grahamg
Old codger
- Location
- South of Manchester, UK
I came across this life story unexpectedly and thought it worth showing to you here:
"I found myself saying goodbye to the only work I knew, without a hope in hell of getting a decent job, I was 45 years old, no qualifications, but capable of anything, not that it did me any good without some form of qualification, so the only way I was ever going to work again, was to buy myself a job, which is how the dairy farm came about.
I cleared all our debts, then began to search for a farm; 6 months later, I’d found the farm I wanted, and yet another learning curve began.
The children were each reaching the end of their degrees, our savings weren’t anything to write home about and we had a debt brought about by three disastrous investments my wife had made, which turned out to be a part of a Ponzie Scam of the late 1980’s, and two other disasters friends of my wife encouraged her to invest in, which she did by forging my signature without my knowledge or consent and losing everything I’d accumulated over the previous 18 years, leaving us with a debt, five times the size of our original home loan.
We were ruined, there was no money, the children’s educations were about to be lost to them, unless I positioned myself for redundancy.
My redundancy, was the equivalent of winning the Lotto, it consisted of a sum of money as compensation for losing what was supposed to be a permanent job for life, repayment for all my unused recreation leave, including leave bonuses, my complete 31 years of untouched long service leave payments, and all my 31 years of superannuation payments and employer contributions.
It was 1993, financial institutions were crashing and burning all over the place, there was nowhere safe to put our money, and to add to my burden, my wife had made it clear she wanted her life back, that she wanted me to leave the family home, so the farm offered the opportunity to create exactly what we needed to meet all our requirements in that it gave my wife her life back, it gave me somewhere else to live, somewhere safe to park our remaining funds, and on top of all that, it gave me a job with an income which allowed us to make the repayments on the debt my wife’s poor investments had brought down upon us.
Compared to any other kind of investment, considering the havoc of the financial world at the time, the farm was the safest place to park our money, I knew if it were under my feet, it would be safe, so off I went with absolutely no knowledge, no support, no contacts in that industry, and eventually purchased the farm.
As I looked at each farm, I’d hear various terms such as carrying capacity, Butter Fat and Protein, names of different types of cows etc; never being one to be too proud to show my ignorance, I’d ask what they meant or why they were important, so that in the end, I had a reasonable theoretical idea of what my criteria should be.
Based upon this, I took the risk and eventually signed a contract on a settlement farm, on the Murray River Irrigation System, in Northern Victoria.
Settlement farms came about after the First and Second World Wars, they were sold to returned soldiers and like any of those projects, saw almost all of them swallowed up by the original squatter, because most of the soldiers who took them on, simply didn’t have the knowledge to keep them going, and wouldn’t have been in the same financial situation I was, so with a huge debt, a young family, and all the demands of the farm life, they would have quickly realized this was not the way to go.
Ok so now I’m a farmer in that I own a farm, there I was, standing in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by paddocks, with fences which were mostly laying on the ground, a house not in much better condition than an old shed, with all other buildings in similar condition.
Wintering in the bottom paddocks were 150 cows, so I thought I should feed them some hay. I’d bought some very good toys with the farm as far as it had a brand new tractor, and a hay feed out wagon, which automatically loaded two round bales and fed them out of itself, without me having to lay a hand on them. Most of the other equipment was as good or at least as practical, so I’d bought well as far as material handling was concerned.
The dairy, although aesthetically a very old building, had state of the art equipment and could milk 100 cows in 45 minutes so I’d done well there also. I did have to add a few things, but basically it was a good set up and made the job as easy as was possible for what I had to spend.
I discovered the farm had no potable water for drinking, so I immediately contacted a water borer and soon had a great bore with absolutely pure water, which came from a deep lead 300 feet beneath the earth.
Then I began the huge task of removing and replacing all the fences and gates.
12 weeks later I’d fully restored the farm, but I’d, had it up and running, within 4 weeks of arriving, and it wasn’t long before the biggest pay day of my life.
My first milk cheque was for over $10, 000.00 for the first month, those cheques continued to rise month after month until in the end, I was in a state of disbelief at the huge amount of money I was handling, but I was to soon discover the costs of running a farm would quickly gobble up most of that.
