Off the Radar

by Te Radar

  It’s not until you don’t have access to nails that you stop taking them for granted. Nowadays we cast a bent nail aside. They are just another seemingly disposable object. The process of pulling them out of timber and straightening them is considered too time-consuming.

  At one stage I wonder, given the meagre nature of my stipend and the challenge of becoming more sustainable, about the possibility of melting down used nails and re-forging them. Sadly, this idea will go the same way as the ideas I had about a bicycle-powered shower, the aqueduct, and the pig-poo methane extraction plant—all of them falling somewhere short of the drawing board.

  With the timber now held up by stronger nails, I heave the bath back into place, flip it over, and again in fear of being crushed, release it to the bonds of gravity.

  It slumps into place. I hold my breath. Nothing moves. I stand still for a few more seconds, waiting to see if anything is about to become detached.

  Nothing happens.

  Blessed nothing.

  As I place some netting into the bath that will allow a space to be retained between the bottom of the bath and the vermicast so that the precious worm tea can dribble out, and cover the netting with cardboard, scraps and worms, the mermaid becomes obscured.

  Realising that she will soon be lost under vermicast, I become a little sad. No doubt she brought someone great joy at some time. It would be nice to know who drew her, and why. Did she have a name?

  As a final act, and because worms are like goths and prefer the darkness, I place an old door over the tub like the lid of some kind of rudimentary coffin, and think to myself, ‘Job well done.’

  Now, all I have to do is remember to feed them.

  8

  Heard of goats?

  While I said at the outset of this adventure that I don’t mind getting up early, what I really meant is that dawn is a special thing, and with it being so special you don’t want to ruin its magic by seeing it too often.

  There is something both a little exciting and oddly wearying about rising at the ludicrously early hour of 3.00 a.m. It’s a long time till dawn. Nonetheless, I rise at that time so that by 4.00 a.m. on a chilly, late spring morning, I can head up a tanker track towards the lights of a cowshed in a location I cannot reveal, as Chris, the owner of the property, fears rustlers.

  He’s worried that they will come after his prized milking goats, which I shall be assisting him in milking in exchange for anything that isn’t eggs or silverbeet or grapefruit.

  I am feeling quite chipper after the hair-raisingly brisk ride on the quad bike, which is a marvellous workhorse when it’s not rolling over on top of its rider. The eyes of hundreds of goats sparkle in its headlights, like blinking, yellow stars, as they cluster around in the chill dark of the morning, ready for milking. With the gate opened they flow out like a river of tiny, terribly placid goats.

  They plod past us as Chris explains that he never intended to become a goat farmer, but he couldn’t afford a herd of cows. Seeing the goats advertised, he thought: why not? I will think the same thing as the milking progresses, and the goats begin to enchant me.

  I have been defecated on and urinated on by more cows than I care to remember as I stood beneath them in my parents’ cowshed. Often it was a few moments of welcome warmth on a cold morning, tempered by the freezing water that then had to be used to wash the slurry off. After a while it merely became an inconvenient annoyance for the hapless person underneath, and a source of earthy humour for everyone who witnessed it, which in my case was usually my mother.

  But with the goats, there is no such problem. They are a clean animal. Rather than the voluminous torrent of reconstituted grass that can pour forth from the cow, the goat emits only tiny little pellets.

  If I were to return to a dairy farm, I would have no hesitation doing so with goats. They are small, easy to handle, and delightfully cute.

  Placing the cups on their two teats is a simple task made difficult by my almost ingrained four-teated cow habits. Goats are also wonderful producers, and it’s hard to imagine why more people don’t wish to milk them. It’s like novelty milking.

  ‘The white ones are for whole milk, the brown ones provide the cream, and the black ones produce skim milk,’ Chris tells me.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m joking, now hurry up and drench them or we’ll be here all morning.’

  Even though they are all nanny goats, they have little beards under their chins, which makes them easy to drench, as you can gently grip it and turn their heads to the drench nozzle.

  As I’m hosing the yard down afterwards, the rising sun’s rays catch in the water, creating a silver stream that rhythmically washes away the goats’ leavings. It’s an iconic New Zealand scene, one that can often be witnessed from cars as you travel through the countryside in the early morning.

  That watery parabola is hosing away what is also one of dairying’s biggest problems: cow effluent. Where once it simply went into slurry ponds to settle, with much of the overflow often finding its way into drains and waterways, it is now much more regulated. And a good thing this is too. There are even those who argue there’s money in muck.

  I met a scientist in Palmerston North by the name of Dr Steven Pratt, who is endeavouring to turn cow excrement into bioplastic. He showed me a bucket containing his research, which contained a slurry, on the surface of which it was possible to discern a faint, oily gleam that I was told was the beginning of the bioplastic.

  He talked passionately about all manner of scientific things, such as ‘the inclusion of propionic acid producing polymer chains with the favourable characteristics of malleability,’ which, despite sounding fascinating, made no sense whatsoever to me.

  It did seem clear to me, though, that there is a high chance at some stage in the future that cow effluent could become a renewable, biodegradable source of plastic. It doesn’t get much more renewable than cow manure. If it proves successful, it may be that the grass is actually greener after it has passed through the cow.

