('COUNTRY CALENDAR' THEME) - The best of New Zealand's rural heartland... - A large Wairarapa station has cracked the secret to no-wool sheep. - I just thought, 'God, we've just got to make farming a bit simpler.' The sheep are just gonna be in the paddock more ` which they should be. I think it's a win-win for the sheep and for us. - They're also running a thriving rural cafe and a chocolate factory. - We're a bean-to-bar chocolate maker. Captions by Tom Clarke. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2024 (PEACEFUL MUSIC) - Hey, guys. All good? (SMACKS LIPS) You beauts. - At Homewood Station on the Wairarapa coast, Andy Tatham has a unique set of wheels to get around his farm. - This is quite a big place, and there's always something that needs fixing. My trusty side-by-side here, I've called it a PRV, which goes back to my pig hunting days when I was a little bit younger and fitter, and we called it the pig recovery vehicle. It's a colloquial term and it seems to have stuck. - Andy loves his dogs and the stock side of farming, and he's always had a keen interest in breeding sheep, in particular finding strong hybrid mixes that make the most of unique traits. - Just really developed a love of sheep breeding. I used to breed them with my late uncle, just Romneys in those days, lovely woolly Romneys. All good? - Yeah. All good. - Yeah. You happy just to bring those down? - Yep. I'll go and get them. Bri's down there, going to turn them in for us. - Andy has several staff to help with the work across the 2400ha station. - We just breed terminal rams now, which is like a meat breed. We're not worried about the maternal side. There's plenty of guys out there doing a great job on that. My base breed is a Poll Dorset-Texel. I've found that's a pretty good cross. - But Andy's taken his trait selection one more step. He's actively trying to breed out woolly sheep. Once the backbone of hill country farming, these days, there's some new thinking. - As breeders, we've done a really good job. We've got our sheep very fertile, very woolly. They are very productive, but I think there's a lot of work that goes with that production. And probably the one point which really hit home to me was that if a sheep is not growing a big fleece of wool, it's got a lot more energy available to put into fighting worms or milking or just growing. That'll do. Good boy, good boy. I thought, gee, that does make sense to me. Good boy, good boy. (SHEEP BLEAT) (WHISTLES) - I'm looking for basically the less wool, the better. There's two fellas coming here. So they're all bald underneath, which is a great start, and very bald around the back end, which means they're just not going to get daggy. I'm really just breeding for meself. I just wanna have a really easy care system. - The Tatham family's been a big part of the Homeward Valley since arriving here in 1877. Andy's spent most of his life here, raising three sons with wife Jan. - We've been farming here together since in 1994 when we got married, and we were first farming under the family trust, and then I think in '97, we started farming in our own partnership. So it's been going a wee while. - While Jan's professional life was in accounting and governance, But she's now full time at home, supporting two of their sons, who were running businesses from the farm. - We've got three sons. The two oldest are currently living on the property, and they've both set up their own businesses from this as a home base, um, neither of them in farming, which is interesting, but amazing that we've got them living out here and they want to be here. - Yeah, pretty cool. - Um, yeah, it is cool. - Eldest son Paddy runs a farm-style cafe, and the revived station garden provides much of the fresh produce required. - For me, having the opportunity to have our own vegetables and our garden and herbs and all those other sorts of things, there's a real quality aspect to it. Got these little, uh, tomatillos here. They're like Cape gooseberry and a little husk, keeps them safe from insects. Beautiful plump tomato on the inside, turns into a beautiful salsa verde. I used to work in a cafe in Wellington, and six days a week, you'd be getting produce delivered to your door, and, I mean, I won't lie ` a lot of the time, I wish I could do that, but you get a lot from having it in the garden. It's satisfying just to know that you're not spending money on it, but also able to grow it and then feed your community and your customers. It's really nice. The farm cafe is in a former church, which required extensive renovations. Setting up a brand-new eatery in a remote location was a massive undertaking. - It was absolute, um, chaos, stress. You got an old building, you go. 