Opening the gates to dairy farming

The cows at Waihau Rd, Patoka, await Open Gates, letting the public onto the farm to see how dairying is done. Photo / Duncan Brown

Award-winning Hawke's Bay dairy farmers Nick and Nicky Dawson don't necessarily see a lot of visitors. They are, after all, close to 60km from town, as the car drives.

But they are expecting a few next week as their property off Waihau Rd, near Patoka and northwest of Napier, is one of 40 throughout the country opened up to the public in a Fonterra initiative to show what dairy farming is really all about, and negate a few concerns of the dirty dairying kind.

Open Gates they're calling it and it happens on December 10, but so there are no surprises with numbers on the day intending visitors need to register at www.opengates.co.nz.

The couple milk almost 400 cows on 220 hectares, although they had 366ha at the time they won the Hawke's Bay Farm Environment Awards' dairy sector award in 2011 and 2012.

There were three streams through the property, part of the playground of the couple's three children, one now at university and two at boarding school.

It leaves the adventures now to such people as Richie Frantzetis, son of calf rearer Rebecca Selwood and a 5-year-old new entrant among the 50-plus pupils at nearby Patoka School where Nicky Dawson works as a part-time teacher.

Mr Dawson mixes farming with being vice-president of Hawke's Bay Federated Farmers, a member of the Hastings District Council's Rural Community Board, chairman of TBFree Hawke's Bay and being part of the Hawke's Bay Bio-diversity Accord.

They've been farming the property about 15 years, since moving from Taranaki where they were sharemilking at Okato and Rahotu, while Nicky Dawson taught at Pungarehu, where among her pupils was one Beauden Barrett, aged about 8, although she says, shyly: "You don't need to put that in."

On the farm in Hawke's Bay they planted well over 1000 plants to stop sediment entering the streams and nutrient runoff entering the waterways.

They also closed-off 6ha which would become too wet in winter, and it would act as a sediment trap, the area being planted with native and exotic trees.

After winning the dairy sector award at the Farm Environment Awards for a second time, Mr Dawson said that despite Hawke's Bay's limited amount of dairy farming the region had, like others, struggled with the "dirty dairying" label.

But he said: "Farming has to be profitable. You have to look after the resources you've got.

"As food producers we have to be accountable to consumers and to the environment," he said then. "I think most dairy farmers have pulled their socks up in recent years."

Nevertheless, dairying developed in the area, from what Nicky Dawson says was a "handful" of dairy farms to about 15 in the region.

Mr Dawson says there have been misconceptions about dairying, and the tag "dirty dairying" doesn't seem to be heard as much as it once was, although it could be because dairying is a relatively small player in Hawke's Bay's rural economy.

"There are people who only hear what they want to hear, but I think people are now more understanding," he says.