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00:05Proudly celebrating 60 years of rural New Zealand.
00:09Chundae Country Calendar.
00:15All this stuff is from the cyclone. Yeah, it's pretty horrendous.
00:20Gabriel actually brought us to our knees.
00:23Years and years of fencing and fixing water troughs and re-grassing.
00:30Brendan's done a wonderful job of bringing it all back.
00:33You do what you're going to do, you don't want to waste good posts.
00:55Three years after Cyclone Gabrielle stormed across the North Island's east coast,
01:00Padua Station an hour north of Gisborne is finally running pre-cyclone stock numbers.
01:07Manager Brendan Ewart is helping shepherd Lily Scully bring in a mob of 2,000 ewes and lambs for today's
01:15weaning.
01:17We've got rid of a pick about seven o'clock and some lambs going on the truck at three this
01:22afternoon.
01:24Lily's just gone over the other side there and she's going to push her side around and then come up
01:28to the top
01:28and I'm just going to clear the blind side of the paddock where she can't see from the top
01:31and we'll go down the road and head to the yards.
01:35It's a bit of a performance marker I suppose, we'll see how well our lambs have done.
01:41Padua Station is primarily a finishing farm and runs 2,500 breeding ewes, 600 hoggets and buys in 12,000
01:50lambs over the year.
01:55We only had a very small amount of ewes on after the cyclone, we had to offload a lot of
02:00stock, so I think we only had about 1,800 ewes.
02:03Our first pick here was about 300 lambs total, so yeah hopefully we're going to see more like 800 this
02:10year.
02:12We sort of over mate the hoggets and then you know just kill all the drys so we're only carrying
02:17through in lamb hoggets
02:19but that's the only breeding component of Paaroa, we don't have any cows.
02:24The cattle component is male only trading stock.
02:28They kind of act as our grooming tool for our sheep in our hill country initially
02:33and then the following year they sort of come down to the flats and we try and pump them along.
02:44He's keen, he's not very old that dog.
02:47He's doing something, he just doesn't know what he's doing yet.
02:52Brendan's always enjoyed stock work with his dog team.
02:57That was always sort of my favourite part about it when I was starting out.
03:01I left school when I was 16 and just straight out on the farm, yeah.
03:05I managed to get a junior shepherd job but I didn't go through any like training schools or anything like
03:10that.
03:10I just, yeah, straight into it and learnt on the job sort of thing.
03:17This is Brendan's first time managing a station.
03:22To be fair I probably wasn't qualified for the mess I unknowingly was going to have to tidy up, eh?
03:29I had to learn a lot very, very quickly.
03:31We had all these tractors and all these planting machines and all this stuff
03:34and I'd never actually had anything to do with them before, you know.
03:37Like most farms you actually just get the contractor and then they do it.
03:40So I had to very quickly learn how to operate all that stuff.
03:46What has Lily got to? Oh, she's just up there.
03:48She must be bringing a few sheep round the other side.
03:50These ones here will just wander around the face to the gateway
03:53and then we'll get Keela to crack the gate open and we'll head down the road.
04:01Cadet Keela Olsen has been with Padua for a year now.
04:06I signed up for a program called Grown Future Farmers
04:09and this is the station where I got placed at and, yeah, it's been really amazing so far.
04:16I've learnt so much.
04:17I've learnt stuff about machinery, stock sense, fencing, a bit of water systems.
04:24This farm has everything. You can learn anything on this farm. It's good.
04:32With the sheep successfully down from the hills,
04:36Keela and Lily will move them to the yards a kilometre down the road.
04:42Meanwhile, Brendan is meeting with Wayne Amaru,
04:45who was chairman of the Manga Heia 2D Incorporation,
04:48the farm's owners, at the time of the cyclone.
04:51And it's just a pictorial history of what we've done on the farm,
04:55so you get a pretty good idea of what it used to look like before that storm came and destroyed
05:00it.
05:01I believe you're working somewhere there.
05:03Yeah, yep, yep, actually.
05:06Roughly 30 kilometres of fencing needed to be replaced.
05:10The river's actually coming again and taking a large bit of the bank away from us.
05:14It'd be good to look at it.
05:16Yeah, yeah, if you've got time, should we go for a look?
05:18Yeah, it'd be great.
05:27This year, the water would have been at least twice my height over my head.
05:32We'll try and put it back down.
05:34How are you getting on, girls?
05:35Oh, no, all good.
05:36All right.
05:37You guys remember Wayne, eh?
