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Battling to build a back-country life
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| Don Siemonek: The family virtually “buried themselves in the valley” for the first 10 years. |
Even after 48 years of toil on their farm at Erua, life is no picnic for Don and Velma Siemonek.
While breaking in their 1000ha farm, they have battled 2m-high bracken fern and scrub, goats, deer and pigs, hunters with dogs and guns, high interest and exchange rates, and fickle weather with late spring snowstorms.
Yet they say the greatest challenge in the past two years has been mental pressure exerted by Horizons Regional Council's proposed One Plan.
Don and Velma arrived in 1961 as young newlyweds to a hill country lease block in the bush on the slopes of Mt Ruapehu 12 km from Erua, between Ohakune and Raurimu. The block was to be a Siemonek family operation but was not viable for more than one family, so others bowed out and left the operation to Don and Velma and their three children who arrived in the next few years.
The couple started out on an old mill site, with 100 square metres of clear land and two sheep, Don says, "and they were both doing fine when I saw them last". Gradually they bought the original lease block and adjoining properties and called it Kahikatea Station.
Early settlers had abandoned the blocks before 1927 and any clear country had reverted to huge bracken fern bushes and scrub by the time the Siemoneks arrived. The family virtually "buried themselves in the valley" for the first 10 years, working from daylight till dusk, building up from 100 sheep, clearing and getting grazing pressure on the bracken fern.
Eldest son Kevin recalls his parents shearing through an old mill hut with a night pen of 80 until three in the morning because rain was imminent.
The family lived without power or telephone until the early 70s, even though power pylons and telephone poles to the Ruatiti Valley traversed their land.
Fencing the back boundary facing the Ruatiti Valley made life easier. They could keep stock pressure on the pastures and slowly build up their numbers of Perendale ewes. Romney rams were mated over the Perendales when the country improved, because the straight Perendales were hardy, but difficult to keep on the property.
"We had to tie a dog up on the road at shearing time so the sheep didn't take off to Erua and down to Raetihi," Don says.
From a family of keen horse and dog men and women, Don spent 10 years on the NZ Rodeo circuit and both he and Velma rode horses on the farm, although he says you could ride only so far before the tracks ran out and you were back to walking.
Having spent many years on the farm they felt they were losing their social skills so joined the National Park Polocrosse club in 1968 and spent 25 years playing the sport, which was popular in the Ruapehu region.
"It was a wonderful family sport, and a great way to meet all the neighbours and locals and we made friends for life," Don says.
The region hosted international players and had a successful representative team, of which Don was a member.
Being 12km down a no-exit road at an altitude of 750m made the Siemoneks resourceful, tough and a close family unit. Don did all the shearing and Velma the woolhandling and the children helped out. They also turned themselves into mechanics, fencers, water reticulation engineers and the "Jacks of every other trade" they needed to be.
Their first farm transport was a VW Beetle which ferried the children to Erua to catch the school bus to National Park school and carted gear and dogs up and down the farm tracks. The day's work was planned around getting to the school bus on time; although once the kids fell asleep in the flax on the side of the road until 7pm when Velma was kept out the back of the farm by a fallen tree. Another time she had to walk home after the bus drop-off when the Beetle battery rusted out the bottom of the floor pan and fell on to the road.
Their first fertiliser was 10 tonnes flown on from Raetihi, at a quarter of a tonne each load. Don recalls the pilot, Bill Fowler, smoking his pipe and reading The Truth newspaper on his way over on each run.
Early in the 1980s they decided they needed their own airstrip so the family spent eight years using a contractor with two D8s plus months of manual labour turning the only piece of flat land around, a nearby 4ha county council bush section, into a landing strip. Don went out and bought half a dozen heavy garden rakes and set their lads and a few extras on to raking.
"One ex-Rotorua boy we had working for us raked for hours each
day and covered a strip 500m long and 40 metres wide at least twice, raking up piles of little bits of wood left from the bush."