To feed the stock alone would absorb between 60 to 70% of that money but in the end, even after servicing my debt, I still had enough to meet all costs and buy the occasional new piece of equipment, and sometimes save a little as well.
My days began at 3.00 am, I’d wake, climb out of bed walk to the kitchen, feed my dog, make my breakfast and by 3.45 am, I’d be on my way to the dairy. I’d set the dairy up, and then make my way down to the cows, where my dog would take over and push them up to the dairy whilst I’d reset the electric fence to provide a new fresh area for the cows to graze when they returned from the dairy after milking.
After the last cow leaves the dairy, all the plant has to be cleaned and sterilized, plus the shed and yards washed out, with all the waste being pumped into two huge settling ponds.
After milking, I’d take about 400 litres of milk which I’d separated as I milked, for the calves. Now once a calf has been broken in to feed from a teat, they pretty much look after themselves, but to begin with, I’d have to teach each calf how to use the teat.
All these jobs require pushing and shoving, wrestling and lifting some very heavy items, and it wasn’t long before I’d developed muscles on my muscles, and then there was the paddock work.
To use the tractor required the attachment of one implement or another, depending on the task at hand, but these also require a huge amount of physical exertion so that by the time 11.00 am would arrive, I’d have been on the job for 8 hours, I not only needed a feed, I also needed to sit down and have a rest, because by 2.30pm, the same afternoon, almost all I’d done in the morning, would need to be done again, and would usually keep me going until around 7.30 in the evening, that is, when I wasn’t irrigating the farm,
Irrigation in the area I was in, which had very sandy loams, which were very thirsty, required irrigating every 6 days, but that irrigation took 3 full days and nights to complete, so I wasn’t able to sleep 3 days and nights out of every six.
These were just the day to day activities; during hay season, I’d have 15 semi trailer loads of hay arrive, which was my winter feed for the stock. I had to unload them by hand, because I didn’t have a front end loader, and all the time I was on the farm, I had other budgetary priorities which denied me that labour saving device, but I did manage to construct a device which at least allowed me to use the tractor to push them off the truck where I’d use a set of forks to stack them afterwards.
Temperatures in the north could be around 40 degrees Celsius from as early as August, right through to as late as May, hardly a climate conducive to hard labour, but it’s amazing what the human body can endure when it must.
Cattle are heavy strong beasts, they damage things non stop, it got that way, every time I looked out the window, something required my attention, and there was absolutely no let up, 24/7/365. On top of that, all farms of the same size as mine had an average of 3 people working on them, whereas I was on my own.
I not only ran the farm, paid its bills, ordered its supplies, I also ran the house, did my own shopping, cooked all my own meals, modified and repaired all my own machinery, serviced all the vehicles and did all the running about required to keep things going.
From this I got a good idea what life was like for most women, and if you took the stock and the calves, as humans, you could say I also knew what it was like to have so many others dependent upon me as well.
Life was no different when it came to contractors in the country as it is with tradesmen in the City, they never come when they say they will, they always try to add to the original quote, and they do terrible work, the same with the Authorities, you have no idea of the ignorance of people until you call an alleged professional and then have to teach them their own job.
So life on the farm was a nightmare, it was exhausting, it was way too much work for one man, but I’d adapted and got a kind of pride in being so unbelievably independent.
As various people would come and go from the farm, now and then little criticisms were exposed. I got the impression most around me thought I wasn’t going to make it, which of course only made me more determined to prove them wrong.
Most were lifetime farmers who had their relatives, their wife and children to help, I suppose they must have seen me as a bit of a bad example for those they exploited to assist them, so the sooner I fell over and left, the sooner they could save face in front of their families, but sadly for them, I had no intention of going anywhere.
Milking requires so much effort, so much care of paddocks, stock and plant, the slightest drop in water temperature can see your plant contaminated and your milk ruined, the same applies to upsetting the cows, it’s like a mine field, so many things can go wrong.
