of at least 2,500 sq. ft. but it had been sadly neglected. Firstly it had to be repiled, this was made easier and cheaper by cutting a hole in the floor of a bedroom in the centre of the house. There was a saucer shaped depression under the centre of the house and it was easier to work outwards from this depression. The old kitchen on the south side of the house became the boys’ playroom and we added a new kitchen area beside a new bay window. This area became the dining area on the east side so we got the early morning sun, and we created a fabulous living room, kitchen and dining area with an open fire and built in oak roller desk.

The Guardian Trust administered 54 farms from the Hawera Office, 50 dairy farms and four sheep farms. Some of the dairy farms were leased to beneficiaries and did not require intense supervision. The extent of my territory was from Mokau on the north coast of Taranaki, south to Shannon and to Ohakune in the central North Island and west of the Tararua and Ruahine Ranges.

Initially I did not come south of the Rangitikei River but the Manawatu farm supervisor for the Guardian Trust, Bill Nelmes, had two farms under his care. This became three when a farmer died suddenly and his farm and estate came under the Guardian Trust umbrella. Bill did not enjoy his involvement with them and I was asked to include them in my portfolio. By leaving Hawera very early in the morning and putting in a 12 hour day, I could visit all these farms in one day. The Waugh Estate at Rongotea and the Waring-Taylor Estate farm at Shannon. Jim Campbell, the Hawera Office Manager who was Public Trust trained and still had that difference, did not approve of me including them in my portfolio but he could not stop me as I was a contractor and tendered a price for each farm each year. At over £12,000 per annum, I was getting more income than the manager’s salary. I was not used to such a salary, in fact it was a big step up from the Public Service salary and one year’s income was almost the cost of the farm, but I had to supply my own car and pay running expenses.

I tried to visit each farm regularly, especially if it was a sheep farm or a dairy farm with a 39% milker, certainly until I had assessed the quality of the manager or sharemilker. The good ones did not need the intense supervision that the poor ones did and I spent much time encouraging the poor performers to improve or to move on.

The sharemilker on the Waugh Estate at Rongotea was the son of the deceased owner and he was satisfied that he could equal his father’s production figures of about 25,000lbs. of butterfat but he was slow to appreciate that his mother was also entitled to an income, she was living in a comparatively new home at the road side and no doubt had been left a life interest and income from the Estate. For a replacement I contacted Allan Wallbank, a younger man with a young family. Allan said he would produce 35,000 lbs. of butterfat but would need a new home.

The three farms were administered by the Palmerston North office, where the manager, Brian Schofield, had a far better personality than the Hawera manager. When I asked for a new house for the Waugh Estate we did the homework and found there were 8,000 in a Capital Account. In 10 weeks we had a new three-bedroom Keith Hay house costing £6,800 on site. Allan produced 36,000 lbs of butterfat in the first year, rising to 45,000 lbs in the third year. Allan then moved to a leased dairy farm near Foxton which was owned by Mrs. Rennie who promised to reimburse Allan for any improvements. He built a new up-to-date piggery, but Mrs. Rennie was not satisfied and did not reimburse him so he was left $10,000 out of pocket. At the time I left the Guardian Trust and bought a sheep farm near Shannon, Alan left Mrs. Rennie and bought a sheep farm at Kaitieke, north of Raetehi. I did not meet up with him again for 20 years when he came to Ashford Park to acquire a couple of race horses of a particular blood line.

The other farm administered by the Guardian Trust at Shannon, was the Waring-Taylor Estate – the original family were early Wellington settlers – had a 39% sharemilker named Waghorn. He was getting 39% of the milk payout and 50% of the pig proceeds. I was not at all happy with the paucity of the pig payment and the suspicion the allocated fertilizer was going to friends who had the farm next door. It was no surprise to me when the Police rang to say they were taking him for stealing four bales of wool. He was convicted so I sacked him on the spot and milked the cows myself until I found a replacement, Tantrum, who worked to the end of the season.

At the end of the season I took the wages man, Tantrum, and his family to Taranaki and brought Jim Parkes and his family down from Taranaki to Shannon. This suited them very well as they had a son who became a resident of the Kimberley Centre.

