('COUNTRY CALENDAR' THEME) - (WHISTLES) - Always a favourite on every rural road. (DOG BARKS) - A small family dairy business that was saved by its customers... - I have a nice relationship with the community. - It was a phenomenal experience. They rescued us, really. - Lot's of people just go, 'What can we do?' - ...and the flower business that flourishes on the same farm. - I enjoy life here very much, I've gotta say. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2024 (EASY-GOING ACOUSTIC MUSIC) - It's an early February morning near Dunedin, and Merrall MacNeille's first job of the day is to feed some calves on the family farm. (COWS MOO) - We're right above Port Chalmers. We're above the port. We can look down and see the boats come in. (EASY-GOING MUSIC CONTINUES) And we're about 14km from the stadium in Dunedin... so it's a pretty good spot. - He bottle feeds his calves for a few weeks after they're born so he can form a bond with them. Then they go on to a calf feeder. - If I kick them out immediately and they're on a feeder, they have no attachment to me or people. They're too wild; I need them tame. I need a nice tame cow. - These calves are only a few days old, so he's still bottle feeding them. - Once they started out tame and halter-led, I can walk up to an older cow out in the paddock and grab her string and put a lead on her. I lead them everywhere. I don't drive them. (EASY-GOING MUSIC CONTINUES) (CALLS TO COWS) (CALLS TO COWS) I'm milking a dozen at the moment, and they're Jersey or Jersey-Guernsey cross. The little taller girls are part-Guernsey. I'm doing five at a time at the moment. A little slower on one end, but less hectic. I want them to stay calm and collected rather than frantic. I don't know about milk, but I know for a beef, that if they are under stress, that beef is not as good. So I'm saying, 'Well, the milk would probably be better if it's` if the cows are easy-going.' - Merrall works at an easy, relaxed pace to give himself and his cows a longer working life. - I've been told the typical cow goes less than five years, where I had Marjorie, who stood here, died this last winter. I'd retired her at age 20. So I'm keeping them going longer, I'll say. I'm not burning them out. (COW MOOS) I'll be 71 first week of March. I enjoy the cows. It's not hard work. I put in some hours. I'm just plugging along, that's all. I know of too many people who retired and then keeled over within a couple of months, so I have no intention of retiring. I'm by` I pace myself. - Merrall grew up in Maryland on the United States' East Coast and studied agriculture. He always wanted to farm differently, and his milking shed is far from conventional. - We put a clear roof on because it was pretty dark. Then it was too hot, so we did grapes to do summertime shade. And the cows, where they can, will eat the grapes, but, um, we get to eat them also, yeah. They're not there yet. They're coming. Well, there are many different things that make good milk. Calm and collected is good. The right breed is good. A clean cow is good. I'll have very little on the filter when I'm done milking, because I washed hot, soapy with some iodine and then a soap with iodine rinse and then dried with individual cloths. I sweep the lime just so I'm not stepping in manure and stuff. (EASY-GOING ACOUSTIC MUSIC) They've got their own spots, and they know them after a while. For instance, I had a cow named Crystal. I sold her. She was gone two years, the people moved to Nelson, I brought her back, she went to her old spot. The Jerseys are a nice high-fat milk, 67%, similar to Guernsey. Guernsey's got a beta carotene in the cream, so it's a yellower milk and a little different flavour. It's the best milk as far as I'm concerned. I don't spray the barn down. I use about a third of the water of a regular dairy. There's not a whole lot of water going through, so I'll to handle with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. (EASY-GOING MUSIC CONTINUES) (BIRDS CHIRP) - Merrall and his wife, Alex, moved to Dunedin from the United States in 2001. Alex came to take up a teaching job. - We met when we were 16 at a school that had a farm, and education and agriculture, not industrial agriculture ` the kind that kids can actually relate to ` has always been kind of our focus, and actually, it would be wonderful if this little farm had a school attached to it. We've talked about that for years, but I don't know, unless you win the lottery, how you make that happen. It is an ideal size. You know the animals. You know when they're sick. You know the feed they're getting. It's a human size. (COCKERELS CROW) We don't do it because of the money, but we get by. We do it because it's the only way that we would do it. - Mango lassi ` it's skimmed milk yoghurt and then mango pulp, and it usually sells out at the farmers' market. A case a week at the moment. I got a farm paper, it had an article on year-round grazing in New Zealand, and it showed middle of winter, cows out on green paddocks. I said, 'Oh, that's a bit of all right,' cos you get tired of snow at a certain point ` or I did, anyway. The politics looked good, so it was an easy choice. I saw the United States over time becoming more and more kind of a military country, and a reasonable chunk of money went into the military every year, as opposed to health care or schools or anything else. We go to Quaker meeting, and Quakers are not military types. - I came here so that I wasn't paying taxes for bombs. It was just before Iraq, and I came to be part of an educational system that embraced a bit of variety and educated people to think. - I came on the first flight after September 11th into Auckland. At