Stock Sales Shenanigans
Girls can build gates
Hello readers,
I hope this note finds you well; the weather is windy and cool; that’s because it’s the beginning of summer, and as is the tradition, summer hides for another month at least.
I’ll fill you in on farm life shortly, but I found myself off the block for two nights last week. Something that very rarely happens at the Bucolic Prison, as small block farms are sometimes termed because they limit your travel.
You can read about that after the farm updates, a three-day ramble through some of New Zealand’s best rural real estate.
Part 1 - A slow start to summer
It’s been a busy time on the farm; with more settled weather K has been busy before the heat arrives in late December. The two highlights of the last few weeks have been getting our first sheep to the sales and making significant progress on the glamping site.
The grass is growing well; thankfully, it looks like we’ll be able to get some bales out of it shortly. I have a sneaking suspicion that next year will be dry, and with a late start to grass season, we need all the feed we can, just in case.
We had seven sheep lined up for the Clareville sales. The sales generally run weekly, but once every three months, they are held on a Saturday, which means that you get a lot of lifestylers turning up to buy their first sheep. Because we breed Arapawas, hardy beasts who are quite different looking, we thought this was probably a good market for us. They also self-shed, making them a bit easier to maintain.
The only problem with this venture is getting seven sheep from our place to the sales when the ute is still stuck in the driveway from the wet season, doesn’t have a warrant, and needs some work. A friend of ours, Margaret, comes to the rescue and knows the drill when it comes to sales having done it before.
We separate the sheep to be sold, and they go into two pens. This displeases them greatly. During the separation, one of the rams has a crack at K, and she still has the bruises. The ram comes off second best, of course, and now is on a short list for possible eating.
With a small flock, always eat the annoying or aggressive sheep. Keep the smart breeders with a good temperament. Sell the pretty, stupid ones to someone else.
They are now penned up and furious. Angry baas roll around the neighbourhood. Fence and gates are tested, and the devil sheep pace up and down their prison, eyeing us grumpily. This goes on all night, and now we know why we hear angry bleating now and again locally when farmers have stock separated and ready for transport or shearing.
Margaret arrives early the following day with a ute and trailer. Now, all we have to do is get angry sheep from the yard into the trailer. The game begins.
The ewes are the easiest, K grabs them, flips them, pulls them out, and I get hold of their legs to lift them into the trailer. This is an intense workout. Sheep are far stronger and heavier than they look. They have zero interest in being grabbed and womanhandled.
We manage to get all but one ram lamb into the trailer. The rams are a bit easier to manage because they come with handles on their head. Those horns are also dangerous because they’ll slice open a leg or arm if you are not careful. Rams are powerful, and they come with inbuilt combat skills.
Ram number seven won’t play ball; he’s out the gate, across the yard, straight through the fence (Arapawa are escape artists) and back with the core flock.
“We’re eating that bastard,” I say to K.
“Damn straight,” she says, “He’s annoying and an escape artist, top of the eating list for him.”
I can see him out the window now; he’s looking very tasty. But if you want a ram, I’ll give you a reasonable price; just let me know.
We arrive at the sales yards, and Margaret does a masterful job of backing with an audience. If it were me, I’d have backed through the coffee cart, and no doubt the sheep would have all escaped. Registrations must be made, forms filled in, NAIT numbers given, statements made, and the sheep are separated into two lots for the auction.
Inside the yards are dozens of pens; aside from lambs and cattle, there is one pen with several pigs and another with three very friendly goats. Locals wander the aisles checking out what is on offer. It’s a mix of country people, lifestylers, and visitors. With an hour to kill, I wander off to the sausage truck.
I hear mutterings in the crowd about the sausage truck. At $4 a sausage, advertised as “gourmet”, some locals aren’t happy. The sausage truck is raising money for a cycle bridge; it’s all quite confusing. There is an artist’s rendition of the bridge, which I stare at while eating my sausage.
“It’s to raise money for a cycle bridge.” The woman tells me.
I nod.