I had always been an extremely diligent operator, no way would I ever take a short cut, I wanted to be the best dairyman in the district, for once in my life, I wanted to be able to claim to be something, and to do that, my goal was to achieve excellence at what I was doing, because I knew if I did that, I’d win an excellence award, which I wanted desperately to be able to display on the gate of my farm, to show I had as much right to be there, as any of my local critics.
At the time, Australia had 14,000 dairy farmers; only 500 of those farmers had ever achieved excellence in milk production. I’d been concentrating on getting my milk as good as possible; every day I’d wait for my test results, and every day I was so very close, but year after year, some little thing would go wrong and I’d miss out again.
To receive the award, every milking, twice per day, every day of the whole year, has to be absolutely perfect, or you miss out.
My problem was, I knew I could do it, I knew no farmer had ever done it on his own before, and I wanted that honour, I wanted it because I was a City boy, I wanted it because no one on earth would have given me a hope in hell of achieving it.
I was fully aware I was considered a five minute wonder by the locals, but I was prepared to do whatever it took to take the smug look off my critic’s faces, and I knew I was so very close to achieving my goal. I knew it was almost impossible alone, but I needed something to aim for, the award became my reason for my diligence and hard work.
After six years of the most diligent operating you’ll ever see, in 1999, I was in my dairy, when a car came up the driveway. I walked out to find 4 blokes in suits. I had no idea who they were, apparently they’d been phoning me, but I never checked the phone and was usually outside so I’d never heard it ring.
They were from the Australian Dairy Industry and my local milk processor; they had with them, my EXCELLENCE AWARD
I was so proud of this, I’d more than earned it, it would have been lovely to have had my family at the presentation night, and I fully expected them to be there, but after waiting at the front of the hall for an hour, it became obvious that wasn’t going to be.
To me, this was no different to how a young person would feel after finishing their studies and receiving their degree, at last when someone asked me what I did for a living, I could answer by stating I was a dairy farmer, I was something, rather than the bloke all others relied on to do all their dirty work.
I recall when my name was called, unlike the other recipients, my walk to the stage and back was devoid of any applause, it was a kind of silent embarrassment and I guess a little sad really, but then, that’s the way it was, obviously, my family had failed to appreciate just how huge that moment was for me.
Just the same, it was an incredible achievement, one rarely achieved by life time farmers, let alone one with so little experience, from a mob of cows most others had written off, and a farm which had been a total wreck when I moved in.
I collected my award, and couldn’t wait to return to the farm; you can imagine my glee as I proudly screwed my award to my front gate.
Now you’d think achieving the almost impossible would be enough, but not for this Dairy Farmer, no way, now I had to prove it wasn’t just a fluke, now I had to show all and sundry I was the best in the district.
I worked every day of the following year with such great stress, I knew there was no room to move, everything had to be perfect, I was rewarded in the year 2000 with my SECOND EXCELLENCE AWARD.
Now I was on a roll, I knew what was required and I gave all I had with the result, 2001 saw my hat trick. THREE EXCELLENCE AWARDS; I had finished the old, and started the new millennium, in excellence.
I could now legitimately call myself a dairy farmer, and there was no one who could doubt that claim, because not only had I received one, but three excellence awards, and when you consider almost no life time farmers have ever achieved one, the fact I’d achieved what I had alone, not only made me a legitimate dairy farmer, it made me unique and by far the best in my district. Of course, as you can see, I’m only the tiniest little bit proud of that, lol.
By 2002, the effect of the drought was beginning to impact, I could see things were going to change and by early 2003, I’d shut the farm down, sold off the stock and was living off hay I was producing and the water I was temporarily trading. By 2005, I’d sold the farm and begun early retirement.
Do I miss the farm? Not in the slightest, that job was the next best thing to slavery, it was made even harder by those I had no option but to tolerate, and was beginning to have so much interference by so many authorities, I may as well have been an employee. Any appeal it ever had was gone.
If I’d known what was ahead of me when I took it on, I’d have run a mile. It was so much work for one man; it definitely made me very strong in many ways other than physically. It gave me time to reflect and understand a great deal of things in my life, I was a better person for it, but surely there has to be an easier way for one to find ones self."