Los Angeles Airport, there were all these kids with machine guns racing around. I got off the plane in Auckland, and there was a single policeman with maybe a nightstick, And I said, 'Yeah, this is all right. (CHUCKLES) I don't see the guns. I like that, yeah.' - Right from the time they bought the farm in 2002, they had a clear goal. 22 years on, they sell all their milk around Port Chalmers and Dunedin. - Probably 30% of my milk is sold within 4km or 5km, and 95% is sold within the 16km, 17km. So we have very little money going into diesel or fuel. (EASY-GOING ACOUSTIC MUSIC) Locals are important also in terms of getting bottles back. I'm reusing the bottles and reusing them, I'm reusing them. My first customer's still getting milk, my third customer's still getting milk. This is from 2003. Beyond that, I can't promise you who's who, but many of them have been around for years and years and years. - It might be a small farm, but it's now providing a living for another member of the family. (RELAXING ACOUSTIC MUSIC) (BIRDS CHIRP) - In 2007, another member of the MacNeille family moved from the USA to the small family farm near Dunedin. Like his father, his name too is Merrall. - So I'm Merrall III, my father's Merrall Junior, and my grandfather was Merrall, and then my great-grandmother's maiden name was Merrall, I think is how this works. (CHUCKLES) - After a stint as a jeweller and then trying to grow roses, he's found success. - I started trying to go cut flowers. The first couple of years, I didn't produce very much, but I'm gradually getting somewhere. So all of these kind of old beds that have gotten completely infested with couch grass, I need to kind of revitalise, but then they'll be` you know, they'll be good for a number of years. And I'm putting perennials in here so they'll just stay in for the next like three, four or five years, and I won't have to do anything other than weed it. I think probably the most tiring and the things that have made my back hurt the most would be harvesting things like Iceland poppies. Usually I do it just down to my hands and knees, because otherwise, you're back hurts really badly. Things like sunflowers are actually really heavy, so when you get, you know, a big armload of them, it can be pretty hard going. When I was first starting, I was financing myself as I went. So there were certainly times, any given thing that I might need, we'll say support netting, you know that then I would say, 'Oh gosh, can I spend $100?' And of course you need it right then, not in a few months. I am making a living, relatively modest. I think probably definitely not paying myself minimum wage, but I do work a lot of hours. Work is a strong word. I usually say when I'm going out that I'm going to go pretend to work. Sometimes, it is actually work. The view is always beautiful. Of course, views always come with good wind as well. So we get, you know, all kinds of nice mist and things like that. It's been really nice to have a greenhouse, because of course, the weather can be foul here on occasion, and so it makes it much easier to get motivated that I can go work in the greenhouse, be out of the rain. I came to New Zealand partly because my parents had moved here. They had bought this place and it was a place that I could live. Where I was living was in southern Vermont, and the winters are cold, which means that the vast majority of the roses that one can grow die over the winter. A big part of it, too, was that I would be able to grow the various roses that I actually wanted to. (TRANQUIL MUSIC) - They might be working on the same small farm, but the two Merralls like to go about their business without too much chatter. - Oh, we fight like cats and dogs most of the time, most of the time. - (CHUCKLES) - There are a few disagreements, it's fair to say, yeah. We do have different spheres of influence. Where we intersect is water, and that can be... tricky. You know, the water and trough that's overflowing or the... Yeah, there's a lot of things that can go wrong. Cows that step on pipes, which means all the water went somewhere. - (CHUCKLES) - Yeah. - And I guess, occasionally, I need the tractor. - Yeah, occasionally. - Every once in a while. (LAUGHS) - I didn't move to the end of the road to talk all the time. Merrall walks by, I say, 'Where y'at?' And he says, 'Is that you, Poppie?' or something like that. - Yep, that's about right. (LAUGHS) - That's kind of a big part of our daily conversation, I'd say... - (LAUGHS) - ...until he says, 'Oh, the watering trough is running over.' You know, there's, there's some stuff comes up, but otherwise, we're not talking a lot, which is good. I like that. - These two bushes are ones that I planted this year, so I'm not actually cutting any flowers off them unless there might be one from the last flush that I might grab if it's nice, but I'm mainly just growing them for the next year. At the moment, they have spider mites that are just getting rolling, so I'm taking off lower leaves to get rid of some of them, and then I'm deadheading everything else. In here, it's less work then the things I have to do outside, because I do a slightly better job of keeping on top of all of the weeds. And when they're small, they're a lot easier to deal with. You know, I keep things in here a little bit tidier, so overall, it's a bit less work. Working in the greenhouse is always fun, except for on the hottest days, we could say, (LAUGHS) and then I usually do things outside instead. It is surprisingly pleasant, and it is, because it's usually fairly productive in here, also very gratifying seeing how nicely everything's doing, because things are usually doing pretty