'Yep, that's sweet. We'll just do the add-on,' but probably the renovation of the church cost us a lot more than we ever envisaged, you know. You have to adhere to the rules, so you just got to go with the flow sometimes. The Storeroom Cafe's, managed by Paddy and his partner, Alex, and the project had them on a steep learning curve. - This is my first job in hospitality. I worked and studied as a speech and language therapist, worked for four years in Wellington was looking for some kind of a change, just didn't know what it was going to be. This opportunity came up, and it was too exciting to say no, and, yeah, here we are. (CHUCKLES) - Part of when we kind of talked about doing this business was that if we're going to do it out here, it really makes sense to have it attached to the farm and be able to serve our own lamb on the menu. So all we'd use to flavour our lamb, it's got a really simple herb oil ` bit a parsley, a bit of thyme, bay leaves, rosemary and then salt and pepper. - While Paddy has two other staff members, he also has the full support of mum Jan, who's a dab hand at baking and prep work at the cafe. - Uh, yes. There we go. - You know you can't plan life sometimes. You've just got to try things. Otherwise, you just stay in the same place. You know, life really does begin at the end of your comfort zone. Take a leap of faith and make the jump. - And on top of the home-grown food on offer, youngest son Jonty creates sweet treats in his on-farm chocolate factory (RELAXING ACOUSTIC MUSIC) - Homewood Station near Riversdale Beach in Wairarapa is a huge block running from the mountains down to the coast. And while owner Andy Tatham prefers working with stock, his right-hand man, Aaron Tomlin, takes care of everything else without four legs. - Some people are more suited to machinery than stock, and I was definitely suited to machinery; sheep do in my head in. I do everything that Andy doesn't wanna do, really. He looks after the stock. He does it really well, but anything with machinery, cropping, fertiliser, any sort of projects we have going on, I'll take care of all that. - Their different skills make them a great team, and one thing they do have in common is a love of timber. Andy planted many exotic trees 30 years ago, and now they're at maturity, Aaron's working on felling them and milling them into timber. - Years ago, before I came along, Andy could see that there was a use in untanalised timber. He was real keen on it ` macrocarpas, acacia blackwoods. Now they're coming to the size where they're millable, but a lot of the plots are too small to get a contractor and they're not interested, so we decided to get a mill and start producing our own timber, because we use a lot of timber ourselves, and timber prices were just going up, so it sort of made sense. It's a swing-blade mill. You set it up, and you run down one way and it'll do one cut. You flip it over and it'll run back, and then it comes off with a board at the end. We can do anything from 12x5 right down to 1 inch, and we've cut a lot of smaller boards, sort of floorboards. We do a hell of a lot of 6x2. - Leaving timber in sheds to dry used to take years, so Aaron decided to build a kiln. They're pretty simple sort of setups. All they do is dry wood. We made a small one, enough to fit a pallet or two of timber in there. We used all our own mac for the framing, used plywood. For insulation, we just used wool. Wool's not worth anything. We just stuffed it all in there. I'm just using a simple household dehumidifier and a little heater and just a thermostat. Once it stops drawing moisture out, it's pretty well done. We used a lot of timber on the farm for railings, for yards, all that sort of stuff, and it's really versatile sort of timber on the farm. - Homewood station has lots of old farm buildings, and Jan Tatham has used her flair for interior design to revive several of them as homestays. - This gorgeous little building was the cook's cottage. Because the buildings get to a point where you either knock them down cos they're getting really run down, or you love them, and Andy (CHUCKLES) are the sort of people that love them, unfortunately. We currently have another B&B that we're just getting started with. It's actually the original garage. We've tried to keep some of the special features that make it a garage, and we've repurposed things like the old stairs from our homestead. We've put in them to create the bedroom. And there's a beautiful painting on the wall and there, which Andy's great-grandparents', and their vintage car parked outside that garage, which is really quite special. - But one of the larger houses has been retired from the B&B pool. Youngest son Jonty's moved in and turned it into a chocolate factory. - We're based here in the old family home. I actually grew up in this living