The biggest estate was that of J J Patterson which at one time had seven farms at Waitoa in the Waikato and 21 farms in Taranaki. Some of these ‘farms’ were small properties usually leased but not big enough to carry a herd, but there were 10 herds in the Taranaki cluster including two at Tongaporutu which is on the coast south of Awakino and north of Mount Messenger. In South Taranaki we also ran a dry stock farm where we grazed the replacement stock from May to May.

My arrival at the Guardian Trust coincided with the change over to tanker collection which meant installing vats at the milking shed, making the cans and horse drawn wagons redundant. Because no whey was available to return to the farm piggeries the pigs became redundant. Up to that time all herds were on whole milk supply except for the two herds at Tongaporutu (south of Mokau) which separated the milk and sent the cream to Waitara. I closed down the Tongaporutu sheds because we would have been heavily penalized for carting the whole milk over Mt Messenger. The whole milk went to Waitara and, in more recent years, to Hawera.

Closing down those two milking sheds gave a very strong sheep unit with quality ground to fatten surplus stock. It was the only sheep farm in the J J Patterson portfolio. It was close to 4,000 acres. J J Patterson was the great grandfather of Olympian Rod Wardell. J J had six daughters but no sons. After I left the Guardian Trust in 1965 Jim Wardell (Rod’s father) took over the sheep farm and farmed it until his health let him down and he retired to Hamilton where he died in 2007.

One day when coming back from a bull sale at Mahaenui I thought I would go and look at the hoggets in the valley behind the front hills of the Tongaporutu property. On the way I came upon a whitebait trap taking up the full width of a small stream. I had nothing to put the whitebait in so I left them till I came back when I decided I would go barefooted and carry the little critters in my gum boots and put the trap back in place.

J J Patterson’s Will precluded any capital expenditure, justified I suppose because most of the farms (Farms 15,16,17,18,19,21, 25 and 28) were West Coast Leases, but had compensation for improvements. Times were changing on the farms whereas in the past the hay was cut loose, swept into the stack site and lifted on to the stack using a horse pulled lifting attachment and then thatched. But with no need for horses once the milk was not being taken to the factory by horse-drawn wagons fewer horses were available for hay making. The thatching was not very good unless there was an expert team available.

There were no hay barns on the farms but there was a way around that. I had six to twelve poles delivered to each farm under the guise of heavy fence strainers before the end of the accounting year and then in the next year delivered all the beams and purlins “for yard repairs” and then roofing iron “for shed repairs”. I physically helped the sharemilkers to put up the frames in the Spring. They then put baled hay within the framework so that the roofing timber was put on while standing on the hay. No risk and No wages – but each farm got a hay barn and all tax deductible and not listed as capital expenditure.

There had been a minimum of maintenance on the Patterson farms in recent years as the Trust had aimed to pay the six daughters £5,000 each per annum. None of the houses had been painted for 14 years. Len Newell advised me to catch up on maintenance if there was a good year. Fortunately that appeared in my first year. There was record spring production, all the silage was in October then the rain stopped. I was so confident of the Taranaki weather I encouraged the sharemilkers to feed the silage to keep the production up to support my spending spree which included painting and renovating houses, materials for hay barns, converting milking sheds for tanker collection, upgrading tanker tracks and cattle stops at the road entrance.

The dry weather continued so there was no hay for the coming winter. I tendered for a whole farm (120 acres) just south of Eltham. It had not been grazed since the winter so the crop was very heavy. There were four tenders above £1,200, mine at £1,218 won the day and we could at least partly fill the hay barns for the winter feed supply. Lou Styger, a friend of Joe Buhler, mowed and baled the hay and Dick Taplin, the eldest son of my boss in 1944, carted it to the farms, mainly Patterson Estate farms, as the Guardian Trust was responsible for their hay.