05:38Yeah.
05:38This particular spot's probably got half a metre of silt from the original ground level on it,
05:43so we're a little bit higher, I suppose, for the next one, eh?
05:47Might keep us out of the waterway a bit more.
05:49Snapping.
05:50Yeah?
05:50The ground's a bit hard.
05:51What are you going to do about that?
05:52Probably two.
05:54Brendan has four full-time staff members, including Shepherd Lily,
05:58who was brought on board after completing a growing Future Farmers Cadetship.
06:04How long is this going to take here? You've got a bit to go still, eh?
06:07We started the GFF programme three years ago, actually not long after I started.
06:11We took Lily on as our first GFF cadet and she's since graduated a year ago
06:16and we offered her the shepherd jewel.
06:20We sort of skipped a year and Keela is in her first year
06:23and then next year we've got another young girl called Maddy starting,
06:27so we'll have three from the GFF programme.
06:29I'll go forward a little bit.
06:31Okay.
06:32Tiny as a bit, yep.
06:34This particular property here suffered quite badly in the flood.
06:39This, in the early stage prior to Gabriel, this actually bank went straight across there.
06:45So we've lost a good half a hectare.
06:50And all the fence, that's what the girls are replacing at the moment.
06:54So this property here suffered quite badly.
06:58There was silt all the way across through this entire area,
07:02along with a lot of debris, slash and logs.
07:08Over the years, since Bola, we've actually had nine storms that were of equal strength as Bola was,
07:17culminating in Gabriel, which was 15 metres.
07:20And that actually brought us to our knees.
07:25It really held us up completely.
07:31We've handled the other nine storms quite, you know, quite easy,
07:35but Gabriel just come and it was just devastating.
07:44Prior to Gabriel, we were probably asset base about $45 million.
07:51What's the matter?
07:54We had purchased 13 odd properties, something like about $12 million worth.
08:01We had a debt of $3.6 million on an equity of, you know, 75% to 80%.
08:09So we were a reasonably good business.
08:12But after Gabriel hit, we were virtually on our knees.
08:18The Māngaheia 2D Incorporation administers the land on behalf of its shareholders,
08:23primarily from the local iwi, Te Aitanga a Hauiti.
08:29One of our biggest problems was trying to explain to our shareholders
08:32what was holding everything back.
08:34It was extremely difficult to get funding when we had no cash flow
08:40because losing all that pasture and the fencing, we had to de-stock.
08:46We dropped by about 10,000 stock units, which meant our cash flow dried up.
08:53So it was extremely difficult to get sufficient funding just to do the basic repairs.
09:00So it's been a hard road.
09:03But Brendan's done a wonderful job of bringing it all back
09:06in the period that he's actually been here.
09:09So it's been quite a job to get it actually functioning.
09:19Oh, you know, you do what you've got to do. You don't want to waste good posts.
09:23The budget's always tight, eh?
09:25I will reuse them back on the new bit of fence.
09:29It's come on me. It looks, yeah, looks really nice, I think.
09:38Probably for the first time since I've been here, we're actually sitting about where we should be.
09:43We've wintered about 14,500 stock units, which aligns up with where we were before.
09:48We're back up there, but we've still a long way to go in terms of fertility
09:51to do a good job of every one of those stock units.
10:02See ya.
10:06Holly, can you put your boots on, Holly?
10:09Come on, biggies.
10:09Life on Paaroa Station, just out of Tolliga Bay, north of Gisborne, looks pretty ideal
10:16for manager Brendan Ewart, wife Hannah, and their two boys Oliver and Angus.
10:23That's right, hold it up.
10:25This is exactly what I imagined when I wanted to bring our children up on the farm,
10:29is to have pet piglets and pet lambs and, you know, we've got the horses and things.
10:35It's so cool for them to grow up with.
10:37We have chickens.
10:38Oh, and chickens, you're right.
10:39Grow up with all the, you know, crazy animals.
10:43Well, they're pretty lucky.
10:45Aren't you?
10:47But it hasn't all been easy.
10:50Brendan's first day on the job here coincided with the largest cyclone to ever hit the East Coast.
10:59Monday was my first day at work and it was, like, really heavy rain.
11:04I think we sent everyone home just because it was raining so much.
11:07It was, like, ridiculous and we had a cyclone warning.
11:10And then the next day it was, like, a lake.
11:14You couldn't see any of the fences, nothing.
11:16It was just a lake all the way up to the road edge.
11:19And no power and no phone and whatnot, so not quite what we expected, but, yeah.