  While Chris heads off for breakfast, it’s my duty as the lackey to take the last of the goats back to the paddock. Some of them are a little lame, so they get to ride in the motorbike trailer as I chauffeur them back.

  There’s little I find more pleasurable than puttering along behind stock in any of the glorious rural landscapes we are blessed with in this country, with the sun just risen and the whole day stretching before me.

  Everything has gone well, and all I have to do is to take the last goat from the trailer. As I lift it out, I assume it will, in a nimble example of goat agility, simply bound out. It doesn’t. It falls out.

  It could be argued that I dropped it on its head, much to the amusement of Bevan the cameraman, who barely manages to capture the shot as he is laughing so much. The shot will never make it into the show—yet another example of something that is not family viewing—which is fortunate, as it may have destroyed any chances I have of working on a goat farm in the future.

  With the goats safely back in their paddock, it’s time to head home to my own chores. The wonderful thing about getting up so early is that it leaves a lot of the rest of the day to fill. I am to fill mine with more milking.

  The ease of milking the goats is tempered by the milking of my cow. As neither Harriet nor Coco is in milk, I have bought another, named Judy, along with her two precocious stepsons, who she is milk-mothering. They are Hereford calves, one ginger and the other black, and somewhere along the way Jane has named them Sainsbury and Campbell.

  The irony is that I got into comedy and television to avoid a career in farming. Well, actually I got into it because my promising law career was stymied by an inability to pass the required exams, leaving no other option but television, the last bastion of those who aren’t really sure what else to do.

  I grew up on a dairy farm near Huntly. I left the farm not because I hated farming, but because I hated milking cows. Specifically, I hated milking them in th
e heat of a summer’s afternoon. I would begin to get a palpable sense of horror as the appointed hour approached.

  Now, here I am, milking my own cow.

  Admittedly it is a far cry from milking as I knew it. Rather than using machines as we did on my parents’ farm, I have to milk Judy by hand, which is a time-consuming, laborious job that requires a lot of patience and skill.

  I really should have taken the calves off her the night before; I had no idea they drink so much.

  I don’t normally need much milk, so I only milk her occasionally, but on this particular day I am supposed to have several litres in order to make cheese with renowned cheese-maker Sabine Drueckler.

  I don’t have several litres. I have half a cup.

  Sabine lives at the Otamatea Eco Village, an ‘intentional permaculture community’, situated on 250 acres on a peninsula of the Kaipara Harbour.

  ‘I’ve had a bit of a milk disaster,’ I explain as I arrive at the village, offering my cup of milk up for inspection.

  Sabine peers into it and says in her Germanically accented English, ‘This would make cheese about the size of the tip of my thumb.’ Luckily her husband, Wolfgang, has persuaded their cow to give him five litres that morning.

  She suggests that I pour my offering into the bucket that her strapping husband has diligently filled. This way, it will not be discernible which bit of the milk is mine, so I will be able to lay claim to the entire cheese. Who could argue?

  ‘Today we are making feta, so we begin, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I had not realised that making cheese is such a simple process. We filter the milk through a small sieve, heat it up to 40 degrees—the same temperature as the inside of the cow, Sabine tells me—then add some home-made yoghurt and a little rennet to set the ball rolling. Then we have to wait for an hour.

  This is the part of the procedure at which I excel.

  After an hour Sabine announces, ‘It is time now to cut the cheese.’ Because I am immature I find that very funny, especially as it is delivered with a slight German accent.

  By this time the milk has solidified, and appears to resemble an instant pudding. With a long knife we cut it into tiny squares, which allows the solid curds and liquid whey to separate. Draining the whey, we take the curds and press them under some cans.

  As I can’t wait the 24 hours needed to complete the process, Sabine performs the trick perfected by television cooking shows the world over and produces a cheese she prepared earlier. It resembles a block of polystyrene.

  ‘Tasty polystyrene though,’ I hurry to reassure her.

  It is that simple. We have a friend in cheeses.

  On the way home, I think that if it is that simple, then perhaps I should do more of it. After all, even making butter is easy; it just requires a very strong wrist and a lot of shaking. The only drawback is the milking process. If I am going to do it in future, I will need to extract more than the pitiful cupful of milk I got from Judy’s udder. There has to be a better way, and, as it turns out, there is.

  While at Dexcel’s Greenfield Project, a research farm in the Waikato, I witnessed the brave new world of dairy farming. I beheld the marvel that was the robot milker.

  It was a little disappointing.

  While I certainly wasn’t expecting an android bedecked in the clobber of a busty milkmaid, yodelling as it worked, nor was I expecting a big grey stainless steel box. The cow walked into the box, a scanner identified her, a mechanical arm containing the cups swept out underneath her, sensors based on similar technology to that used in carwashes located her teats, independent arms applied each of the cups, and as she milked out, all manner of data about production was logged.

  While this happened, the cow stood calmly eating a special brew of food and supplements doled out to her particular specifications by the feed machine.

  As the scientist remarked, ‘It doesn’t matter how technical we get, only the cow can produce the milk.’

