Stop me if you've heard this yarn before? Ok, so you haven't? So here goes:
A recent interview on The Country with South Otago sheep and beef farmer (and former Silver Fern Farms director) David Shaw about the renaissance of goat farming, got me thinking about my own less-than-pleasurable experience
with the little blighters in the 1980s.
David and I are alumni of the Dip Ag class of 1982 at Lincoln College, as it was known back then. He reckoned our renowned animal science lecturer, Dr. Alex Familton, alerted him to the prospects of goat farming in his final lecture of the year. David's been stoically farming and breeding goats for cashmere ever since.
My cousin Billy (great name for a goat farmer) Mackay also got into goats in the 1980s as an entrepreneurial farmer looking to diversify away from sheep farming, which wasn't cutting the mustard under Rogernomics.
He subsidised his fledgling farming operation by butchering at the local Mataura freezing works and as result wasn't quite as proficient on the shearing handpiece as the other Mackay boys who were fulltime farmers. Suffice to say, no Mackay could ever be mistaken for a Fagan but we did chip the wool off to the best of our limited ability.
As a result Billy asked me to shear his goats, which was no easy task. As a method of remuneration I was offered a one quart bottle of Speight's per goat shorn or I could choose to be paid in goats in lieu of any monetary reward. Foolishly I chose the latter.
Five or six years later I would eventually gain some liquid reward for my foolish foray into farming goats, when Billy and I sat down to drown our sorrows with a crate of the amber ale, having spent the best part of the afternoon culling the remainder of our worthless joint goat herd. The Speight's wasn't the only bitter thing back then!
On a lighter note, some of the best conversations we have on our radio show are in the commercials breaks. As long as we remember to turn our microphones off, they stay largely private between the interviewers and the interviewees.
Former Black Cap Craig Cumming, a fill-in producer on occasions when he's not fronting Sky's cricket commentary, has declared himself to be the 'rain whisperer'. Craig reckons everywhere he's gone this summer to cover the cricket, it has rained.
As a shareholder in a bone-dry dairy farm at Otautau in western Southland, I'm urging Craig to turn up to a first class fixture at the picturesque Queen's Park in Invercargill. Normally summer-safe Southland has never had it so dry!
Craig sometimes amuses himself (and us) with his lunchtime texts into our show when he's on the road. A recent on-air conversation about the explosion in the cost of avocados, and what that means for yuppie Aucklanders with their crushed avocado on toast in Ponsonby cafes, elicited a terse text from Craig about the lack of class of some Aucklanders.
He reckoned the JAFA he was swimming with had no idea of swimming lane etiquette, refusing to swim in the slow lane when he had the buoyancy of a brick. He also committed the fashion crime of wearing speedos despite looking nothing like Michael Phelps and then spent most of his time in the changing room examining his form in the mirror.
What ensued was a team discussion of our glory days as swimmers. A bit like my goat farming foray, I had little to offer by way of a good work story. The best I could muster, no farming pun intended, was relating a yarn about how my father decided to save money on family holidays when we were kids by buying us a Para pool. We lived in that pool over the long hot summers northern Southland enjoyed (farmers would say endured) in the late '60s and early '70s.
Although our round pool was only 24 feet (approx. seven metres) in diameter we spent hours swimming up and down it. By the time you kicked off at one end you were almost at the other!
We were the envy of Riversdale. Dad was justly very proud of his Para pool, so much so that he built us a platform diving board that towered above our one metre-deep pool. We learnt quickly and painfully the only way to survive Dad's diving board was to dive outwards in a horizontal, rather than vertical, fashion.
OSH, Health and Safety and all that stuff didn't exist 50 years ago or Dad's diving board would've been for the high jump, quite literally. Mercifully, all four of us siblings survived. But I do wonder though, half a century on, in some of my more forgetful moments, if those head-first landings at the bottom of the Para pool might actually explain some things.
Jamie Mackay is the host of The Country which airs on Newstalk ZB and Radio Sport, 12-1pm, weekdays. jamie@thecountry.co.nz