11:26Paaroa Station is owned by the Mangahea 2D Incorporation
11:31and it's believed to have been the farm hardest hit by Cyclone Gabriel three years ago.
11:38It would just be directly sort of correlated to the area of river flats that we have.
11:43No one else has got anywhere near 1,000 hectares of river flats.
11:49Ninety percent of our farm is just a giant flood plain, essentially.
11:53So that meant virtually the whole thing went under water.
11:57So we lost all the fences, a lot of the grass.
12:00Hill Country farmers definitely did it pretty tough as well.
12:04They had, like, lots of erosion, slipping fences to be fixed, that kind of thing.
12:09But, um, it was sort of a bit more spread out damage,
12:12whereas ours was just a big blanket of devastation, I suppose.
12:18Hannah was eight months pregnant at the time.
12:21Got to find some space now.
12:24When I realised that we couldn't get to town
12:27because both ends of our road were completely blocked,
12:32I was thinking, hmm, I hope this clears up before we need a hospital trip.
12:38But we were all right, eh? We soldiered on.
12:41No, it was fine. We had gas cookers and some canned food and stuff.
12:44We were all good to go, eh?
12:46Luckily, everything was...
12:47All the stock was up on the hills, so we weren't really worried about that.
12:51It wasn't till after we had to start worrying when we had all the clean-up to deal with.
12:55Years and years of fencing and fixing water troughs and meddling and re-grassing.
13:04It's nice to actually sort of be back to just farming now and not just fixing stuff.
13:10I dig the holes.
13:12I dig the holes.
13:14Over at the yards, Brendan's staff and stock agent Luke Bates are hard at work.
13:24Just taking the top males out of these and the rest will go on crops, so...
13:28Yeah, but now they're looking really healthy.
13:32They'll be off to the works today.
13:34Hush! Hush! Hush! Hush! Hush!
13:36We're trying to get about an 18 to 19 kilo average.
13:39We'll get what we get, really.
13:41We don't want to go too deep, don't want to go too shallow,
13:43so it's just finding that medium ground.
13:46On busy days like today, having full-time staff is a lifesaver for Brendan.
13:53The farm's quite spread out.
13:55There's a lot of roads and rivers and separate blocks,
13:59so it takes a bit of getting around.
14:01And no-one ever seems to be working in the same place,
14:04so yeah, it's important that I get around and catch up with everyone
14:07and just make sure they know what they're meant to be doing.
14:10Better to keep your finger on the pulse.
14:14We've got Willie. He's our full-time mechanic slash tractor driver slash digger driver, whatever.
14:20And we've got Joe, who's our full-time fencer, looks after all the water system.
14:25Yeah, now they're both pretty sharp.
14:27There's not many places you have the array of staff that we've got.
14:31You'd probably have three staff, not five.
14:34But it's just the flats are so much more intensive, and obviously since the flood especially,
14:38there's been so much more work that needs to be done.
14:41No, we're very lucky to have them.
14:47I'm out and about most days.
14:49I can't sort of ever seem to concentrate on one job at a time.
14:52I'm jumping from Joe to Willie, back to the girls,
14:55and then going to talk to a helicopter pilot or go to a board meeting or something.
14:59I'm all over the place some days.
15:04Despite the covered yards, the drenching and dipping is hot and dusty work.
15:13Just drenching our weaned lambs.
15:15Just come off mum today.
15:17Getting a pretty hard drench and then they'll be dipped.
15:22All this dust is from the cyclone.
15:24Yeah, it's pretty horrendous.
15:26You can kind of see on the inside where the silk was up to on the race.
15:32Every time we get warm weather and it's dry again, it just comes back up.
15:36Only time we can really avoid it is winter when it's wet.
15:40But otherwise, you know, it's just dust.
15:44These will all go out onto our old chicory and we'll get another pick from them again in January.
15:50It's pretty cool when you go through the whole exercise.
15:52You know, we plant all the crops ourselves and the girls actually have a hand in it.
15:56You know, they plant some of them.
16:00Everything's going well.
16:01Yeah, I'm happy.
16:02This is our first season fully stocked.
16:04This is our first proper weaning.
16:06We've had a whole lot of series of little small ones building up to this moment.
16:12We're fully effective for the first time in three years.
16:14We're fully stocked.
16:15And we're going to get a chance to see our policy express its full potential, I suppose.
16:26Have you been in this bush before?
16:28Nah, first time.
16:29Okay, this is called Stuart's Block.
