Double reason for 150 celebrations
Heavy soils that allow a North Otago farm to hang on longer in drought have kept a family on the land since 1864, reports Rob Tipa.
The Century Farm and Station Awards in Lawrence last month was a special landmark for sesquicentennial farm owners Bob and Nancy Allan, of Calton Hill, near Oamaru.
Not only were they celebrating 153 years of continuous family ownership of their property, but coincidentally the awards dinner fell on the same day as their golden wedding anniversary.
The event turned into a double celebration with their four daughters arriving from Auckland, Christchurch and Oamaru and their bridesmaid, Ainsley Webb, also present to celebrate the Webb family’s century of fruit-growing in Central Otago.
‘‘We had our bridesmaid sitting with us so it was quite an amazing weekend really,’’ Nancy says.
In keeping with the spirit of the occasion, Bob dug out and wore his old wedding tie, which Nancy reckons was so old it had actually come back into fashion.
Bob says the awards gave him a better appreciation of the challenges farming families had endured to keep their farms in family ownership.
Families shared some emotional stories of the hardships their ancestors had been through that were enough to bring people to tears, he says.
The Allan family attended the inaugural Century Farm Awards in 2006 when they received a brass plaque marking 100 years of continuous family ownership at Calton Hill.
Six generations of his family have watched the sun rise and set over the rolling limestone landscapes of North Otago since 1864.
Henry Allan first leased 72 acres of the original family farm near Weston before freeholding it in 1876. He named the farm Calton Hill after an unfinished monument on a hill of the same name in his homeland of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Eight years later Henry’s 12-year-old orphaned nephew Robert and nine-year-old niece Elizabeth joined him after being put on a ship to travel out from Scotland.
The resourceful Henry used whatever materials he had at hand to build his first home. The back wall of the house was carved out of a limestone cliff face. The fireplace and cupboards were actually etched into the cliff and are still obvious more than 150 years later.
Henry and Robert (Bob’s grandfather) are believed to have worked on the historic Clarks Flour Mill nearby at Maheno.
In the rich black ‘totara tar’ soils of this region Henry and Robert grew crops of wheat, potatoes, turnips and mangolds and bred ayrshire cattle and clydesdale horses.
In 1886 the adjoining Aitkenhead Farm was bought. Originally the homestead was used as a chaff shed but it became the main dwelling on the farm and a second storey was added in 1931.
Robert’s son Gavin took over the farm during the transition from horse power to mechanisation, the family’s first tractor a Massey Harris 44. Gavin retired in 1973 and Bob and Nancy took over the farm, their focus switching to growing wheat, barley and fattening lambs on the fertile cropping land.
The couple still live in the original Calton Hill homestead, solidly built on Oamaru stone foundations and walls more than 130 years ago.
‘‘I can just remember the wool shorn by blades and the wool pressed in a box press, where it was stamped and tramped, horse teams and a binder, threshing mill and large heaps of straw left behind for us kids to play in,’’ Bob says.
‘‘When I started working on the farm, all the grain was bagged in sacks and, as the boy, I rode on the header and sewed the sacks,’’ he says. Later the farm progressed to bulk harvest, bagging off grain in the corner of the paddock, before going to bulk harvest directly into silos.
Alison, one of Bob and Nancy’s four daughters, farmed with her father for 20 years through a period of difficult drought conditions. Today the farm is leased and share farmed by a neighbour who grows grain crops for bird seed.
Endless dry seasons and a lack of irrigation have taken a toll on the family’s resilience.
‘‘I have been farming here on my own account for 40 to 50 years and 45 of them have been droughts,’’ Bob says. ‘‘I was always watching my back. North Otago is only one nor’wester away from a drought and we could go from an oasis to a desert.’’
During the droughts of the 1980s the Allans, with four young girls to feed, clothe and educate, had no option other than for Nancy to go back to work teaching at Waitaki Girls’ High School in Oamaru.
‘‘It was pretty depressing really,’’ she says. ‘‘I used to come home from school and I could see all this mist blowing out to sea, but it wasn’t mist it was dirt blowing off the land. It was just like a cloud.’’
‘‘The thing that got us through those droughts of the 1960s was that we had our rural water schemes going so we had water for stock and household water,’’ Bob says.
With a cautious approach to stock and land management, the Allans only had to send stock away for grazing twice. Fortunately, the heavy soils allowed the farm to hang on longer than others, giving them some leeway with feed for stock.
‘‘My main irrigator was a roller,’’ Bob says, tongue firmly in his cheek. He used the roller to compact the soil to conserve moisture.
Calton Hill has an average annual rainfall of about 550mm, but Bob says farm records in 1906 and 1907 show annual rainfall dropped as low as 12 inches (300mm) a year.
As shareholders in the North Otago Irrigation Company Scheme, the Allans have recently invested heavily in three centre-pivot irrigators to bring reliable irrigation water to about two-thirds of their 149ha property.
The second stage of the scheme was due to be commissioned last September but irrigation water from the Waitaki River is yet to reach the farm because of design faults with the scheme and a pipeline blowout.
The Allans are philosophical about the delays but remain confident their investment in irrigation could have a big impact on the range and reliability of crops that can be grown on the farm in future.
With a sixth generation of the family now living on the farm, they retain a strong bond with the land.
As Nancy puts it: ‘‘We’re still here.’’
When I started working on the farm, all the grain was bagged in sacks and, as the boy, I rode on the header and sewed the sacks. Bob Allan