“But,” she says, “It’s already been built.”
I raise an eyebrow, “Where is the picture of it then?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she responds, “it’s strange.”
I nod.
“The taxpayer paid for it!” she exclaims, “You paid for it!”
Good lord, this is getting weird. “Why am I paying for this sausage them?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she responds, “it’s strange.”
It is bloody strange. But she has other customers, and as I escape, I wonder if a great sausage fraud is being had—a gourmet sausage rort. I should have asked her if I could buy the bridge.
Back inside, the sheep auction has started, and a tall man, “it’s the Sheep Man”, people in the crowd whisper, is moving from pen to pen, selling the animals. The Sheep Man sells sheep, commenting on their heritage, which ones he would like to eat in what order, whether they are for eating before or after Christmas, and now and again looking around and saying “Laaaaambs,” with a baaing tone. I like him.
People are jammed into the runs, and the bidding is carried out with barely perceptible nods or eye movements. Kids hang over pens, and comments are made on prices.
Our two lots are sold, and K speaks with the new owners. Both groups are lifestylers. Two of the ewes are to be used for breeding, the pair that fetched the higher price, and the other four are off to a paddock life.
“She’s a bit crazy.” Says Margaret to me, under her breath, looking at buyer number two.
“Really?” I said.
“Yep,” Margaret responds, “I asked her how she’s getting them home, and she told me she’s going to put them in her hatchback.”
That is crazy. Included in the four is one of the ram lambs that was very hard to get into the trailer that morning. The thought of having that loose in a hatchback was worrying and hilarious. If you were writing a situation comedy of new farm owners, that would be an episode to include.
The day is done, and we drive back to the farm. It’s been a good experience, but K and I agree it’s not the market we want. People don’t know how good and tasty the Arapawas are, so they fetch a lower price in those markets. There is a local black sheep breeding and sales community that we’ll get in touch with.
Back on the farm, K has been working on the glamping site.
The gates are well underway to being finished. Above is the first one that K has built, with number two on the way. Because K is a woman, this kind of thing amazes local men. Dave is our most excellent fencer. He’s a bloody good bloke who does great work and loves a beer or twenty.
He’s also going to come and help hang the gates because it is a multiple-person job, and these things weigh a tonne. I no doubt will be coopted into picking things up and putting them down somewhere different, my chief role on the farm. So K messaged Dave…
Girls can do anything.
As well as upgrades to the site across several areas, including screens being put in, shelving, more painting, installing the electric generator, and a truck with many trees turned up for planting.
The trees are necessary to provide privacy at the site. There will be an outdoor bath being installed, and the last thing that anyone wants is to be spotted wandering about as nature intended. As someone who likes wandering about as nature intended, I appreciate a good bit of privacy. Actually, that’s not entirely true; everyone else appreciates a good bit of privacy when I am wandering around as nature intended; I don’t care.
So it is that several trees have gone in at the site and in the adjoining paddock, with more to come. This process nearly killed me. Given that I spend a large proportion of my day sitting on my backside trying to convince people not to do stupid things, I tend not to be anywhere near as fit as K, who spends the whole day moving.
Holes had to be dug, and the ground was already medium hard. Another three days, and it would be like a brick. As it was, it needed brute force with a hoe and a spade. The land here is about eight inches of rich topsoil and then river run, or as some people called it out here, “red rock.” It’s full of old river stones once you get down a bit making the job even more difficult.
So, in the heat of the day, I tried to help K as best I could though frankly, she did the bulk of the work, and the trees went in. I went and sat under other trees, periodically got up like some neanderthal, pounded the earth a bit and then retreated out of the sun again.
They are also on the edge of part of the paddock that gets a lot of runoff ponding when we have major rain. The theory is once they grow, they’ll suck up some water.
I, for one, was keen on planting out the entire paddock in gum trees because of firewood, privacy, and, hey, a forest. It’s probably just as well I am not in charge of planting.
That’s all on the farm for this episode—more than enough. If you are interested, as I said at the beginning, I travelled to Hawkes Bay a couple of weeks back for a very long lunch with a very old friend.