"I found myself saying goodbye to the only work I knew, without a hope in hell of getting a decent job, I was 45 years old, no qualifications, but capable of anything, not that it did me any good without some form of qualification, so the only way I was ever going to work again, was to buy myself a job, which is how the dairy farm came about.
I cleared all our debts, then began to search for a farm; 6 months later, I’d found the farm I wanted, and yet another learning curve began.
The children were each reaching the end of their degrees, our savings weren’t anything to write home about and we had a debt brought about by three disastrous investments my wife had made, which turned out to be a part of a Ponzie Scam of the late 1980’s, and two other disasters friends of my wife encouraged her to invest in, which she did by forging my signature without my knowledge or consent and losing everything I’d accumulated over the previous 18 years, leaving us with a debt, five times the size of our original home loan.
We were ruined, there was no money, the children’s educations were about to be lost to them, unless I positioned myself for redundancy.
My redundancy, was the equivalent of winning the Lotto, it consisted of a sum of money as compensation for losing what was supposed to be a permanent job for life, repayment for all my unused recreation leave, including leave bonuses, my complete 31 years of untouched long service leave payments, and all my 31 years of superannuation payments and employer contributions.
It was 1993, financial institutions were crashing and burning all over the place, there was nowhere safe to put our money, and to add to my burden, my wife had made it clear she wanted her life back, that she wanted me to leave the family home, so the farm offered the opportunity to create exactly what we needed to meet all our requirements in that it gave my wife her life back, it gave me somewhere else to live, somewhere safe to park our remaining funds, and on top of all that, it gave me a job with an income which allowed us to make the repayments on the debt my wife’s poor investments had brought down upon us.
Compared to any other kind of investment, considering the havoc of the financial world at the time, the farm was the safest place to park our money, I knew if it were under my feet, it would be safe, so off I went with absolutely no knowledge, no support, no contacts in that industry, and eventually purchased the farm.
As I looked at each farm, I’d hear various terms such as carrying capacity, Butter Fat and Protein, names of different types of cows etc; never being one to be too proud to show my ignorance, I’d ask what they meant or why they were important, so that in the end, I had a reasonable theoretical idea of what my criteria should be.
Based upon this, I took the risk and eventually signed a contract on a settlement farm, on the Murray River Irrigation System, in Northern Victoria.
Settlement farms came about after the First and Second World Wars, they were sold to returned soldiers and like any of those projects, saw almost all of them swallowed up by the original squatter, because most of the soldiers who took them on, simply didn’t have the knowledge to keep them going, and wouldn’t have been in the same financial situation I was, so with a huge debt, a young family, and all the demands of the farm life, they would have quickly realized this was not the way to go.
Ok so now I’m a farmer in that I own a farm, there I was, standing in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by paddocks, with fences which were mostly laying on the ground, a house not in much better condition than an old shed, with all other buildings in similar condition.
Wintering in the bottom paddocks were 150 cows, so I thought I should feed them some hay. I’d bought some very good toys with the farm as far as it had a brand new tractor, and a hay feed out wagon, which automatically loaded two round bales and fed them out of itself, without me having to lay a hand on them. Most of the other equipment was as good or at least as practical, so I’d bought well as far as material handling was concerned.
The dairy, although aesthetically a very old building, had state of the art equipment and could milk 100 cows in 45 minutes so I’d done well there also. I did have to add a few things, but basically it was a good set up and made the job as easy as was possible for what I had to spend.
I discovered the farm had no potable water for drinking, so I immediately contacted a water borer and soon had a great bore with absolutely pure water, which came from a deep lead 300 feet beneath the earth.
Then I began the huge task of removing and replacing all the fences and gates.
12 weeks later I’d fully restored the farm, but I’d, had it up and running, within 4 weeks of arriving, and it wasn’t long before the biggest pay day of my life.
My first milk cheque was for over $10, 000.00 for the first month, those cheques continued to rise month after month until in the end, I was in a state of disbelief at the huge amount of money I was handling, but I was to soon discover the costs of running a farm would quickly gobble up most of that.
