Farming for good – Judith Rowe’s physical, mental, and financial journey

Judith and Kim Rowe farm deer, beef and some sheep on a 460 hectare piece of land in Upper Stanley Brook which the Stanley Brook and Forsyth Gully streams flow through. They moved south from Kim’s family farm up north and bought the property fifteen years ago when Kim’s father passed away. Judith and Kim love it in the South Island and were taken by the beauty of the piece of land they now call home, and by the good work already put in by the previous owners.

“The previous owners had really looked after the land – they’d planted plenty of trees on the property, planted and fenced alongside waterways and on highly erodable soils to protect the streams.”

Judith and Kim have picked up where the previous owners left off – farming successfully while working hard to look after the environment – planting natives in gullies and silt traps;  creating a wetland; fencing areas that are highly erodableand planting poplar poles. But the Rowe’s have taken a few rather huge steps further – taking on the massive challenge of tackling weeds and pests on their QEII block, held community events, run sessions with school children, become an active member of the Tapawera propogation group… and more.

Her dog, Raffa, is pictured below in an area of planting with a silt trap in a gully not far from the wetland. These initiatives, which take considerable work, time, commitment, money and organisation, have been established to reduce the amount of sediment, phosphate and other pollutants reaching the river.

The wetland construction has had the support of Fish and Game, NZ Landcare Trust, and MCC, which Judith is grateful for.

The farm has the most significant area of native bush in the Top of the South Island. The previous owners had protected it with a QEII covenant but when the Rowe’s took the farm on, Old Man’s Beard was rampant. Large vines made the bush almost impenetrable, and some of the large trees were dying.

Michael North came and did a survey about 10 years ago looking at remnant bush areas in the Tasman District and the report was picked up by Kaitiaki, a restoration company.

“Andy ward on behalf of Kaitiaki, approached us and said, look, we could get some funding to start a restoration project. We decided to apply for as much funding as we could get so we got $120,000 through the Department of Conservation Community Fund, and initially we had to match that with $60,000. So at that point, we made a commitment that we would spend $20,000 a year on environmental improvement on our farm.”

Kaitiaki then prepared a restoration plan for the main QEII block, which the Rowe’s did some work and put in some money over the first three years, and additional funding was given through the Stevenson Fund, available to QEII Trust owners.

The initial work was to try and save the big trees, and  the intact bush. So the first sweep through was to cut the big vines. And then when we got some sort of control, then we can start working outwards from there. You want to keep going because you can see the progress. But you can only do it if there’s surplus funds in the farm. It’s a huge $20,000 contribution from us a year. At that stage, farming was going  well for us and that money was available.

The government then went about identifying  additional significant native areas across the country. So three more smaller areas of bush were identified on the farm, two of   which the Rowe’s have already fenced off. Then, following Covid, the Tasman District Council offered the Rowe’s a labour force for weed control for two years in the three areas through the Jobs for Nature programme.

They have ongoing help from the Motueka OMB weedbusting volunteers who come on an annual basis for a mornings work, this year 10 have been out there, and they are highly productive, and this has very much helped ease the load.

Now the big vines are gone and there’s been a sweep through for little seedlings for two years, the job is to try to keep on top of that seed bank of little plants.

“Everybody loves cutting the big vines, but the follow up work pulling out or spraying the juveniles, continues on. That’s about where we’re at with it. So you just have to keep going. If you don’t keep going the seedlings form a cobweb over the understory and gradually smother it.”

Judith is driven to carry on, because as she says “That’s what you do if you own a piece of land. You’re trying to do the best thing by it.”

However the weight on Judith’s shoulders shows. At times, it is a very large burden and weight of responsibility to bear.

“Sometimes you think of the futility of what you’re doing, because the minute you stop, it’s going to come back, it’s just going to come back. The physical, financial, mental pressure is huge”.

It’s not just the Old Mans Beard, possums have returned to the farm with a vengeance, and they currently seem to be spiraling out of control. Since possum control was ramped down when the area was no longer considered a TB risk area. Judith comments:

“So we’ve had more Stephenson funding for traps and I’ve got two young boys doing trapping in the native bush and up the creek. They put down 70 traps and they’re maybe catching about 30 or 40 possums per night…. so we as a landowner might do what’s needed on our place, but you’ve got these pests coming in from the surrounding pine forest.”QE2 have also helped fund the construction of a 3.4km deer fence around the block, this year, to eradicate deer and pigs.

When she drives around the farm she does notice the good her and Kim have done but she also sees all there still is to do. Sometimes it feels to her like she’s bitten off more than she can chew, particularly as her and her husband come out the other side of a long drought.

“We’ve got this big project trying to improve our environmental footprint. There are things we need to do to up skill on the farm to do with phosphate runoff and nitrate runoff off the hills and taking areas out of production, which are highly erodible and planting them with natives. And then we’ve got the work that we need to do on the rest of the farm – the actual farming , animal husbandry and cropping.”A big part of what they do on the farm is farming deer for velvet. They also have cattle, sheep and some forestry. The Rowe’s have around 1000 deer.

When farming for velvet, the antler is allowed to grow for around 60 days from mid August each year. It is then cut and frozen, then shipped overseas (mainly to China who then on sell to Korea) where it’s dried and sold for traditional Chinese medicine and as a healthy functional food. The velvet is thought to have regenerative properties.

The Rowe’s produce four tonne of velvet a year. They are not the sort of farmers who carry on doing things the way they’ve always been done. They take a progressive, entrepreneurial approach to farming, and as a result they’ve seen impressive production increases. They’ve set up an artificial insemination breeding programme on the next door property, and have increased velvet production significantly:

“There’s a skill to farming and working with deer, which is learnt over time, and patience and good stockmanship are needed. We also have to be certified to be able to cut velvet”.

Because of the farming decisions they’ve made, although it’s been a challenging year in the drought, they’re still farming profitably because of the price they get for velvet, and because they haven’t got a high number of sheep they’re not impacted by the demise of the sheep industry.

On the converse Judith thinks we’re still going to see more problems for those farming predominantly sheep as a result of the drought. With lambing coming up its likely the ewes are in poor condition because of little grass growth and may not be able to feed their lambs properly. Let’s hope for a great spring with which will make it easier for everyone.

Despite the pressure Judith feels, and the ever growing list of jobs and requirements Judith has to juggle, on top of just managing the farming business, she still finds joy and satisfaction in what’s she achieving, and what a special place they have:

“When it all feels a bit too much I go and sit up in the bush at the far end, and hand-weed in an area of little omb seedlings. And I can hear the birds, and you know, I think, yeah, I know why I’m doing this. This is amazing. And you take anybody in there and they go, this is amazing.”

Source - https://motuekacatchment.org.nz/farming-for-good-judith-rowes-physical-mental-and-financial-journey/