Despite being a hard-nosed man with a bent for confrontation Roel Wobben is crying for his cows.
The family will lose their 2700 cows and have already lost nearly as many young stock and bulls to a Mycoplasma bovis cull.
They milk through two sheds on their irrigated 710ha North Canterbury farm, doing about 500kg MS a cow and calving twice a year. There’s also a second 285ha farm nearby milking 900 cows, run by a contract milker.
They had their first positive milk test in August 2018 but weren’t notified till the end of January 2019, six months later.
Wobben sold a lot of stock in the interim including service bulls. All those animals had to be traced, a process that could easily have been avoided, he said.
“If they had come to us after the first positive milk test we could have been shut down before the service bulls got sold.”
The milk test revealed the presence of M bovis antibodies in the herd so half of the stock went to slaughter in November and the rest will be gone in March or April.
Young stock were the first to go, mainly to the pet food market. Two or three trucks a day rolled up over a couple of weeks, carving up the Wobbens’ 30-year Holstein Friesian breeding programme.
The two milking herds totalling 2700, including the family’s beloved Red Holsteins, are next.
For a few months last spring as the cull kicked in Wobben thought “I don’t need all this shit”.
Sick to the bone with stress, he and wife Diane went to Netherlands for a few weeks to get away from it all. He seriously considered selling the farm until family stepped up and convinced him to carry on.
“We’re not just a farm, the herd is what we are.
“If it wasn’t for the boys I would have sold and got out of here.”
They have lodged a compensation claim big enough to need ministerial sign-off. They’ve got good bank support, cashflow is healthy and there shouldn’t be much serious financial damage to the business.
As the next round of culling nears he is most worried about people welfare.
The Wobbens don’t want to witness the coming slaughter so will quit the farm for a month over March and April.
“When I go, the staff will have to load them while we leave the farm,” he says.
Meantime, everyone is feeling the strain, even their three sons and partners.
If anyone tries to forget the disease they have only to wander into the yard where contractors from the M Bovis Programme are washing down.
Wobben calls the team in white overalls the Star Trekers – intruders into what now feels like an alien environment.
The Ministry for Primary Industries and programme partners say any animals linked to the farm had to be destroyed because of the presence of antibodies.
He doesn’t dispute his stock had antibodies.
“But they never found a cow that was actually infected. Every time we had a sick cow we would ring the vet and it would be tested – nothing, nothing.”
Out in the paddocks he’s shaking, near tears at the unfairness of it all.
“When you walk through here … beautiful … there’s nothing wrong with these cows.”
Voice shaking, he says “I’ve had no sick cows … they haven’t found a trace either.”
Pointing out a favourite Holstein Red he gestures to the horizon and says it took him 30 years “to get a picture like this”.
The farm hadn’t taken in stock since February 2015 when a line of 41 reject export heifers, from 20 farms, was bought from an export company.
Wobben thinks that could be the trace, if there was one.
“But MPI say it can’t be – they say the bacteria has been in New Zealand only since December 2015.”
He regrets buying the reject line and wouldn’t do it again but he gave the Bovis Programme all the consignment details consignment, including herd origin and Nait participant code.
“It took them six weeks to even chase a participant code. And it only takes five minutes to go to LIC to get the data on where those farms are. They’ve got a Biosecurity Act to do that – and it still took weeks.”
It also took an age to get test results after culling. In mid-February he was still waiting for results from the November slaughter.
Wobben is pressing MPI for on-the-hook testing of every cow that goes to the works. He’s told that only a sample, perhaps every third load, get that treatment.
But this is more than a dispute about M bovis, he says.
It’s about family and being treated by authorities with respect rather than as a criminal.
At times lately he’s felt completely marginalised, as if he has a deadly disease himself.
Other farmers haven’t always been sympathetic.
While some neighbours wished the family well, some of their strongest support was from nearly lifestyle-blockers, he says.
He admits he’s had difficult legal issues with agencies and other farmers in the past but says this one is something quite different again. One that is out of his control.
He has had four ICP managers (M bovis response case officers) since it all started but says the problem is mostly that they lacked the farming skills and knowledge to understand his situation.
He admits to getting seriously angry at various M bovis officials, though he never physically threatened anyone, he says.
Last winter, their contract milker, Arno Luton, barricaded his farm gate stopping a planned cull of his in-calf heifers.
MPI said the animals had M bovis antibodies but Arno and the Wobbens argue they were disease-free and question the timing of the cull, just six weeks from calving. After a flurry of media attention, the stock did not go away. The cows were milked for the rest of the season.
Wobben believes MPI misled him.
“First they said we would be able to calve them and milk them through the season but a month later they gave us an instant cull notice – saying the cows were going away in two days.”
Initially, MPI organised stock consignments from the farm to meat processors but Wobben says there was no way he was going to let MPI sort things again after hearing the story of nearby dairy farmers Duncan and Amanda Ferguson whose stock went to Blenheim after MPI promised the animals would be sent to a local, same-day kill.
Not trusting MPI he has organised the stock consignments himself.
And there is a bright side to all the distress.
The family is planning for the arrival of thousands of replacement animals, working to source Holstein Friesians from around the country. For the Wobbens life can and must go on.