room. This is where we used to have dinner as a family and watch TV. Growing up, we did a lot of work on the farm, the three brothers, and I guess I enjoyed aspects of it, but I knew deep down it wasn't really for me. And as much as I wish I could say to my dad that I want to take over the farm, I just can't. So I think the best that we really can do in that situation is if you're gonna do something different, then give it a bloody good go, and that's what I'm trying to do, I guess. - Jonty makes his chocolate from scratch, starting by grinding dried cacao beans. - My business is called Lucid Chocolatier. We're a bean-to-bar chocolate maker, meaning that basically we start with the raw beans, we process them all in-house, and we finish with bars of chocolate. We're very premium brand, and we focus all of our sourcing of ingredients exclusively from within Peru. And as you can see here, this is a bean. And if we crush it, we get the shell. This is a waste product of chocolate making. And then after that, what we've got is the nib, and this is what is used to make chocolate. Standard dark chocolate is a combination of this nib plus sugar, and that's it. We're just sorting through our raw beans. This is the first step of the process. Last year I was very lucky to have the opportunity to go to Peru and visit in person some of the farmers that we get the beans from. I made a point to bring the chocolate that I'd made with their specific beans. That was a very, very special experience. At the moment, we're tempering our chocolate. Essentially, what this is going to do is give us a great shine and a good snap on our finished bars. We've tipped it on the bench to sort of bring the temperature down close to the working temperature. As it cools, it gets a lot more thick, a lot more viscous ` so going by temperature but also by feel. We do speciality high-end chocolate bars. We have about 20 total. Then, wholesale-wise, we also sell bonbons, we sell desserts, but the bread and butter is definitely the chocolate bars, and that's what sort of put us on the map. As well as our wholesale and retail, we have a shop that's quite handy to us just down the road. It's been good having Paddy to support me like that. And it's also been great ` we did a dinner last year for Wellington on a Plate. We've been able to do some events together, so hopefully we'll do some more of that in the future. - As well as supporting each other, they also repurpose the by-products. Jan, working with Aaron's wife, Nicola, has found a use for the discarded cacao husks. - We've discovered that we can actually make a beautiful hand scrub from it, and it's a great way to use his leftover products, you know. What else would you do with the husks? It's quite a dry scrub. It does have oil in it, obviously, just to hold it together. There is a cacao husks, which is the predominant ingredient. Then we've included some cane sugar, colloidal oatmeal. We've got some beautiful apricot kernel oil. It's got a bit of honey powder in it for it's antiseptic ` you know, if you've got some cuts on your hands. For this particular one, we use peppermint oil, so you get this beautiful scent of chocolate peppermint when you have finished washing your hands. What you do is basically just scoop some out in your hand. It obviously looks quite dry. Add water to it, rub it around in your hands, and it gradually turns into some lovely soapy scrub. Work it in as much as you like, rinse it off, and you left with hands that feel very, very smooth and smell amazingly of peppermint and chocolate. Nothing better than that. - And of course, their products have the perfect retail outlet in their on-farm cafe. - Two posh toasts. (SERENE MUSIC) - On the dry Wairarapa coast, the Tathams have farmed at Homewood Station for generations. Andy Tatham's at the helm these days, and he's been forging a different path lately after years of farming woolly sheep. - We've got 5500 ewes in total here. We used to have 8000. They were a lot of work. And like a lot of farmers, I was a little bit disenchanted with the way wool was heading. Like everyone else, I said, 'Don't worry. It'll come back. It'll come back.' And then in the end, I thought, 'I'm not sure whether it is going to come back.' So I made the call that I was gonna head a no-wool way. - In order to breed no-wool sheep, Andy's farm advisor suggested they look at a UK breed called exlana. - The difference between an exlana and a Wiltshire basically is the exlana is a hair sheep which doesn't actually shed its wool. It's just got a thick skin. - The exlana of genetics should reduce Andy's farm work, minimising, shearing, drenching and dagging. which suits Andy, as two years ago, he was diagnosed with cancer. - I just went into the doctor to have my annual