A very long lunch
So it was that a friend of mine, Geoff, and I set out on a three-day lunch, a tradition from before the Days of the Plague. And of course, because we both live on a farm, we chose to go to Hastings, well, Haumoana, to be exact. For my international readers, Haumoana is about three and a half hours’ drive from Wairarapa, a small seaside town filled with workers who can’t always afford to live in the surrounding cities.
Haumoana sits on the edge of Hawke’s Bay wine country, which has obscene wealth displays. Haumoana is held up as a poster child of climate change, the town being slowly eaten by the sea. It is within striking distance of Hastings, which has a terrible reputation (or so I thought) and Napier, that very strange city best known for its art deco vibe, which is weird.
I met Geoff many years ago, and he was a large part of the inspiration for the move back to urban from rural. At the time, we were both corporate wankers, senior managers responsible for making a huge insurance company spit money out daily while stealing it with the other hand.
Being corporate wankers, we had a very large fight when we met and then, after that, became best friends. To be fair, I was much more of a wanker. We worked on and off together over the years, and I spent a lot of time on Geoff’s small block in Wairarapa. Back then, you could buy steak on a stick (a tomahawk, as they are known), chips, gravy, and a bottle of wine for about $35 each. The salad was always put on hold, and we have a tradition of not eating anything green when we “do lunch.”
Before the Days of the Plague, we’d go somewhere once a year for a long lunch. Usually, a small town, and it had been three years since we did that, so over a few beers on the deck, one afternoon agreed the tradition needed to be resurrected. We chose a bach in Haumoana, a converted barn, and set off on a Tuesday morning.
The first order of any rural road trip is the breakfast pie. It’s impossible not to travel and have a pie on the way. It’s spitting in the eye of the travel gods and courting disaster. Rurally, pies are a part of life and are full of meat, fat, and cheesy goodness for an excellent price. Clareville Bakery took my money and gave me a monster pie with steak and cheese.
We then charged on to Masterton. Well, cruised slowly. The twelve kilometres between Clareville and Masterton are a mess of roadworks and thousands of road cones. It became a feature of the entire trip, roadworks everywhere.
At Masterton, we bought meat. Homegrown Butcher is probably the most expensive meat spot in the valley, but the quality is insanely good. Tomahawk steaks were bought along with sausages to go with the venison, homemade Chilli BBQ beans I had made, eggs, beer, and a lot of wine.
Now, the Wairarapa has a lot of weird towns, Masterton is one of them, and we had to traverse a lot of them to get to Haumoana. The roads are long, straight, and tedious. There are hundreds of thousands of hectares in this part of the country, but it is largely forgotten. Wairarapa is similar to the youngest child in a family, probably the cleverest, but often overlooked.
Eketehuna is the first town; it’s tiny. Again a rural hub that is notable for two things. One, it has a very high proportion of Mormons, one of my favourite religions, and two, the only sex shop in probably a 200-kilometre radius. You say “Eketehuna”, and people are always like “, Oh yeah, there’s a sex shop there.” It’s weird in as much as it’s quite a religious place, yet there is an overt sex shop on the tiny main road.
I like Mormonism. I like Joseph Smith, who created it because it’s one of those epic tales of crazy. I’m going to butcher this and piss someone off, but the story is like this.
An angel visits Joseph and gives him golden tablets, which he copies, and then something happens to them, so there is no evidence. He goes on to create a religion that simultaneously features magic underpants and the ability to have many wives. He is rumoured to enjoy drinking (with forty wives, you’d probably need that) and gambling. He dies in a gunfight with a mob in jail. His religion goes on to be worth over $100 BILLION.
On through Pahiatua, we go. Slightly larger and apparently inhabited by a lot of Exclusive Brethren. It is a weird place, but it has a giant plane at one end of it, for some reason, so we can give it some kudos. I look for the brethren, but they are no doubt hiding in their windowless buildings drinking Tui.
