Less than a year after their farm was inundated by unprecedented flooding from both branches of the Ashburton River, a Canterbury farming family are back to full production and the scars left by floodwaters and the thousands of tonnes of debris they left are starting to heal.
Despite the devastation and after enormous disruption, thanks to their own hard work and the countless hours put in by volunteers and contractors, they were able to continue winter milking their barn-housed herd and were ready to go when spring calving for the rest of the herd started.
The third generation of the Stewart family, brothers Mark and TJ and Mark’s wife Stacey, who milk 550 cows on 213ha at Greenstreet, Ashburton, were counting down to formally taking the reins of the farming business on June 1, 2021, but a few days before that MetService issued a rare red warning of impending huge rainfalls and resultant flooding.
“I guess we could say we’re back to normal now, yes,” Mark says.
“I don’t know why or how or what it is, it’s just the way it’s happened.”
“It didn’t actually seem that bad at first and from what I heard it was way worse up at Mt Somers so we only recorded 180mm but up at Mt Somers and the backcountry, it was over 400mm,” TJ says.
Some reports put the rain in the backcountry at more than 500mm.
“The thing is they had 500 and with our 180, it equates to 680mm flowing past us,” adds Mark.
The Ashburton River’s two branches have their headwaters in the foothills that rise from western edge of Canterbury Plain and come together a few kilometres upstream from the town of Ashburton. The Stewart’s in Greenstreet is just above the confluence, with the larger south branch on one boundary and the north branch only a kilometre or so up the road.
By Sunday, May 30, both branches were in flood and as he fed out, TJ was keeping an anxious eye on the stop banks that protected the farm from the south branch. But it was the north branch that was first to go.
“The north branch broke out and flowed down and went over Thompsons Track (an important road link running across the plain). It went through creek systems and border dyke systems and came down here, water up to here (knee-height) running through the yard and it was rising and we were about to start milking,” TJ recalls.
His brother Mark had gone to feed cows grazing off-farm on the north side of the north branch and witnessed its fast rise.
“The farmer over there rang me in the morning and he said, ‘I’m a little bit concerned about the weather. You’d better come over and have a look’, so I rushed over at 7am, wound the fences up and gave them a break,” Mark says.
“I came back here and had some breakfast and then I went back again and at that point the North Ashburton was within an inch off the top of the bank, behind where our cows were and the farmer said, ‘I’ve never seen it like this before’, and he was absolutely concerned. He said, ‘I think you better take the cows away’.”
The Gilbert family, who had safe ground further from the river, offered a paddock to put the cows in and with the help of six volunteers who rushed to help, Mark spent two hours moving the 200 cattle to safety.
Meanwhile, TJ was working out what to do with a mob of recently dried-off cows, whose paddock was disappearing under rising floodwaters.
“I couldn’t take them down the track because the creek over there was flowing that fast and I wasn’t happy taking them over it, so we had to go up and across another paddock,” TJ says.
“I fed the cows in the barn and went home and had some lunch and by the time I came back the water was up to mid-shin and rising and we thought we’d better leave.”
The only way out was by tractor.
“We left 350 milking cows standing in the yard and let 120 autumn calves out because they were all in sheds with water up to their knees, so I opened gates and there were some high spots where there was no water running and hoped for the best,” he says.
Next morning TJ and Mark returned to the farm. Stacey was waiting anxiously in Ashburton with their three children.
“I got a phone call, these two were in the tractor, ‘The cows are all safe’ they said,” Stacey says.
“You leave and you don’t really know what’s going to happen,” TJ says.
“Is the flood going to come through and take everything out or is it going to follow the course of the land, which is sort of flowing down to the point of the river? I guess we were lucky that this (the barn, yards and cowshed) is sort of a high point.”
Milking the cows that had been waiting 20 hours was a priority but with no tanker access, the first few days’ milk had to be dumped.
The damage to the rest of the farm was enormous and the water from Ashburton River was still flowing through it
“At the end of the track there was a bow wave that you could just about white water raft down,” TJ recalls.
“I think it was Monday night I walked down the track just to see if it was dropping a bit and I got three-quarters of the way down the track and the water was about mid-shin and I thought, ‘This is actually starting to push me around, I might just stop this’.”