To feed the stock alone would absorb between 60 to 70% of that money but in the end, even after servicing my debt, I still had enough to meet all costs and buy the occasional new piece of equipment, and sometimes save a little as well.
My days began at 3.00 am, I’d wake, climb out of bed walk to the kitchen, feed my dog, make my breakfast and by 3.45 am, I’d be on my way to the dairy. I’d set the dairy up, and then make my way down to the cows, where my dog would take over and push them up to the dairy whilst I’d reset the electric fence to provide a new fresh area for the cows to graze when they returned from the dairy after milking.
After the last cow leaves the dairy, all the plant has to be cleaned and sterilized, plus the shed and yards washed out, with all the waste being pumped into two huge settling ponds.
After milking, I’d take about 400 litres of milk which I’d separated as I milked, for the calves. Now once a calf has been broken in to feed from a teat, they pretty much look after themselves, but to begin with, I’d have to teach each calf how to use the teat.
All these jobs require pushing and shoving, wrestling and lifting some very heavy items, and it wasn’t long before I’d developed muscles on my muscles, and then there was the paddock work.
To use the tractor required the attachment of one implement or another, depending on the task at hand, but these also require a huge amount of physical exertion so that by the time 11.00 am would arrive, I’d have been on the job for 8 hours, I not only needed a feed, I also needed to sit down and have a rest, because by 2.30pm, the same afternoon, almost all I’d done in the morning, would need to be done again, and would usually keep me going until around 7.30 in the evening, that is, when I wasn’t irrigating the farm,
Irrigation in the area I was in, which had very sandy loams, which were very thirsty, required irrigating every 6 days, but that irrigation took 3 full days and nights to complete, so I wasn’t able to sleep 3 days and nights out of every six.
These were just the day to day activities; during hay season, I’d have 15 semi trailer loads of hay arrive, which was my winter feed for the stock. I had to unload them by hand, because I didn’t have a front end loader, and all the time I was on the farm, I had other budgetary priorities which denied me that labour saving device, but I did manage to construct a device which at least allowed me to use the tractor to push them off the truck where I’d use a set of forks to stack them afterwards.
Temperatures in the north could be around 40 degrees Celsius from as early as August, right through to as late as May, hardly a climate conducive to hard labour, but it’s amazing what the human body can endure when it must.
Cattle are heavy strong beasts, they damage things non stop, it got that way, every time I looked out the window, something required my attention, and there was absolutely no let up, 24/7/365. On top of that, all farms of the same size as mine had an average of 3 people working on them, whereas I was on my own.
I not only ran the farm, paid its bills, ordered its supplies, I also ran the house, did my own shopping, cooked all my own meals, modified and repaired all my own machinery, serviced all the vehicles and did all the running about required to keep things going.
From this I got a good idea what life was like for most women, and if you took the stock and the calves, as humans, you could say I also knew what it was like to have so many others dependent upon me as well.
Life was no different when it came to contractors in the country as it is with tradesmen in the City, they never come when they say they will, they always try to add to the original quote, and they do terrible work, the same with the Authorities, you have no idea of the ignorance of people until you call an alleged professional and then have to teach them their own job.
So life on the farm was a nightmare, it was exhausting, it was way too much work for one man, but I’d adapted and got a kind of pride in being so unbelievably independent.
As various people would come and go from the farm, now and then little criticisms were exposed. I got the impression most around me thought I wasn’t going to make it, which of course only made me more determined to prove them wrong.
Most were lifetime farmers who had their relatives, their wife and children to help, I suppose they must have seen me as a bit of a bad example for those they exploited to assist them, so the sooner I fell over and left, the sooner they could save face in front of their families, but sadly for them, I had no intention of going anywhere.
Milking requires so much effort, so much care of paddocks, stock and plant, the slightest drop in water temperature can see your plant contaminated and your milk ruined, the same applies to upsetting the cows, it’s like a mine field, so many things can go wrong.
