Allan Crafar and his family are selling up. Photo / Tracey Robinson

Allan Crafar and his family are selling up. Photo / Tracey Robinson

In rural Reporoa, a winding 45-minute drive up unsignposted roads from Rotorua, the Crafars gather for lunch in their single-storey farmhouse. The fare is simple, but ample: Pickled onions, bread and jam and, of course - given this is a family where dairy flows in the veins - unpasteurised milk fresh from the cow.

At the table sit family patriarch Allan, clad in shorts despite the winter chill, and his brother Frank, who's wearing dark glasses to cover a genetic defect that has left him 90 per cent blind. Allan's wife Beth has put the spread together, and her youngest daughter Lyn has just returned after spending the morning tending to calves.

Everyone is heavily into dairying to the exclusion of all else, says Allan. "We don't drink, we don't smoke, and we haven't had time to play sport. We gave that up when we become serious. It's not a hobby. It's our life and our religion and our work."

Then he cracks a smile: "I've ended up in the greatest job in New Zealand - I've 20,000 girlfriends, I get to play with tits all my life, and my wife doesn't get jealous."

Despite the estimated $35 million-worth in land titles shared between the people sitting around the table, this is a modest home. The sole luxury on display is a Sky television decoder, and even that was only bought recently.

Allan has a hacking cough. "The doctors says it's lung congestion brought on by stress - but I don't believe it," he says.

The Crafars, or rather their farming company CraFarms, principally run by Allan, Beth and Frank, have been at the forefront of the debate about "dirty dairying" - an unwarranted title, say the Crafars.

Green co-leader Russel Norman said last year in Parliament that the repeated prosecutions for effluent discharges by CraFarms had led to them becoming colloquially known as "CrapFarm". Last month CraFarms appeared before the courts a fourth time, and was convicted a fourth time.

But while the Crafars' brushes with environmental regulation are well-known, it is a deeper malaise that has led to the ruin of this proud farming family.

The recession, added to pressures to improve environmental practices, has left them with nothing but bad headlines to show after 40 years of cud, shit and tears.

The Crafars, after breakneck expansion in the 1990s funded by large-scale borrowing, are - until the hammer falls on forced sales in the very near future - the largest privately owned dairy farming outfit in the country.

Early last year the family should probably have featured on the National Business Review Rich List. Fonterra had just paid a record $7.90 per kilo of milk solids, far eclipsing the previous record of $5.33 set the previous year. With good times ahead - a payout of $7 plus was forecast for the next seven years - one source put the value of this modest, family-run, empire at $400m.