Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

I arrived at his farm, and before I knew it, I was listening to the details of his distant arrival. Colin’s boat arrived in Wellington on Easter Friday, 1958. When he came ashore, he found the city virtually empty—the entire island’s population was just half that of his hometown of Edinburgh, and New Zealand was still relatively isolated from the rest of the world. “I began to wonder, where were all the people?” he said.

Eventually, Colin settled in the Canterbury Plains. He began to practice sheep farming, employing the same methods his family had used back home. As farming in New Zealand began to modernize throughout the next few decades, Colin stuck to more traditional methods. He has followed the same daily routine for nearly 40 years, waking up early each morning in his rural 1849 farmhouse to begin the day’s chores.

In a series of whistles, hand gestures, and thickly accented commands, Colin and his sheepdog effortlessly round up 200 lambs and move them into an open grazing paddock, as I stand in awe. After each command, his dog Stacey looks back intently for direction. “You wave your hand and she does it,” complains a frustrated neighbor. “Well that’s it,” Colin says, “I trained her!”

With a grace and prowess that seems to belie his old age, Colin catches a sheep for shearing and ushers it into the barn. “Farmers no longer see an animal—they see how many kilos of wool or milk powder they will get,” he says. “I haven’t fallen to that.”

I follow Colin into the barn, where he uses the Tally-Hi method (a technique designed to minimize the sheep’s struggle and reduce strain on the shearer) to shear the sheep. He stands behind the sheep and removes the thick wool coat that has been growing since this time last year, beginning at the belly and working around the sides. After a few minutes, he takes his polo shirt off. “It gets hot,” he says, and then tells me how, in the old days, they used to wear singlets. For the first time I see strain in the eyes of the aging 60-year-old.

Although it’s a stressful process for the sheep, shearing is necessary to prevent overheating and fly-strike (a parasitic disease). The sheep’s skin thickens within a few days to provide protection from the cold, and the wool eventually grows back.

Colin separates out the higher-quality wool, placing it into two piles by hand. His Romneys (a type of sheep) yield 41-micron wool, which is significantly thicker than what you find in most New Zealand markets. “People keep telling me I’m going too high [with the thickness],” he says. “I can’t see why.”

As he shows me into his garage, Colin tells me that he is hesitant to embrace the ever-increasing shift toward modernization. Pesticides and large-scale farming have overpowered small, family-run farms, but he continues to use the techniques he learned 40 years ago. He refuses to top-dress (add an extra top-layer of soil) and keeps only two sheep per acre, which is far fewer than most large scale-farms. While other farmers plow over thick vegetation with expensive modern equipment, Colin uses an old 100-horsepower Ford tractor—and even that gets minimal use.

A bronze plaque, mounted indifferently atop a lone fencepost in his backyard, sums up Colin’s approach to agriculture: “For farming in harmony with nature.” Colin quickly counters that it should probably read, “Award for not farming right.” He confesses that his methods stem partly from tradition, and partly from an aversion to change. “I’d flatten all this land and put in irrigation,” he says, “if I wasn’t lazy.”

Intensive irrigation systems are causing erosion problems in the Canterbury Plains. Century-old tree breaks that were used to keep soil from blowing off are now being destroyed to make room for irrigation systems. Colin regretfully admits that many of today’s farmers simply don’t understand what they’re doing to the land, nor do they understand what the long-term effects will be.

“Lake Ellesmere looks brown today,” Colin says as he looks out at the lake. Increasing nitrates from a recent farming boom and top soil have manifested in the water supply, and Colin worries what the water will look like in another 40 years.

As a displaced European, Colin in many ways represents the non-native culture in Aotearoa. This is not where he grew up, but it is now his home. Although many of the immigrant workers of the Ten Pound Deal “felt homesick and exploited and returned to England the moment their mandatory two years were up, Colin was different,” his wife Sherry tells me. “He loved it in New Zealand from day one and never felt any urge to go back to England. He has only been back twice in all those years.”

Driving across his land, he looks out the window and sees a few deer. He stops the car, leans his head out the window, and calls out affectionately, “G’day girls!”