(ALAN MOORHOUSE'S 'HILLBILLY CHILD') - (WHISTLES) - Always a favourite on every rural road. (DOGS BARK) (DOGS PANT) - He's a latecomer to the land. (SHRILL WHISTLE) - Farming's complicated. You gotta keep an eye on the environment ` that you're not doing any harm there ` but also run a profitable business and also enjoy what you're doing. - It's a challenge he thrives on. - It takes quite a bit to bring all those different aspects in together, but that's the bit I really enjoy. (WHISTLES SHRILLY) (SHEEP BLEAT IN DISTANCE) (SERENE MUSIC) (ENGINE RUMBLES) (SERENE MUSIC CONTINUES) - It's early morning on Ian Knowles' farm near Waipara in North Canterbury. - Come on. It feels like you're a wee bit closer to heaven up here ` on top of the world. It's, um, a great spot ` a nice place to start the day. (SHEEP BLEAT) (TRILLS WHISTLE) Get a bit of work done early in the morning before things get too hot and windy, which is sort of typical Waipara. (SHEEP BLEAT) (BLOWS WHISTLE) Outside! - Ian's bringing sheep down from the top of Mt Donald. (WHISTLES SHRILLY) They're weaned lambs, so they've got a mind of their own... or no mind at all sometimes. (WHISTLES) After a few times you've shifted them, they tend to start working as a bit of a mob, and... we're heading in the right direction anyway, is the main thing. - The farm is 820ha of rolling hill country, ideal for sheep. - Sheep are the bread and butter ` about 60% to 70% of the income is straight from lamb sales, then a bit of wool and ewe sales. So they really drive the business. (BLOWS WHISTLE) Sit down. Strike! (DOG BARKS) - Now in his mid-40s, Ian got into farming later than most. - I grew up on a flat farm down in the Canterbury Plains, and I was, yeah, really inspired, I guess, by Mum and Dad's work ethic. They both grew up in Christchurch in an urban lifestyle but wanted to go farming. I studied at Lincoln and then went through teacher's college, and then ended up getting a job with AgResearch, and there I met some really clever people. There was the agricultural systems team, and they really opened my eyes as to how you use technology and research and numbers and try to make your business better and better. That's where the real passion for farming came along. - But Ian's passion extends beyond traditional farming. He's always loved birds ` breeding them and showing them. Now he's in the big league with ostriches. - Gonna go see if there's any eggs out there today. Normally pretty easy to find. They're big enough eggs that you can see them in the grass. (ENGINE RUMBLES) These are a couple of good-looking eggs ` nice and fresh, still nice and clean, no cracks. So hopefully they're fertile. If you want to make an omelette out of these eggs, you'd better be hungry cos it's worth about two dozen chook eggs. You want to be cooking for a crowd. The big picture plan for me personally was just to have some just for a bit of fun, and if they bred up naturally to have a few spares for the freezer, then that was good enough for me. And then I met Adam down the road, and he got all excited about them and went and found an incubator and gathered up the eggs, and now we've got two years' worth of chicks running around. He's due for a big hatch this week, plus a few chicks that are already running around, so just... catch up with him and see how they're all going. - Hey, Ian. How you going, mate? - How you doing, mate? How are you? - Good to see ya. - You're looking well. - Yeah, you too. - Got some eggs for you. - The eggs are cleaned, checked and put in the incubator. For the first few months, they're under Adam Trethowen's care. - They spend 42 days in this incubator. The eggs are turned every two hours, and once they're hatched, they'll go into the hatchery. (CHICKS TWEET) And these little guys here will spend a week in there. The idea of them being in there is that they are getting their strength. - At 1 week old, they're up and running, but they still need a carefully regulated environment. - How are these guys looking? - Yeah, they're doing good. Yeah. - Nice and lively. - Yeah. - Nice and alert. - Yep. The birds are very susceptible to cold. Because they're an African bird, they just thrive in the heat. They love it. So, 36 degrees constant. As they mature, get up to, sort of, three to four weeks, I might drop it down a degree as I'm acclimatising them just before they start going outside during the day. (CHICKS CHIRP) - Ostriches lay around 60 eggs a year, but not all the eggs are fertile, and not all the chicks survive. - Nice little spot for them to get a bit of exercise. Well, last year was our guinea pig year. We were just trialling things. I think we ended up with about 30% of live chicks out of the eggs that we collected up. This year, we seem to be going a lot better than that at this stage, but, you know, don't count your chicks before they hatch. There's a long time to go yet before we get live chicks running around up on the farm. - They're almost fully grown at 12 months, and Adam's hoping the meat will be in demand. - Long-term, if I can get a market, I would definitely go for the boutique wineries, restaurants. There's a lot of African people here in New Zealand. A lot of the eastern countries eat ostrich too, so I would like to have this opportunity to offer ostrich meat here