All that development and improvement gave me great satisfaction but when the accounts were done there was only £1,700 for each beneficiary. Of course I got the blame but the Guardian Trust had something to answer for. The deputy chairman of the Guardian Trust Board based in Auckland made bi-annual visits and should have seen the deferred maintenance and I believe that the Trust should have held back up to £1,000 a year to insure against a poor season. Anyway, the beneficiaries were after the new supervisor and called a meeting in Hawera. The six daughters attended and also four of their sons from the South Island who came and looked around the farms the day before and two North Island sons Jim Wardell and Phil Wickham. The latter two I had met during the year and they were aware of the deferred maintenance and changing farming pattern. As I walked into the meeting two of the South Islanders came across the room and welcomed me like a long lost brother – they were the Allison brothers who had been with me at Lincoln College. I put my case to the meeting and was endorsed by the sons, and the Guardian Trust administration got a bollicking. The Allison boys flew a four-seater plane up from the south and next day wanted to fly to Tongaporutu but the cloud was down on the saddle between Stratford and Ruapehu. I was glad when they turned back. Now with more local knowledge they could have flown along the coast around Mt Egmont. Because of the distances that I covered I was taking flying lessons but that experience changed my mind and I stuck with the car, doing 60,000 kms per year.

To do that mileage meant early starts, I would have breakfast with the farm manager at Tongaporutu. On one occasion breakfast wasn’t ready so I went over to the milking shed. When I opened the door I had to use it to push a cream can out of the way. When I got into the shed Bill, the sharemilker, was over vigorously scrubbing the vat and the land girl was likewise scouring the cups. I noticed through the summer weight blouse the land girl was wearing that the top hook of her bra was fastened to the bottom eye. The milkers generally wore overalls when milking but obviously they had been discarded, such was the heat of the moment, and the reason for the cream can against the door.

Bill, the sharemilker, got a 50/50 job just north of Bulls and used to do a stint in the evenings at one of the hotels in Bulls. One evening four of the locals went to a Lions Club meeting in Feilding. As they were being delivered to their respective homes they noticed Bill’s car parked upon the side of the road. They turned around and shone a torch through the windows. The chap who lived up the road said “That’s my wife”. They opened the front door of the car and took all the clothes leaving the two nude lovers to work out how they were going to get home. Bill went off with the woman and Bill’s wife milked the cows for the remainder of the season.

After Len Newall left the Guardian Trust I took over the contract. I rendered an account for my services to each farm based on time required to supervise the on farm management, the time spent buying and selling stock, the mileage required to service the farm and, possibly, some extra to reimburse me for attending dairy and sheep farming conferences. This account was about £12,000 a year, which was more than the office manager earned. When I added the three Manawatu farms to my portfolio I was only given 10 more days a year to my work load because I would visit all three farms in a day. Campbell’s attitude towards me changed as I had rapport with the Palmerston North manager.

Another incident fueled the dislike. It involved me accepting the Trusteeship of a Family Trust. One of our neighbours at Hunterville was a returned soldier who drew a ballot block adjacent to our farm. His wife, Valerie, went to Wanganui Girls’ College with my wife. Robin was a progressive farmer and embarked on pasture development. I was a very interested bystander and helped him by using my tractor to take the half sacks of grass seed and clover to strategic points on the farm from where it could be spread.

At the time that Robin left the 600 acres at Hunterville to go to 4,000 acres at Purangi 40kms east of Waitara, I was moving to Hawera. Robin asked me to be trustee for his family trust. I took that as a great honour, but Campbell thought it should have been the Guardian Trust. Robin had met Campbell and did not like what he saw. Campbell considered me as a traitor, which I was, but Campbell did not fill the bill for Robin and his family.

After years on the sheep station Robin bought a dairy farm near Stratford where his second son Tom, built up a very strong unit. After Robin died suddenly, Tom cashed in his share and bought a dairy farm just north of Ashburton. Recently I was talking with Valerie who is still on the Stratford farm. She said that Hannah Wright had been working for Tom. Hannah is the daughter of Brian who is the son of Ken who had the Roxburgh farm.

Upon reading a lengthy article in the Sunday Star Times on 24 August 2008, on the inside workings of the Trustee Companies, I woke up to the thinking which has been their modus operandi for 50 years. If the office charged out the supervision fees they could charge a percentage of the estate fees plus normal and abnormal accounting fees. There were instances of beneficiaries suing the Trustee Company for malfeasance and the Trustee Company taking their legal fees out of that estate’s coffers.

When setting my fees I would temper the fleece to the shorn sheep. Where a farm was struggling to operate in the black ink I would reduce my fee until I could get a more profitable return. Such generosity was not written into the ethics of the Trustee Companies and certainly not in the Public Trust.

I’ve learned: That it isn’t enough to be forgiven by others. Sometimes you have to learn to forgive yourself.