  The cows were also being used to trial the reduction of farm labour even further, by being allowed to dictate the times they wished to be milked. This meant they could walk from the paddock, be milked, and then be directed back to the next paddock via sets of automated gates.

  This was dairy farming at its best, a glorious devolution of authority, with it now being vested in the best workers the farmer has—the cows themselves. No more would the hapless cocky have to rise in the predawn dark, or rush back to the cowshed from a family do in the afternoon. The bovine sisters were doing it for themselves.

  If I had been able to utilise the services of a robot to milk my parents’ cows, I may well have entertained the idea of remaining a dairy farmer.

  I can’t even remember if the robot had a name. No doubt it would be something like Trev.

  ‘Is there nothing you can’t teach a cow?’ I asked the scientist as I was leaving.

  ‘Well, we don’t like to tell the farmers because they might complain,’ she said, ‘but we’re trying to figure out if they can read.’

  ‘Books?’

  ‘No, signs with coloured symbols,’ she said.

  That’s good, I thought. You wouldn’t want a cow reading the newspaper—she might find out what she’s worth to the farmer and demand more molasses and a back rub.

  9

  Sheep in sheep’s clothing

  Two important things happened in New Zealand in 1971. Firstly, I was born, and secondly, the Agrodome opened in Rotorua.

  Over the years, countless millions of tourists have been mustered through its hallowed hall to sit open-mouthed in astonishment at the exploits of one this country’s greatest ever animals—the sheep.

  I often find myself staring at my sheep in open-mouthed astonishment. Any time I venture anywhere near them, their eyes widen, their breathing increases, and they begin to look decidedly agitated. After a few moments, they flee in the opposite direction as fast as their tasty lamb shanks will carry them.

  I think they may have had psychological issues. They remind me of a group of teenagers who have been up all night watching horror movies and then suddenly think they may have just heard something tapping on the windows.

  Because of their emotional instability, and the fact that they are destined to end up in my stomach, I generally leave them to their own devices in the paddock I call ‘The Tops’. It’s a nostalgic and slightly self-aggrandising name that pays tribute to the great high country sheep stations that run up into the Southern Alps. In reality it’s just the paddock at the top of the hill.

  Prior to emigrating to New Zealand, my great-grandfather was a shepherd for Queen Victoria at one of her London farms. I doubt he had a close relationship with her. It’s unlikely that as Her Majesty passed in her carriage she would lean out of the window, wave, and holler, ‘Hello, James, how are the sheep?’ and he’d doff his cap and shout, ‘Mighty fine, Ma’am,’ and she’d reply, ‘Oh that’s grand, why don’t you pop over later for a cuppa?’

  None of his skills with sheep seem to have been passed down to me.

  The only time the sheep’s erratic behaviour is of any concern to me is when I need them to be somewhere specific, such as in the back of the Land Rover. The reason they need to be in the back of the Land Rover is that they need shearing, and the shearing shed is some distance up the road at Shawn’s.

  While the thought of mustering a flock of sheep along a country road conjures up classic images of a rural New Zealand reminiscent of iconic Marti Friedlander photographs, the reality of running my four unpredictable scatterbrains along a busy modern highway is quite a different story.

  Hence the need to catch them.

  So it is that Shawn, his four-year-old daughter Charlotte, his dog Bob, and I find ourselves all slowly pirouetting in the middle of the paddock as we watch the sheep gallop around and around and around the fence line.

  With the help of the dog, we finally corner them in the shed, and now all we have to do is grab them. I can well understand why rural areas
produce rugby players who are such proficient tacklers. When it comes to dealing with an animal as mentally unpredictable as a sheep, you can’t pussyfoot around. You have to commit yourself totally to the physical action of catching them. If you don’t, and they get away, immense frustration ensues.

  Inching closer to our woolly foes, Shawn leaps at one and in a nimble movement catches it and simultaneously flips it over, enabling him to drag it to the truck. This causes one of the others to make a dash for it, and as it runs past me I leap at it and am dragged halfway along the shed before my weight causes it to come to a reluctant halt.

  ‘Got it?’ asks Shawn.

  ‘Yep,’ I say, as I try to casually flip it over, an action that results in a flurry of flailing legs and near-catastrophe, until finally it is on its back and I have it firmly caught, much to the disappointment of Shawn, his daughter, and the crew, who are all enjoying the show.

  I manoeuvre it to the Land Rover, hoist it up inside to join the one Shawn has just put in, and close the door.

  ‘Well, halfway there,’ I say.

  Once again Shawn snares his with ease, but the sheep I’m after easily eludes me, and is headed towards the only gap from which it can escape at breakneck speed. All that stands between it and freedom is Charlotte.

  ‘Grab it,’ I yell, before realising that she is a four-year-old child who is probably not equipped to deal with the large and terrified mass of mutton that is about to run roughshod over the top of her.

  All I can think is that I’m going to be responsible for breaking Shawn’s child.

  With a leap that can barely be described as valiant, I launch myself at the sheep and pull it to a halt just in front of Charlotte.

  ‘I wouldn’t have let it escape, silly man,’ she says.

  I believe her. She’s her father’s daughter.