A station constantly under the pump!

The station is sited on some of the 40 square kilometres of land uplifted 2.7m out of the sea in the 1931 earthquake which devastated Napier and killed 256 people. 

The 1326ha (1100ha effective) property is located right next to Napier Airport, another facility which owes its existence to the earthquake. While the land looks perfectly normal from a distance, albeit low lying, mother nature requires men and machines to allow it to  remain farmable.

Not obvious on Ahuriri Station from your plane approaching Napier are two large pumping stations, with four pumps, which suck some 17,000L of seawater every minute – yes, minute – out of the network of drains on the property back into the Napier estuary. Even more bizarre is that while the seawater is being removed from the farm, freshwater – at the rate of 84,000L per minute – is being pumped back onto the farm from a site about 5km from the farm office to provide drinking water for stock.

Every day a digger is used to clear the gratings that clear the seawater during its passage from a vast network of drains all over the property to the main pumping station. That’s what happens on a normal day, but as manager John Ferguson points out, it gets much worse in a flood. He says during one particularly bad storm it took 15 days to pump the water off the farm. But despite all the water Ahuriri, like all Hawkes Bay farms, still gets hit by drought.

“We farm predominantly in the usual Hawkes Bay summer dry environment and we are proactive in getting the lambs off the property in December and at the same time having the ewes in ready for when the ram goes out on February 20. In  November and December we also cull the ewes. We need to do this because this year we got worse than a Hawkes Bay summer dry. We went from the Hawkes Bay summer dry to a severe Hawkes Bay summer dry and if cyclone Pam hadn’t have come along we would have been in trouble.”

Today Ahuriri runs 9000 sheep, of which 5600 are breeding ewes and the remainder replacements or lambs still being finished. It also runs about 200 Angus steers and 500 heifers brought on from other Landcorp farms as yearlings and taken through to two-year-olds.

“When I first came here to work in 1984 there was a lot of deer. There were over 1000 hinds which had been captured in the wild. Les Turfrey was the manager then. He was a very knowledgeable man who knew a lot about deer. There was of course sheep and cattle too. In those days the lambing percentage was 105% whereas today it is 150%.

“In the early days there was a Coopworth stud on the property and we bred our own replacements. We used a Suffolk ram across the others. The Coopworths performed well and looked good, but it was decided to change to a Romney flock and use a Landcorp Supreme ram across these as a terminal sire.”

Today there are more changes afoot. In addition to the mixed age ewes on Ahuriri, five-year-old ewes from other Landcorp farms are being sent here to get a “couple more years” out of them. John Ferguson says these older ewes are good animals and it’s been decided not to waste them by culling them at five years of age.

While nature freely gave up the land, it also provided many challenges for Ferguson and others who have farmed Ahuriri. Soil is the issue. A lot of it is heavy blue marine clay. Some of the soil is sandy and there is just 38ha on two prominent hills in the middle of the farm that could loosely be classed ‘normal’ pasture. The nature of the soils has limited the type of grasses that can cope.

“In terms of pasture we’ve tried all sorts but now stick to traditional ryes and clover and a bit of plantain mix. There is no chicory because it doesn’t like the salinity in the soil. We have had lucerne here and in theory it should have lasted six or seven years but once its tap roots got to salt it failed to persist. We have also tried brassicas and have had the same problems. As part of our re-grassing programme we are looking at maize in the future.”

Some of the land is shingle and Ferguson uses this as a sort of feed pad for wintering the cattle. They are fed a mixture of baleage which is made on the farm, and other roughage.

The location and nature of the farm is most unusual with challenges that would be seen on few New Zealand farms. Yet common sense and simple technology have been combined to find a solution to make a profit from a very new piece of the country.

Better live animals than dead ones!

Ferguson has spent all his life in Hawkes Bay and almost all his working life in the farming sector. After he left school he did an apprenticeship as a butcher, but then decided he wanted to work with live rather than dead animals. 

“In the early days there was a place in Hastings called the Hawkes Bay Farm Centre run by Miss Williams.  I told her I wanted to move on in life and she put me here across the estuary at the Dave Holder Estate on Seafield Road. The farm manager there was John Gannon and I used to look across the hills and down onto the flats here at Ahuriri and thought that I couldn’t work over there,” he says.

He later worked at Marist Society’s sheep and beef farm at Awatoto. The society is best known for its Mission Wines; they also had a large farm which they still own but lease out. On a Saturday John would butcher the meat for the Marist seminary at Greenmeadows. He worked at other stations before coming to Ahuriri in 1985. He has been here ever since and was appointed farm manager six years later.

Ferguson is a highly regarded and dedicated manager known for his excellent stockmanship and ability to run a farm recognised as difficult to manage. He is also very much in the public eye, having to manage relationships with the adjacent airport, port and industrial area. 

In his time at Ahuriri he has overseen many improvements to both the infrastructure of the farm and the stock. Upgrading the water supply and pasture renovation are two major projects.

Today he remains as keen and dedicated as ever, working with the four staff on the farm, one of whom is his son, and looking at ways to improve this gift from mother nature.