health check, and he started poking me and prodding me ` 'Oh, we're going to need to do a bit of surgery on you.' And it certainly sat me on my arse for a bit, but I'm in remission, which is great, but my energy levels are probably not what they used to be, but I'm very grateful. And, yeah, just, uh, still trucking on, still farming, so that's great. - During his months of treatment, Andy could see things needed to change. - I did a lot of thinking when I was down in Wellington, and, um, I just thought, 'God, we've just got to make farming a bit simpler.' I just think we can make a lot of cost savings and have happier sheep, and I think it's gonna be good. - Andy's now fully on board with no-wool sheep, actively breeding the exlana genetics into this flock with artificial insemination. - We've selected 200 ewes out of our recorded stud flock. We've gone through and picked the barest sheep we can find ` so there's no belly wool, nothing up the sides. They are a half exlana and a half Poll Dorset-Texel, but a lot of them are already pretty much bald, which is pretty exciting for me, cos they won't need to be shorn, and they don't seem to need drenching either, so it's a win-win. - Each season, Andy selects his strongest ewes, and the AI technicians set up in the wool shed. It's a specialist process, but the whole team is on hand to help. - It's quite labour-intensive, but obviously he's the main man doing the AI. He works on about 50 an hour, hopefully, if we have a good run. Good girl. - With sheep artificial insemination, the only option is really laparoscopic AI, which is what this is. So we're injecting semen right into the horn of the uterus so the semen doesn't have to travel very far. - Over time, the new genetics will help make Andy's flock lower-maintenance and lower-cost. - I mean, farming, just our costs are continually rising, whether it's petrol, whether it's rates, whether it's insurance. I see it's an area where we can make some real savings, and the sheep are just gonna be in the paddock more ` which they should be. There shouldn't be in the yards being crutched, being drenched, being shorn. I think it's a win-win for the sheep and for us. - Next door, the Storeroom Cafe is attracting visitors from near and far. - How's the harvesting going ` all done and dusted? - All done and dusted. - Yeah? - Currently open Thursday through Sunday, doing breakfast, lunch and dinner, depending on the day. Certainly the hardest thing is trying to figure out how many people are gonna come and how much food to prepare. So when it's busy, we typically need three people on food. I'll generally stay in the cooking area of the kitchen and Mahina will help with salads. As it gets busier, I'll get Mahina to come and help me, and Mum will do the salads around the corner. - Sometimes we have clashes of ideas cos I'm not a chef. So I suggest things, and Paddy goes, 'That's never gonna work.' I really don't like doing service. Really, that's not my thing. I'll do it if I have to. I really don't like the pressure. Got the salad. Do you wan them running? - You can hold them for now. We're just doing the frozen prawns first cos they've been waiting longer. - Jan has tapped into infusing gin with some of the produce on the farm as well. We've got damson gin from damson plums on the farm. We make a classic Damson Darling cocktail with that ` nice and refreshing, yeah. - And now they've established the weekly routine of the cafe, the Storeroom's branching out into special events. - Our first event is all locked and loaded for the end of the month, and it is a wedding, yeah. So we're very excited to host the ceremony on the front lawn with the reception to follow and, yeah, just see how it works having a whole event all in one place, nice and compact and, yeah, see how it goes. - We're really lucky that we have two of our sons living at home and doing their businesses. You just assume when you're farmers that you will only get your sons living near you if they are farmers. (INDISTINCT CHATTER, LAUGHTER) - I think it's a huge credit to Jan and, um` - I don't know about that. - It's a team effort. - And I think it would be fair to say the journey isn't always easy. - Yeah. - We've had some major ups and downs, and hard work, obviously, very hard work ` and long hours. (CHUCKLES) - Been plenty of that. - Anyway, um, it's all good fun. It's good fun. (EASY-GOING MUSIC RESOLVES) - Next time ` - Geoff has a certain type of madness, I think... - (SNICKERS) - ...a certain type of being driven. - I'm very passionate about growing bananas. My passion started right back after I left school. - That passion has spread to growing all sorts of tropical fruit. It's a nice big flower. Pretty happy about that one. - That's next time on Hyundai Country Calendar.