I had always been an extremely diligent operator, no way would I ever take a short cut, I wanted to be the best dairyman in the district, for once in my life, I wanted to be able to claim to be something, and to do that, my goal was to achieve excellence at what I was doing, because I knew if I did that, I’d win an excellence award, which I wanted desperately to be able to display on the gate of my farm, to show I had as much right to be there, as any of my local critics.
At the time, Australia had 14,000 dairy farmers; only 500 of those farmers had ever achieved excellence in milk production. I’d been concentrating on getting my milk as good as possible; every day I’d wait for my test results, and every day I was so very close, but year after year, some little thing would go wrong and I’d miss out again.
To receive the award, every milking, twice per day, every day of the whole year, has to be absolutely perfect, or you miss out.
My problem was, I knew I could do it, I knew no farmer had ever done it on his own before, and I wanted that honour, I wanted it because I was a City boy, I wanted it because no one on earth would have given me a hope in hell of achieving it.
I was fully aware I was considered a five minute wonder by the locals, but I was prepared to do whatever it took to take the smug look off my critic’s faces, and I knew I was so very close to achieving my goal. I knew it was almost impossible alone, but I needed something to aim for, the award became my reason for my diligence and hard work.
After six years of the most diligent operating you’ll ever see, in 1999, I was in my dairy, when a car came up the driveway. I walked out to find 4 blokes in suits. I had no idea who they were, apparently they’d been phoning me, but I never checked the phone and was usually outside so I’d never heard it ring.
They were from the Australian Dairy Industry and my local milk processor; they had with them, my EXCELLENCE AWARD
I was so proud of this, I’d more than earned it, it would have been lovely to have had my family at the presentation night, and I fully expected them to be there, but after waiting at the front of the hall for an hour, it became obvious that wasn’t going to be.
To me, this was no different to how a young person would feel after finishing their studies and receiving their degree, at last when someone asked me what I did for a living, I could answer by stating I was a dairy farmer, I was something, rather than the bloke all others relied on to do all their dirty work.
I recall when my name was called, unlike the other recipients, my walk to the stage and back was devoid of any applause, it was a kind of silent embarrassment and I guess a little sad really, but then, that’s the way it was, obviously, my family had failed to appreciate just how huge that moment was for me.
Just the same, it was an incredible achievement, one rarely achieved by life time farmers, let alone one with so little experience, from a mob of cows most others had written off, and a farm which had been a total wreck when I moved in.
I collected my award, and couldn’t wait to return to the farm; you can imagine my glee as I proudly screwed my award to my front gate.
Now you’d think achieving the almost impossible would be enough, but not for this Dairy Farmer, no way, now I had to prove it wasn’t just a fluke, now I had to show all and sundry I was the best in the district.
I worked every day of the following year with such great stress, I knew there was no room to move, everything had to be perfect, I was rewarded in the year 2000 with my SECOND EXCELLENCE AWARD.
Now I was on a roll, I knew what was required and I gave all I had with the result, 2001 saw my hat trick. THREE EXCELLENCE AWARDS; I had finished the old, and started the new millennium, in excellence.
I could now legitimately call myself a dairy farmer, and there was no one who could doubt that claim, because not only had I received one, but three excellence awards, and when you consider almost no life time farmers have ever achieved one, the fact I’d achieved what I had alone, not only made me a legitimate dairy farmer, it made me unique and by far the best in my district. Of course, as you can see, I’m only the tiniest little bit proud of that, lol.
By 2002, the effect of the drought was beginning to impact, I could see things were going to change and by early 2003, I’d shut the farm down, sold off the stock and was living off hay I was producing and the water I was temporarily trading. By 2005, I’d sold the farm and begun early retirement.
Do I miss the farm? Not in the slightest, that job was the next best thing to slavery, it was made even harder by those I had no option but to tolerate, and was beginning to have so much interference by so many authorities, I may as well have been an employee. Any appeal it ever had was gone.
If I’d known what was ahead of me when I took it on, I’d have run a mile. It was so much work for one man; it definitely made me very strong in many ways other than physically. It gave me time to reflect and understand a great deal of things in my life, I was a better person for it, but surely there has to be an easier way for one to find ones self."