in New Zealand. (LAID-BACK MUSIC) - On one of the steeper slopes at the back of Glenmark Springs, Ian is getting advice on a landslip. - It's certainly got worse. There's a couple of little slips along the bottom there, and now the whole hill's starting to move, taking everything with it ` water troughs and pipes. - Andrew Turnbull and Sam Thompson work for Environment Canterbury as part of the soil conservation team. - Feel those. It's very, very fine particles. - Yeah. - And this is what has caused this ` excess weight... - Right. - ...due to the heavy rainfalls we had. - So it hasn't been able to drain out, and so the weight of the water just helps... - Yeah. Yeah. - ...slide it off down the hill. - The solution is to put in a shallow drain to divert some of the water, and also plant poplars. - Because it's a deep, deep earth slip, the roots of these trees will be able to get down and fix together at that 15m to 12m spacing and really hold it together. There might be a little bit of movement before they get there, cos you're looking at around five years before they get to lock in. - The trees will ultimately stabilise the ground and help clean up the waterways. - It's around protecting farm infrastructure, but also, the sediment that's on these slopes, once it starts moving, it's only gonna end up in the waterways, and that's what we're trying to prevent. - Ian's already a big fan of poplars. He's planted 3000 around the farm. - Great strike rate through here. - I don't think we've got any losses, really, which is just... it's pretty satisfying cos there's a wee bit... - He gets right trees, gets them cheaper, and in return, tracks their progress. - They want you to take a record of where they're planted and how well they're surviving, and they come back and inspect them as well. - As time and money allow, Ian is poisoning thirsty willows on his farm and replacing them with more environmentally friendly poplars. - Wild crack willows just spread naturally. Every time a branch falls off into a bit of wet soil or mud, it'll put roots down, so it just turns into a forest. So they're sucking out the water all summer long. Having those willows gone is the first step of any future project. - And Ian always has a project on the go, either to improve the farm or his stock. (LAID-BACK MUSIC) (DOG BARKS, SHEEP BLEAT) (WHISTLE SQUEAKS) - On his farm near Waipara in North Canterbury, Ian Knowles is always looking at ways to improve his operation. (DOG BARKS) - The rules keep changing around docking and tail lengths... (BLOWS WHISTLE) (DOG BARKS) ...but if I can breed a sheep where the tail actually is that much shorter that they don't need tailing at all, then there's no cost, there's not an extra job to do. It's better for the animal and better for the farmer. (DOG BARKS) (BLOWS WHISTLE) - These ram lambs are part of a trial. - So we got two main lines in here. The ones with the brown faces are pure meat breed, so they're just here for growth rate and producing the best lamb chop you can get and in the fastest time you can get it, whereas the pure white ones ` they're for the maternal, the mothering side. - He's crossing his top meat producers with a short-tailed breed, and long, woolly tails are disappearing from the flock. - This is sort of what we're trying to achieve. So this one's got a pretty short tail. Like, it doesn't` it only goes halfway down to his` his knee joint, or his hock. It's sort of tapered, and it's got hardly any wool on it at all. - He's keen to lose the wool on their bellies as well. - He's almost bald there, and as he gets older, he'll probably lose most of this wool off around his tummy and his belly and even maybe up his neck, so it means that when he's walking through the long grass, he's not getting seeds and things stuck into his wool. With the breeding that I've done over the last five or six years, we've probably already reduced the tail length to about half of what it used to be, so I think we're probably 80% of the way there already. (CAMERA CLICKS) It's been pretty fast progress. - All through the breeding programme, Ian's been keeping careful records of what's working and what's not. - I've got spreadsheets for most things. I try to combine them with photo diaries as well and then match that up with the numbers that I'm seeing, either over the scales when I'm weighing sheep, or when I'm doing cuts for the crops or pastures to see what's growing. - There are spreadsheets for stock, different crops, and even the sheepdogs he sells. - I spend a lot of time crunching numbers and spreadsheets. Because it's things that I'm really passionate about, I need to know if it makes money or if some breeds of sheep grow faster than others. If you're gonna run 5000 sheep, you want to make sure that they're working for you. I could plot out all the breeds that were available on the market, quite quickly figure out what the top ones that were working well in my situation, and so, as a result of that, you know, the Suffolk, the Poll Dorset, Texel are my three main breeds that I use. I've got enough debt already without adding to it with poor decisions. So when I'm making decisions, I like to make sure that there's some good, robust data behind it. - And that applies to what he feeds his sheep, especially in what he calls his 