Farmers help keep Karen's milking dream alive

Karen has been supported by a network of dairy farmers in and around Pukekohe, many of them participants in the IHC Calf & Rural Scheme fundraising scheme, who raise animals and donate the proceeds to IHC.

This year, the IHC Calf & Rural Scheme marks its 40th anniversary by celebrating all the farmers who have made lives better for people with intellectual disabilities in their communities. Over those 40 years, the scheme has raised $40 million.

Karen’s dream looked pretty hopeless because her Dad Noel Chapman, a sharemilker, died while she was still a teenager and she and her mum Olive shifted into Pukekohe. Then in a double tragedy, her mother died suddenly too, and Karen moved into IHC residential care.

But local farmers, once they knew of her love of dairy farming, welcomed Karen into their milking sheds.

Karen has milked all over the northern Waikato and South Auckland districts. A long-time family friend, Glen Lee, has driven her around the farms for as long as anyone can remember. Karen says she is “a good friend to me, I have known her for a long, long time”.

Glen would call farmers to see if Karen could visit. “It seemed to work best with the Goodwrights.”

Karen used to milk for Syd and Jenny Goodwright. These days their son Tom farms the home farm and Karen milks for their daughter Becky Payne and her husband Mike on their farm not far away. Another sister Hannah farms close by too with her husband Trevor Turner. All of them are donors to the IHC Calf & Rural Scheme and know Karen well.

Syd and Jenny have been donating calves – real and virtual – to the Calf Scheme for more than 30 years, and for half of that time Jenny has worked as a canvasser for the scheme, visiting around 50 local farmers each season to encourage them to pledge calves.

“I am really lucky because I have got a lot of farmers in the district like me who want to keep supporting the Calf Scheme. How lucky are we that we have had four children and 15 grandchildren who have no disabilities,” Jenny says.

Karen says she used to help her dad milk around 100 Friesian-Jersey-cross cows after school. Now she is milking cows on farms with bigger herds and more complex and automated rotary cow sheds.

“I have been doing it for a long time now,” she says