well. - The dairy farm is prospering now, but a few years ago, it was threatened with closure, till the local community rallied to save it. ('COLD AS ICE' BY FOREIGNER) (READS) "Additional tax refunds. Click the link to..." # You're as cold as ice... # Not clicking the link. (CLEARS THROAT) VOICEOVER: If something seems suss, we're here to help 24/7 on 0800 ASB FRAUD. (GENTLE ACOUSTIC MUSIC) - The MacNeille family's expanded their Dunedin dairy farm in recent years. They've bought another property close by, where they graze their breeding stock. - There's 36, all told here. 25 females. And of that group, they're all breeding age. They'll calve over here, and then I haul them back. And usually, if I haul one or two back, I'll dry off a couple just to keep` keep the numbers a little lower. There's tons of grass over here and not that much grass at home. - Merrall's checking if any of the cows are ready to calf. - There's nobody close at the moment. If there's someone close, I would be here every day checking, saying, 'Where are you?' Because at a certain point, they disappear, and they'll go up above, or they'll tuck around somewhere. And I said, 'Oh, I know who you are. Where are you hiding that calf?' That's the` (LAUGHS) But I find them, yeah. - But a few years ago, they faced complete disaster. - We had not a milker, but a bred heifer test positive for tuberculosis, and it had been creeping in, coming this direction 2016... You're a good girl. ...so MPI came through and they said, 'You can't sell milk for five years.' Five years? OK. (LAUGHS) That gets tricky, yeah. - But their customers wanted them to keep supplying milk, and they rallied around. Tess Trotter was one of those who led the rescue effort. - Hey, Merrall. - Oh, hello, Tess. Yeah. - Merrall's plan was to send his cows off on the truck. He just couldn't imagine how he was gonna be able to feed them during the hiatus, and money just sort of started coming in and along with a lot of other offers of help as well. (BOTH LAUGH) - One of the most successful money-raising ventures was held at the Port Chalmers Town Hall. - One of the things we did was put on a big banquet, and that was a lot of work, but there was just amazing generosity. We had wine and beer and meat and vegetables all donated. We had musicians happy to come and play. - ALEX: It was a phenomenal experience. They stepped in and rescued us, really. And the banquet that Tess organised, it was like a wedding. It was just amazing, in the town hall with lots of people and... lots of good food. The children that I taught at school came and cooked and waited and made music. - They raised enough money for the farm to be converted from producing raw milk to pasteurised milk, and that ensured its future. - We were faced at shutdown with no money to build stuff. It would have been impossible without people pitching in. Having spent most of my life in the United States, where it wouldn't have happened necessarily, um... it was a nice surprise. I'll just say a nice surprise, yeah. (TRANQUIL PIANO MUSIC) (BIRDS CHIRP) - Now both Merralls ` known within the family is Merrall Milk and Merrall Flowers ` are thriving and at the easy pace they both like to work at. - MERRALL FLOWERS: The busiest day of the week is definitely Friday. I pick all day long. I often have a couple of people that help me as well, just to kind of try to get done before the wee hours of the morning, and then I just continue on until I've gotten everything organised, got all the arrangements done, packed up the van, which can be anywhere from first thing in the spring and last thing in the fall, I'll be done by, like, 8 or 9 at night. If it's the middle of summer, sometimes, I'm up all night, but I try to avoid that these days, but certainly well past midnight on most days, um, and then I go to the farmers' market. I do that, I come home and take a nap. I make almost all my money at the farmers' market, probably a good kind of two-thirds, three-quarters. There's a lot of nice people that come chat to me. It's awfully nice seeing people actually get excited about the things that you have. Thank you so much. It's pretty amazing, really. There's incredible cherries, incredible stone fruits, beautiful vegetables, you know, all through the year. It's a good place. Are you all set? - Yes. - It's a civilised place to live. I miss things at home, for sure ` the trees and the snow and the ice. Whole milk, right? - Yes. - Yeah, OK. You spend the first seven years kind of feeling homesick, and then you realise that you've built an entire community around the place where you live. - I do think it was a good decision to come here. My parents and my sister are here, so it's nice to have family around. Dunedin is a wonderful place to work outside because it's cool most of the year. The winters are not that cold. Where I grew up, well, it was bitterly cold, you could say, and there would be snow all winter. (COW MOOS) - I have a nice relationship with the local community... and that's something that we didn't have where our last farm was. They were every one for themselves, in a way, and here, it's been good. We gave up US passports, did citizenship. Yeah, we're` we're not moving. We're not even travelling, I mean. (CHUCKLES) That's for sure. - Next time ` - When I came here, I didn't know one apple from another. I didn't have a clue. - he spent 20 years creating an organic orchard... - When we first tried sending apples off for export, we got quite a good price. - ...but age catches up with all of us. - They're both in their '80s, and so it was a good excuse for us to come back and help take over the family business. - That's next time on Hyundai Country Calendar.