‘Top’ farm has Tasman and Pacific views

This is now the country’s ‘top’ dairy farm, 40 years on, at the tiny settlement of Ngataki, from which the couple have watched friends and neighbours further north drift out of dairying.

Ngataki is 45km south of Cape Reinga and just a few kilometres north of the most northern golf course in the country at Houhora where Len plays every weekend. There is no store at Ngataki. The nearest general store is Pukenui in the south or Te Kao in the north. 

To collect Crewthers’ milk the tankers have to travel 200km from Whangarei to the gate where the Fonterra sign says supplier 10021. This sign also tells a story about the 20 other dairy farmers who once worked further north than Len and Pearl. 

Crewthers’ farm is down a gravel road off state highway one in one of the narrowest parts of New Zealand. The house is a mere 10 minutes drive from both coasts and in the early days they could climb on the roof and see the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Today the trees block this view.

Len was just 19 when his father died and he moved back to the farm to help his mother. Within a year or so he bought the farm with the help of a Maori Affairs loan and he and Pearl, who comes from the Far North, started to run the farm.

“Forty years ago we had about 80 cows, then we moved to 120 and now we are milking 260 on the 80ha block plus another 80ha which we lease. I also have a 50ha run-off but this gets very dry in summer because it is pure sand.”

Today their cows are run through a 32-aside herringbone. But it wasn’t always that way, says Len.

“We started off with an eight-aside and that got extended over the years as the cow numbers have increased. The eight-aside only lasted three years because it took us two and half hours to milk the herd.”

This year the Crewther’s produced 82,000kgMS and last year it was 85,000kgMS. The year before that it was 78,000kgMS – a fluctuation dictated big time by weather, says Len.

The weather is huge factor in farming in the Far North, drought being the unpredictable problem, not to mention the challenge of managing kikuyu grass pastures. To manage the summer dry conditions Len plants crops such as turnips and sorghum, makes hay and baleage and also maize silage – something he does in partnership with one of his neighbours. While many farmers feed out in late winter and early spring, farmers like Len in the Far North are forced to feed out now. 

“I am feeding maize silage now to the cows because they lost too much condition. For us late March or maybe into early April is the dry-off period. 

“The season runs differently here. In January and February it can be so dry that it’s hard to keep condition on the cows no matter how much you feed them. So you end up feeding out supplements in January and February, hoping the rain will come. You can’t afford to go once-a-day because the cell counts will rise. Even if does rain it takes at least a couple of weeks for this to be reflected in pasture growth.”

Pearl Crewther says they haven’t had any really good rain since last October and the few showers they have had in the last few weeks have been most welcome. The winds which sweep across this narrow spit dry out the land.

Len says the weather patterns in the Far North are unusual. “We can have a poor spring and quite often you will have a good summer rain or vice versa. It seems this is the way weather runs and so our production is normally sort of at the same level every year.”

Kikuyu grass needs to be managed carefully and farmers like Len oversow other pasture species to boost production. Len has direct drilled plantain and also grown chicory; the latter he says tends not to last. He’s also re-grassed the paddocks that have been in crops and this has helped.

Len runs an all Friesian herd and the cows are AB’d to a Friesian bull. But when it comes to the tailenders he works with neighbour John Woodward who supplies him with bulls.

“So he gets the bull he wants for temperament and we use them and then we sell all the four-day-old calves back to him. Sometimes I’ll rear 20-30 Friesian Angus heifers and sell them back to John in calf,” he says. 

Len and Pearl milked cows for 30 years, but now they have two staff to do most of the milking. They do the occasional shift at the weekend and Len gets involved in moving the stock around. But having just turned 60 – last Christmas day - he’s taking a back seat on doing the hard yards on the farm.

Pearl says they employ a nephew and a local lad who’s been with them for a number of years. She’d like to see him get more formal qualifications which would enable him to move up the employment ladder. All their four children have attended university.  “We have all our grandkids with us for the Christmas holidays. We do it because this is our way of seeing them because they live in Auckland, Whangarei and Kaitaia, says Pearl.

For this modest and lovely couple, their dairy farm haven, with all its challenges, has been good to them. They love the area and what it has to offer. They have raised a family who have moved off farm and are making a future for themselves. They also have strong connections to the dairy industry. One of Len’s relatives, Claude Edwards of Opotiki, won the Ahuwhenua Trophy for the top Maori dairy farm in 1975.