In the three years they have been developing the farm, they have been taking the Dairy Industry Award challenge each year, securing third place in the region in their first attempt, runners up last year and now a win which will take them to the national final.
The couple are equity partners in a farm at Camerons, just south of Greymouth; a farm that has been moulded from the waste churned out of the gold mine and converted to dairying nine years ago. When the partnership bought the 79 hectares effective three years ago, some of the paddocks were overgrown with gorse and weeds to the point it was hard to find the cows.
"I couldn't find the cows in the morning. So I was standing on the back of the bike with a torch shining around and all I could see was four sets of eyes."
The farm had a dairy and that was about it, so they have added a house, workshop, calf shed, fertiliser bins and troughs to the paddocks that didn't have them. At the same time they're reworking more ground each year with a digger before sowing crops in a bid to improve the soil which was the hard, dry tailings from its gold mining days. However, the back half of the farm is the opposite and too wet, Kelvin adds.
"We've really kept things ship-shape in there. You can't have a day off – every day has to be a good day. It's about looking after the cows to make sure they aren't getting mastitis and high somatic cell counts."
Three years on, Kelvin says they've completed the major development work on the farm and will continue making improvements to lift production.
"We've done all the hard yards now and just have to keep the wheels ticking along. The ground that was mined needs turning over again because it wasn't put down properly, but we have a cropping programme to get the job done, using a digger to turn it over. It's a cost, but it means we can winter the cows on the farm now and you save money on winter grazing, so it's worth it."
It's a farm that has given them challenges but also opportunities, and their goal is to buy out their partners to be farm owners with the flexibility that comes with that.
"We've got a passion for what we do and try to do everything as good as we can. If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing right."
Like the competition, which they have used to look at every aspect of their business and make improvements where necessary.
"It helps you identify your weaknesses so you can deal with them. It gets you monitoring everything and without that monitoring, you don't know where you're going so can't fix things."
Murchison 50:50 sharemilkers Jon and Vickie Nicholls were placed second, and third place went to 25% sharemilkers Damian Kohrs and Tiffany Hampton from Westport.