We rush on, looking for country pubs; after all, it’s just after 10 am, and we’re nearly halfway to our destination. But none are to be found. We head through Mangatainoka, whose only feature is the Tui Brewery, which is closed.
Woodville is the next town, a dying town by all accounts, after a major route through was closed. Second-hand stores, “antique” shops, and comfortable cafes line the main street. Ne'er-do-wells lurk down side streets, well, I imagine they do, and trucks rumble past.
The last treat before we hit Hawkes Bay is Dannevirke. The only Viking town in New Zealand. Settled by Danes, who survived Ragnarok, Viking insignia are everywhere. It must be incredibly confusing for the new generation because a lot of Viking heritage has been coopted by far-right Nazis. You can see Millenial tourists rolling into Dannevirk and screaming, “how does New Zealand have a whole town of Nazis! Quick Helga, stamp on the campervan accelerator and let us make our escape!”
It also has a Fantasy Cave that is raved about on travel view sites, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Its website had a shouty front page:
This website is the ONLY official source of information. All other sources are not official and may have incorrect information; we are not liable for any incorrect information found on unofficial sources.
It also shouted it was closed. But quite mysteriously, a page on the website noted that it was opening soon and that “Danny the train is already being polished up ready to have visitors….”
Nope. Danny sounds scary.
By this point, having been unable to find an open pub, we had resorted to getting a traveller out of the chilly bin. I don’t advocate drunk driving; however, it is sometimes essential to have a beer whilst driving, otherwise known as a traveller. In fact, in some towns in Wairarapa, I have observed people at the bottle store buying their box of beer and a traveller to get them to wherever they are going to have the beer.
After many roadworks and another 100 kilometres of rambling rural roads, we still hadn’t found a country pub. They were either closed, turned into emergency accommodations, shuttered, or no longer there, with just a concrete pad as evidence. A bloody shame. They were once the lifeblood of communities.
We swiftly went through Havelock North. For those Wellingtonians out there, Havelock North can be compared to the suburb of Kelburn, with better weather. It is a money place, and you can tell you are getting near to it because the number of Tesla’s increases markedly.
From there, it’s a run into the wine area before hitting Haumoana. We were running early; we stopped at Craggy Range winery.
You don’t get the scale of wine production in New Zealand until you hit Hawkes Bay, nor the value. Gone are the days of locally owned vineyards making boutique wine, replaced with foreign-owned companies churning out as much Sauvignon Blanc as possible. Otherwise known as “Diva Juice”, Sauvignon Blanc is a huge export earner.
It’s a $2.9 Billion a year industry with $1.9 Billion in export value estimated for this year. This part of Hawkes Bay is studded with these wineries, each more ostentatious than the previous, with multi-million dollar houses in the hills surrounded by incredibly expensive “retreats.”
As you drive into Craggy Range, on the left-hand side are what appear to be three oversized bronze statues. A bull, a cow, and a calf.
“I didn’t know they farmed cattle here,” Geoff said.
“Can you make wine from cows?” I asked.
“Probably very bad wine,” Geoff replied.
We bought a tasting session. It seemed the right thing to do. We sat amongst a horde of tourists, always a weird feeling in your own country, and a young fellow bought us tasting wines with many long stories of their origin. Geoff, being a master of wine (seriously), outtalked the young fellow who had a wine knowledge competition of sorts while I looked at my empty glass and wondered why wine tastes were so small.
I bought some wine for K; she could not come on this lunch, and it seemed the right thing to do. We then found the only countryish pub for some food, the Gannets Bar and Grill, on Haumoana Beach.
I ordered delicious yellow food. A far cry from Craggy Range, I am sure, but just what was required.
Rural meets coast always has a weird vibe. You feel like the town should be a fishing village, not a rural village, but Haumoana is very much a rural village. Haumoana is losing its coastline at nearly a meter a year; the coast here is deadly, and massive storms can inundate the village.