“I’ve seen the river in flood and water actually flowing back over the stop bank before. When we grew up it was much gentler but by Christ, she came down with some force this time,” adds Mark.
At first the brothers and Stacey were at a loss to know where to start with the clean-up.
“We drove round the place probably five or a dozen times, figuring out what to do and how to go about it,” he says.
All up, 50ha was impacted and 15km of fencing was wiped out.
There were plenty of volunteers wanting to help but with water still flowing and rain still falling, they put them off for the first few days while they looked after their cows.
“At the time we were mating for autumn so we decided to get the cows milking and the cows happy, get on track for mating and get the winter grazing ones sorted and get everything else sorted before we even worry about the rest,” TJ says.
Friends in Dunsandel were still milking some late calvers and they offered to take 30 calves, only five or six weeks old for a month, to help out, if they could get them there.
“We had some people ring up on the Monday with, ‘What can we do?’, and I was like, ‘We actually need to get some calves to Dunsandel’. They turned up with their stock float and took the calves there for us,” Stacey says.
Federated Farmers put experienced local farmer Duncan Barr to work directing the dozens of volunteers who turned out to help.
“He said, ‘How do you guys want to do it?’. We gave him a rough idea and he went and had a look and he took over,” TJ explains.
“A group of young farmer boys turned up and they just pulled fences down one day and then a crop farmer father and son came and did a day, just pulling staples out and then Synlait turned up, our milk supply guys.”
The worst damage, where the south branch changed course and flowed through the farm, leaving 15ha under mountains of shingle, silt and other debris was too much for the volunteers but once contractors arrived with diggers and dump trucks, the river was redirected back to where it came from and the paddocks were uncovered.
“Once it was dry enough, we had four and a half weeks of a 20-tonne digger and two dump trucks just going round and picking up all the shingle and taking it to the top of the farm where the holes were and just dumping all the shingle in the holes and then levelling it all out,” Mark says.
He says they expected it would take 12 months to get back to any sort of normalcy but by November, six months after the flood, he was able to drill kale for winter feed.
“That was so if we got big winds it didn’t sit there naked. And after that sort of event, you get all the weeds from the river all over your farm, so we had the opportunity if we had something in there and we could get the machinery and sprayers over it, to keep those weeds under control,” he says.
The partners reckon the flood caused about $450,000 worth of damage, about half of which was covered by insurance and government flood assistance. They’re grateful this is a high payout year, even if any profit will mostly go into the flood clean-up.
They’re hopeful after the difficult start to their farming partnership that they’re back on track and can make the farm first purchased by their grandfather in 1955 hum again. Originally the 213ha farm carried sheep, a few cows and grew crop, but it was converted to dairying in 1982.
“Dad was sick of crutching lambs and suggested to Pop they start milking some cows, so they bought 100 heifers from the North Island and brought them down here,” he says.
They calved the heifers, along with lambing 800 ewes, and built a 21-a-side herringbone shed. The boys’ parents David and Maree worked with David’s parents until taking over in 1992, installing irrigation from bores on the farm along the way.
They started with a roto-rainer, covering 50ha and soon added another and also put in border dykes, using water from the Greenstreet irrigation scheme. Being at the end of the run, with sometimes unreliable supply, they found the border dykes inefficient and today the farm is irrigated by centre pivots, supplied by bore water.
After leaving school and working on other farms as well as stints overseas, the brothers returned to the home farm. Stacey hails from Tasmania, where her uncle has a dairy farm and her parents have stock trucks and fertiliser spreaders and was working on-farm at Seafield, on the other side of Ashburton, when she met Mark.
“It was on a Young Farmers bus trip to Christchurch, and here I am, 14 years later,” Stacey says.
The couple have three children – two daughters at school and a four-year-old son – still at home. With TJ, they own the stock and plant and lease the land from David and Maree.
The floods aren’t the first hard times that family’s experienced, having bought land for a runoff shortly before the payout dropped to just above $3 in 2016.
“The next three years we borrowed to stay in front and the fourth year the bank came to us and raised their concerns and we were this close to being put on the market and that’s when we stood up and said, ‘Right, we need to do this, this and this’,” TJ says.