Don says a turning point for the family was being accepted by the Marginal Lands Board for a Land Development Loan in 1974.
"All the other banks and lenders had turned me down a number of times and it took three trips to the marginal lands board before we finally got the OK."
The Siemoneks were able to build a new woolshed with a night pen of 1000 and install a decent water system for the house. Lots more fencing was done and a fertiliser bin was built. They now have 15 paddocks on the homestead block and seven larger paddocks on the back block, the furthest point of which is 12km from home.
Tracking was revolutionised by the advent of the digger, Don says, because the hard sandstone base proved difficult to track with a series of Bristol tractors and even with bigger bulldozers. Whereas it took four hours to the back of the farm on horseback, four wheeler motorbikes have shortened the journey to just 20 minutes and Don and Velma can now ride all over the farm on tracks.
"I never thought that would be possible," Don says. "It is brilliant what diggers can do."
They have built up stock numbers to 2000 Romdale ewes and finish all their lambs through the winter on their other two properties - 120ha at Raurimu and 11ha at Taumarunui.
"We feed Auckland; most of the lambs go local trade," Velma says.
A herd of 200 Angus cattle are run on the station, including 80 breeding cows and heifers and steers, which are finished through to 2 1⁄2 years.
The Siemoneks buy in baleage to feed to the weaners on the station and to young stock on their other properties.
Being at high altitude and subject to cold winters, (two or three substantial snowfalls each winter are common), calving and lambing are both later in spring, and still the family have been caught out by late cold spells. Lamb losses in the late October, 2009, storm were crippling, Don says.
"Everything is late here; we calve in November and lamb from late September but we can still get caught out."
One year they lost 50% of their sheep in 25cm of snow which lasted for nine days.
The house sits at 700m asl and the property falls to 365m down in the Ruatiti Valley. Rainfall averages around 1600ml each year and Don says the country handles it well. "We get the odd slip in here but not very much; the underlying sandstone country is very stable."
Pushing in tracks through the sandstone has also made them stable: "A lot of soil, even if it shifts, doesn't actually leave the face; it stays on the slope."
Reliable rainfall means great summer pasture growth, but the downside is that the manuka and fern also grow quickly in the summer. Maintenance of weeds is an important farm activity.
"Growth of the manuka in a moist summer is astronomical," Velma says. "The stock won't eat it once it is past five inches (13cm), and it grows to that easily, and then the sheep will graze around it and it needs to be sprayed."
Don and Velma have a problem with Horizons Regional Council's new vegetation clearance rules, where a farmer has to get a permit to spray or clear any area larger than 2ha a year.
The Siemoneks argue that spraying scrub is a normal farm maintenance activity, one that ideally they need to do on an area each year to control the scrub growth.
"In the hill country when product prices drop then the maintenance drops off - the scrub and fern catches up on you over five years, and when you have a good year, you need to spray a large area to catch up."
Just two weeks before Christmas they were telephoned by a Horizons officer and told they would be dealt with in the New Year for a 160ha block of scrub they sprayed five years ago.
"We didn't even know the rules existed then and now they come and fly over our property and photograph it and threaten us for a rule we didn't know existed," Don says. "It is an interference with our property rights, and I don't accept that we should have to apply for a permit to carry out maintenance on our own property.
"We bought our land - we worked and saved and have lived on nothing to get it since 1961; now they want to tell us what we can do on our farm and we have to pay them to do it."
He is outraged that the Horizons rates on their property have increased from $750 to $2600 annually in the past three years.
Don has had it suggested to him that planting his whole property in pines would be a good option, but he thinks that would exacerbate any erosion.
"The roots of the pine trees work down through the topsoil and after 20 years they hit the hard sandstone, let in the rain and you lose the whole hillside.
"I can't see why the regional council are pushing pines on to this country when they are worried about soil erosion - the pines will just load up the country and make it so much worse.
"Who is going to be liable in 20 years' time when the pines are falling over and clogging up the waterways?"