We retired to the accommodation for the evening. It had everything we needed and nothing that we didn’t. The open fire was used for cooking dinner, and we (obviously) drank too much wine and solved the world's problems. Then at 10 pm, we decided we’d have a whisky nightcap. We finally went to bed at 1 am.
That’s the problem with a whisky nightcap. It seems like a good idea at the time, but it just wakes you up, so you need another nightcap. It’s the path to destruction, but a delicious one.
The following day we head up to Napier. Napier is a place that makes me itchy. There is something about it that weirds me out. It might be the art deco buildings, it’s hard to say, or it feels like it is trying to be something it’s not.
“This place is weird,” I say to Geoff as we walk around the CBD, “It’s like World of Wearable Art week in Wellington, but permanent. All these middle-aged women walking around in expensive momos.”
“You’re right,” says Geoff, “it’s time for a beer.”
We decamp quickly toward Hastings. Surely there will be an old pub there that will serve us lunch along with the ambience of surly locals, thinking we are tourists, staring over their jugs at us.
Hastings has always had a bit of a reputation for not being a great place to travel to, certainly not the city itself, having had plenty of problems over the last few years.
The only pub we can find is a craft brewery charging Wellington prices. It is full of what can only be described as Millennial hipsters. See, Generation-X hipsters were accidental, usually just wearing the grunge of the 90’s Seattle scene. Not because they were into the scene but because we were lazy and it was comfortable.
Millennial hipsters seem to be more serious. Subtle protest-type t-shirts and ironic attire, including a Barbie jacket. They are all emaciated and ordering vegan food. The brewery bar has a vegan butter chicken pie. This confuses Geoff and me.
“How can it be vegan and chicken?” He wonders.
“It can’t,” I respond.
“Then it’s not chicken, in which case this is false advertising, or it’s something that is not chicken that they say is chicken, which is also false advertising. We should make a scene!”
“NO,” I whisper-shout, “they will think we are Boomers if we complain. We must ignore it. We must leave. If we create a fuss, they will live stream us on Tik Cock or that mad Chinese social media site.”
“You’re right,” Geoff hisses, “they’ll cancel us, and that sounds painful.”
We leave immediately and wander around the corner to find an Italian restaurant on the main road. This calls for food and wine. The owner is accommodating, and we have a long discussion about meat over a bottle of wine. The occasional Black Power member wanders past holding their jackets (I think they may be banned from wearing them in the city.) They are on their phones, talking loudly and swearing to prove they are gang members.
There is more swearing than everyday words; they have developed their unique swearing code.
Hastings has become quite upmarket since I was here last. Next to the restaurant are two high-end organic shops, and next to them is a distillery. We discover this with great happiness. They distil their gin, and another tasting session is started. They also make their Negroni. A Frenchman, we think, explains the science behind keeping the Negroni at a perfect temperature for drinking. This involves many flourishes and a complicated graph drawn on wrapping paper.
With bottles of gin in hand, we moved next door to a winery outlet. They were setting up for a wine tasting and had a “wine writer for Metro” in attendance. It was snob city. I asked my personal artificial intelligence why wine critics often come across as pretentious.
Wine critics are often seen as pretentious because they use complex language and specialised knowledge to describe wines, making them appear snobbish or elitist. They may also tend to exaggerate certain wines' qualities, making them seem overly enthusiastic. Additionally, many wine critics are associated with prestigious publications or organisations, which can add to their air of snobbery. Ultimately, the perception of pretentiousness likely stems from the combination of these factors and the exclusivity of the wine world in general.
Isn’t artificial intelligence getting clever? It’ll put me out of my job one day, and you, most likely.
The next day we make the return journey through the land of a million road cones. I feel somewhat relieved as we enter the valley and head toward home. The countryside rolls past hour after hour, and I wonder how long it will be open and productive, the trees are coming, and it may be that in the future, that drive will be down desolate pine tree corridors so that some rich “green” can feel better about getting on a plane and heading off to Fiji. Time will tell.
Oh I laughed and laughed at loading the sheep. And I saw your sheep at the sale and they looked mighty fine.