They sold some land, along with their Fonterra shares, switched to Synlait and concentrated on increasing production and becoming more efficient.
They’d already replaced the herringbone with a 50-bale rotary shed in 2003 and increased their herd to 450 cows and in 2010 they tried winter milking.
“We did two years’ winter milking, calving 150 and we just had them out in the paddock and we made a real mess of some of the paddocks with wet winters so in 2013 we decided to build the big barn,” he says.
With Synlait paying up to $13/kg MS for winter milk, the 140m x 75m barn comfortably pays its way.
“The carryover and autumn calving cows usually go into the barn for transition from late April and they are indoors full time from mid-May until end of September,” he says.
“The barn gives us options to sustain production and maintain cow comfort.
“It’s been a great add-on to the farm and we wouldn’t farm without it now.”
The barn has become a central part of the family’s ability to harness premium winter milk contracts, as they move towards 70% autumn-calving pattern on their now 550-cow herd.
In the barn the cows are fed by mixer wagon, with a ration comprising grass, maize and lucerne silage, barley and soya bean meal, plus a few other ingredients.
“It’s a completely American-style of farming once they get in the barn. We do that for four or five months of the year and then we switch back to the New Zealand-style and get as much quality grass into them as we can,” he says.
There’s an American flavour to their herd as well, with TJ being a big fan of North American Holstein genetics, both for their commercial herd and the stud they operate, part of Holstein Friesian NZ.
“We’ve been using North American genetics for about 15 years, so they tend to be a bit bigger than the New Zealand Friesian. I’ve gathered a few different lines from all over the world. The aim is better cows and some of them come from famous show cow families, others it’s for fun really,” he says.
Overall production, for both the winter and summer milking herds, was about 600kg MS per cow last year and the Stewarts are hoping for 650kg MS per cow this year.
“The national average is about 380kg. Genetics helps but obviously feeding is important and we’re forever talking to the farm consultant about diets,” they say.
Spring calving cows are calved in August-September and the autumn calvers in March-April, two blocks of eight weeks.
“If she calves in spring we try to get her in-calf for next spring but if she’s milking really well and she doesn’t get in-calf, we’re happy to give her another shot and try to get her in-calf for the next autumn,” TJ says.
“She can do 18 months before she gets dried-off and calves in autumn if that’s what happens. If she doesn’t catch that one, she’s generally on the truck out of here.”
While TJ is the partnership’s “cow man”, Mark does the tractor work, looks after the irrigation and makes silage. This year he’s growing winter feed crops as well, but that’s part of the flood recovery programme and normally it’s an all-grass operation on the farm.
“A lot of people ask, ‘How do you get on with two brothers running a farm?’,” says Stacey, who’s also an active farming partner.
“It’s not all beer and skittles all the time, but most of the time we all work well together because TJ has his cows and his feed on his side, whereas Mark’s got the machinery and so on, they sort of have different roles but they can soon cross over if need be.”
Mark and Stacey also operate a slurry business, travelling to other farms to empty their effluent ponds and disk injecting the effluent onto their paddocks. Barn effluent is thicker than cowshed effluent and disk injecting into the paddocks gets the nutrients to the plant root instead of sitting on top of the grass.
A year ago the Stewarts joined Synlait’s Lead With Pride programme, under which they have to meet tough standards for environmental impacts, social responsibility, animal health and milk quality.
“The first year was hell because we had lockdowns at the same time as the audit but once you get through the first year it’s fairly straight up,” she says.
“It’s all stuff you should be doing, it’s all stuff that you know. We had our audit last week, which we passed.”
The Stewarts are well on track to a full recovery from the floods, with production up by 6% over last year. And they’re grateful for a high-payout year just when they really need it.
“We’ve weathered the storm you could say, we came out the other side of it. No lives were lost, we didn’t lose any stock, we all survived,” Stacey says happily.
Farm facts:
Owner: TJ, Mark and Stacey, David and Maree Stewart
Location: Greenstreet, Ashburton
Farm size: 213 ha
Cows: 550 Holstein Friesians plus 200 young stock
Production: 2020-21; 309,000kgs MS
Target: 2021-22; 320,000kgs MS