'lolly mix' paddock. - These crops are very expensive to grow, and so by measuring how much is there, you start getting a bit of a gauge as to whether it's money well spent. - There are about a dozen different species here, including plants to attract beneficial insects. (MACHINE WHIRRS) He takes the same size sample each time, weighs it, and then works out how much goodness there is. - I'll calculate that now, so 1.5kg of fresh material times the area of the paddock. Industry average dry matter percentage of 1.5, so it's 85% water. It means that this crop here is about 9 tons per hectare, so there's quite a bit of eating in there. Bit of a health camp ` they just come in here and pick and choose what they want, and if they've got any upset stomachs or anything, then they can just select what they want to eat and hopefully recover and bounce back to full health. - Ian also grows a big crop of fodder beet, and he's done the maths on that too. He reckons it's a life-saver in winter. - There's 5ha here, and at 30 tons, that's enough to hold 5000 sheep for over a month during the winter time. I always do a cost analysis on it, so I can grow a bulb like this for probably 2c or 3c, and that's probably enough to feed a sheep for lunch. So, it's a pretty cheap way to feed stock through the winter time when there's not much else to eat. - Back in 2015, Ian was forced to sell stock during a drought. This crop's a vital safety net, so he takes no shortcuts. - I rely on the experts to grow this stuff. So we use contractors to prepare the ground and to sow it. This is precision-drilled, so there's a seed drop about every 30cm or 40cm to make sure every plant has the best chance of having a good start to life, and then following that up with a good fertiliser programme. You get lots of good advice around pest and disease management. (SERENE MUSIC) - The farm also features some stunning scenery. Parts of it are under covenants, and Miles Giller from the QEII Trust is taking a look. - Oh, you've got a spot to take a photo here. - The marvels of modern technology. - Yeah. - X marks the spot, so here we go. - About here. - Miles visits every couple of years to check two covenants on the farm, including this limestone outcrop. - A couple of extra ones for luck. - The old picture says a thousand words. - All done. - It's a lot easier to take a photo than write a report, isn't it? - It is, indeed. - The site has a number of special features. - So, it's geological interest, it's Maori rock art, it's botanical interest. It's got all sorts of things going on. - Yeah. - Everything here is looking pretty much as it was a couple of years ago. - Yeah ` still see a few little drawings there... - Yeah. - ...what's remaining of them. - Little pieces of charcoal on the rocks there. - The rock art is fading over time as the limestone weathers and flakes off. - There's one over here that I routinely take a photo of just to see how it's preserving. - So, is this where you take the timeline to monitor? - Yep. - Yeah. - So I take that photo there every couple of years, and... - I see. - ...it doesn't look very much different to what it was in the past, which is what we want to see. Vegetation is looking just as we would like it in many ways. We want it open and dry around the site, so we don't actually want a reversion through to old forest. Well, a lot of Maori rock art and sites like this are on private land, and the future of them depends very much on the attitudes of the landowners. A lot of landowners are doing the right thing. - This particular block is excluded from any forestry to just maintain the look the way it was ` no buildings and also no cattle. So we can graze sheep to try to keep the grass in check. - Even more up here. - We're all only here for a short amount of time. I'm certainly hanging on the coat-tails of people that have come before me, and I certainly don't want to make it any worse in my tenure, so I try to improve things and leave it in a better state for the next generations to pick up with. - But Ian's got a more immediate challenge waiting in the yards. - Hurry up, hurry up. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch! (LAID-BACK MUSIC) (DOG BARKS, WHISTLE TRILLS) - On his farm near Waipara in North Canterbury, Ian Knowles likes to let research shape his decisions, but less so when it comes to his ostriches. - They're just so different. They catch your eye when you see them racing across the skyline on a nice evening. It makes you feel like you're in the middle of Africa or somewhere exotic. It's something you don't see every day. They're pretty easy to have around, so they don't do much harm, but they seem to put a smile on people's faces when they see them. Got them in in the end. They'll always give you a wee bit of grief somewhere along the line. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch! Hurry up, hurry up. Round you go, round the corner. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. - The ostriches need to be treated with respect. - In you go. They're a big bird with a small brain, so they don't always do things intentionally, but they can just knock you around with their sheer size. It pays to have a waddy stick handy just to keep them at arm's length. They're a wee bit more challenging doing than a sheep. You gotta` It's like trying to catch a snake to get hold of the head. (DOOR RATTLES VIGOROUSLY) They're just so strong. They don't look that big, but they're pretty powerful. At such a high centre of gravity, they can knock you round a wee bit, whereas sheep are sort of only knee-high. But they're good fun. These are just year old, so we just try to make sure they haven't got any internal parasites. Same as what the sheep get ` it should keep their stomachs all nice and clean and get them to put on plenty of weight. All done. - The bottom line for Ian is the operation has to be profitable, but life also has to be fun. - I always think of the farm as more of a farm park, like, I think the plantings and the other animals and birds that are around... I try to make it feel like a park setting. Even though it's a commercial operation, I like that kind of feel of the, you know, the poplar trees and being able to sit on a rock and have a picnic and watch some deer trot around the hill. That part of it sort of really, to me, brings it back to nature and makes it more accessible for people that want to use it for recreation as well ` something for everybody. It's a bit windy today. Might be a bit hard to see the tussocks, Dad. - Yeah. - It's a big farm for one person, but Ian brings in contractors when he needs to, and his father also helps out. - About 4000 or 5000 tussocks grubbed out so far this year. About half of what we used to get, though, so it's heading in the right direction. - Yeah, no, we're winning, I think. - Oh, well, I'll drop you off here if you like. - Yeah. Thank you. See you later. - Dad operated this farm on his own for many years. - See ya. - See ya. We both still live on the property, so it's really invaluable having him here just as a handy fixit man. And also, he's pretty keen on the weeds and pests and looking after the QEII block and those sorts of things. - Tony Knowles is on the lookout for two invasive species ` Nassella tussock and horehound. - Well, this is a young Nassella tussock, which we have to grub in some places twice a year. They mainly grow on the dry nor'west slopes. They like the dry ground. We don't get much on the other side of the hill, but it's just a matter of going round and checking possies where you found them in the past, because the seed lasts that long in the ground. They're very invasive, and the stock don't eat them. If you don't keep on top of them, they would take over. - And horehound is just as bad. - It has a multi-seeded burr-type thing. It's very invasive and unpalatable to stock, so it's just a matter of keeping on top of it. Like Nassella, the seed lasts in the ground for a long time. Easily spread by stock with the burrs getting in the wool. So that's just another job. - Even though Ian's got his own way of doing things, Tony thinks his son's approach is working. - Ian's got all the qualifications, and he's doing a great job ` some things a bit different to me ` but then he's a different generation and we've got different rules and regulations, and my attitude is you can only have one boss. - But Tony certainly isn't a spreadsheet man. - Oh, yeah, I don't` couldn't recognise one. (CHUCKLES) I don't have an issue with that, and if you want to borrow a few bob, well, you gotta have a bit of backup, don't you, to the bank? (SHEEP BLEAT) - Outside, strike. (BLOWS WHISTLE) My favourite part of the job is the stock work and being around the dogs, getting outside and going for a walk. The rest of it's just the stuff you do to keep the business operating, really, but this is` yeah, this is the real joy part of it. (WHISTLE TRILLS, DOG BARKS) - After 10 years on the land, Ian's thinking long-term. - I was a latecomer to farming, and physically, I know I can do it for probably another decade, and then I'd like to think by then I'd have the farm set up that I could go and do some off-farm activities or go overseas. (DOG BARKS) (WHISTLES SHRILLY) A driver for me is to be able to create a farm system that somebody else could step in and run for a year or two if I need to go do something else. - His goal is a farm that ticks all the boxes. - Even though I'm really passionate about being productive and profitable, you need to be aware of any impact on the environment as you go through it. It's stuff that I'm pretty keen on. Like, I wouldn't say I'm a real greenie tree-hugger, but it's really nice to be aware of that aspect of your business and what impact you're having. - It was a big decision to go farming, but Ian reckons he's landed on his feet. - At some stage, you think, you know, I want to be able to stamp your own mark and put it into practice. At this point in my life, it's getting hands-on. Actually being able to do it myself is really key. It's fine crunching the numbers and reading all the articles in the paper, but nothing beats going out there and making your own mistakes. (LAID-BACK MUSIC) Next time ` he used his savings to buy cherry trees as a teenager. - I went to the old man. I said, 'Look, we should get into cherries.' And he said, 'If you're serious, I want all your paper run money.' - Now he's running an export business and saving cherries from going to waste. - By 2030, our goal is to rescue 4000 tons of fresh cherries. - That's next time on Hyundai Country Calendar.