16:31It's one of seven of Alola Ngahiri's around here.
16:35An hour north of Gisborne, just inland from Tolliga Bay, Parua Station has almost 800 hectares of native bush within
16:44its boundaries.
16:50Cyclone Gabrielle affected not just the farming side of the station.
16:55Mere Tamanui, whose children whakapapa to the land, is one of those investing time to protect the bush and its
17:02taanga species.
17:05Our forests are plentiful. They're full of resources for us to sustain our living.
17:12It's a matter of knowing what to use, how to use it.
17:16We share this space with our rangatahi, who are able to grasp that land story,
17:22and carry it on to the next generation.
17:26And you can see here, one of our rata vines has fallen down.
17:34The cyclones pretty much suffocated us.
17:37We had over a foot of sediment deposited within Ngahiri.
17:41I kind of freaked out a little bit and started collecting all the kahekitia seeds and the kaikomako seeds I
17:48could see falling on top of the silt.
17:50And if you know silt, it's really small, so it compacts, and when it compacts together, it suffocates everything.
17:59How much possums do you reckon we can get out of here?
18:03I reckon you'll be able to get a few.
18:05Our main trapping has been around the rats, so it's really great to have you on board to do some
18:10possum trapping in here.
18:12Pene Patuwai Tekani, whose dad is head shepherd on Parua, is a keen hunter and trapper.
18:19I just like getting up there, better than sitting on your phone all day.
18:26I just rammed the steeple into the trap and put some flowers so possums will come and eat it.
18:36Up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up.
18:40Time out from farming is also important for Brendan and his team.
18:44But there's always plenty to do before tools down.
18:49We've got our two-year-old stairs in. We're going to have a bit of a way up. It's a
18:53sample way really, just to see where they're at and see if we can maybe get a few away to
18:57the works in January.
18:59We buy these stairs in as yearlings.
19:01So we purchased them probably 12 months ago at about 300 kilos.
19:05And I'm really hoping there's a fair few over 600 by now.
19:11There are a couple of big ones, but the mob average is sort of just under 600 at the moment,
19:16which is not too bad.
19:17But yeah, I'll just sort of hope to kill a few this month.
19:20Usually they had a pretty tough winter.
19:22We probably got a bit greedy on our winter numbers, to be fair.
19:25And then it got quite weak towards the end, but no, they're not too bad at all.
19:32And with the big jobs out of the way for at least today, Brendan is taking Lily and Penny to
19:38a neighbouring farm to share his passion for hunting.
19:42This is probably one of my favourite things to do.
19:44Yeah, it's nice to get out here and just think about something else for a while.
19:49You can't have too much time outside of work with your staff.
19:52It's good to have a relationship with them outside of work.
19:55So everything's not always related to work.
19:59It's hard because I've always been around it and it's always been so cool.
20:02And I've always wished I could be the person holding that gun, but you know, I've never been that person.
20:07And now potentially I can be, which I think is pretty cool.
20:12I've been bugging everybody I can.
20:18You know, you get bit trapped in your own head when you're just, you know, always on farm.
20:22It's more of a mental health thing, I'd say.
20:24Nah, it's good to get away and get, you know, get out of the space.
20:28Get away from the stress.
20:32It's Brendan's cool head and team building skills that Hannah believes are his strengths.
20:38He's just very mellow, doesn't ever get mad.
20:45It's not very excitable, are you?
20:47No.
20:48But I think that works really well in terms of relationships with the staff and things.
20:53You just keep chugging along when things get tough, you don't let it stress you out.
21:01It's been sort of a bit hard to look just past the general recovery, but we are sort of getting
21:06to that point where we can start looking a bit further ahead.
21:10I think Paral has the contour and the ability to probably be one of the best and most profitable, you
21:17know.
21:17There's a lot of potential here.
21:21Paral's got a lot to offer and it's going to take a little bit to get there, but there's no
21:24reason why we couldn't be in the top ten.
21:33All calves must go through a certain course which takes many hours of practising to achieve.
21:43The calves sometimes do better at home than at school.
21:49The owner comes on again, but suddenly Trixie grows too strong and runs away.
21:59To see the rest of this classic episode and more gems from the past 60 years, head to TVNZ+.
22:39Country calendar was proudly brought to you by Hyundai New Zealand.
22:48Well put to the 문
22:48It went with his book in my old row.
22:48This week, I hope we would put any сидений for our friend and I'll be смотреть through it.
22:48And how do we look?
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