The young couple, aged 22 and 20, are contract milkers on Thomas's parents' dairy farm near Reefton where they share the jobs on the farm and taking care of their toddler, Ellie, who also spends much of her time on the farm. It means both parents get to enjoy their farming career and keep up-to-date with all the different aspects of the business, as well as enjoying parenthood, because lifestyle is every bit as important as money to them.
"We're not interested in going huge," Thomas says. "We like to know all the cows. They all have different personalities and there's one cow that will always come into the dairy last and she won't come in until she's had a good scratch with both hands.
"We're really not interested in becoming gazillionaires. We just want to be comfortable and be able to support our kids."
"Our goal is to own a small farm we can run by ourselves," Hannah explains. "We're not in farming just to farm, but for the lifestyle as well. It's just really nice to be able to bring up children on the farm and take turns with the farm work."
It requires good communication to share the jobs on the farm to ensure all the necessary information is transferred between them, but it also means that neither of them gets stuck in certain roles. They have one employee who happens to be a good friend of Hannah's from her school days and all three share the jobs.
Thomas says: "You can get caught up with going big and having big debt that comes with a bigger farm. We want to do well in the industry and have good farming practices and the focus for us is good per-cow figures."
The runners-up in contest were contract milkers Stephane and Sophie Rossignol from Blackball and in third place was farm manager Alice Reilly from Golden Bay.
