This year, Janet Macky has eight children at her calf club. Photo / RNZ, Ke-Xin Li
By Ke-Xin Li of RNZ
For many rural children, spring means calf club time – a much-loved tradition where children raise a young farm animal and show them off for ribbons and prizes.
In the Waikato community of Pāterangi, Janet Macky’s calf club has been going for almost four decades.
The 67-year-old still remembers every child who had joined her club, and many stayed in touch.
She spoke to a photo taken almost 30 years ago.
“This young fella is [now working] on a big, big farm, absolutely awesome with stock, bloody hopeless with machinery.
“This lady, she is an architect over Tauranga way.
“She’s a nurse, married and got one child.
“And it’s really nice when the kids keep in touch, even if they call in out of the blue.”
Macky also remembers her first calf, when she was just five years old.
“I had this black woolly calf, crossbred. I called it woolly aphis.
“I won fifth for leading, which was a white velvet cloth ribbon.
“Calf chewed the end on it. And I can remember that clear as.”
It’s a common experience for country kids to raise their own calf, but Macky’s club means “townie” children from places like Te Awamutu can also join in.
Staci Wilson was one of them, and she still helps at the farm today.
She said before joining the calf club, she had barely stepped foot on a farm.
“When I was a child and had a calf out here, every kid came lived in town, Janet opened it up for the kids at Pātarangi School to be able to have a calf.
“I moved back to the area as a mum, and we send our kids here because Janet gets them in line and they listen to her.”
“Because imagine trying to do this at home with your kid by themself, after a couple of weeks, they get sick of it.
“But here it’s social, but it’s also they get to work really hard and it’s a bit more of a competition because they sort of look at their mate’s calf and go, Oh s**t, is mine a bit dirtier than theirs?”
The club is free to join, Macky said it’s a “social but serious” activity, and it requires children to commit every day after school and some weekends, for a few months.
The commitment is one that many children are happy to make.
Twelve-year-old Hamish Sexton has been coming to the club for six years.
He said his mother is allergic to animal fur, so they cannot have pets, and he’s grateful for the opportunity Macky’s club provided him.
“It gives me responsibility and something else to love and an opportunity to have a pet.”
He’s starting the club by brushing his calf, Phoneix.
“So, I’m just brushing really hard to get all the hair out to come off because when the judges come down here [behind the forearms] and like push up, all the loose hair will come out.”
Staci Wilson’s son, Loki Hanley, is raising his fourth calf at Janet’s club, and he still gets to see some of the bovines he helped raise.
“I’ve always just liked the Herefords and the different types of beef breeds.
“Last year, I had a calf called Danger Zone.
“She was a Jersey calf, and she got a very bad, infected ear.
“So I had to get a boy Hereford, Janet’s leftover calf.
“I ended up getting some pretty good ribbons. Its name was Lasagna.”
At the club, the children learn about every aspect of their animal’s life.
Twelve-year-old Jade Guise told me everything about her calf, Toblerone.
“She was born on the 13th of July, and she is a Friesian Jersey crossbreed.
“And she drinks 4.5 litres of milk a day with water, grass, and hay.
“She’s had 5-in-1 vaccine, pour on for worms, and vex for Lepto.
“She can’t eat the whole avocado tree, rhododendron, and tutu trees.”
After about 40 years running her calf club, Macky is planning to retire, and she hopes someone will take up the baton.
She’s loved seeing kids and calves growing up together.
“If a child’s got a little bit of a learning disability, especially those children, to see them grow with their calf, it’s amazing.
“It changes them. The parents and the teachers have noticed the change in them.
“By doing something that they wouldn’t usually have the chance to do, they pick the calf, they name it, they teach it to lead, they groom it, we wash it before the group days.
“So they get really involved, and at the end, when we let them go, there’s tears.”
- RNZ