Old Blue and Graeme–both still working on the farm

Farm manager Melanie McEntyre using Old Blue to cart round silage bales to feed out. Photo: Jeanette Nee.

Most farmers – or farms – have a pet tractor. One that has been on-farm for forever – and just keeps going and going and going. Or one the boss nurses along, or keeps polished and tucked away in a shed.

At Graeme and Jeanette Nee’s farm at Ohauiti, in the Western Bay of Plenty, that tractor is ‘Old Blue’.

Graeme bought Old Blue about 50 years ago – and while she is nursed along these days, she’s never missed a beat. And is still on-farm working – just like Graeme, who has just turned 80.

“It’s been here from new. Jeanette and I bought the tractor – it’s a Ford 4600,” says Graeme.

“We used it for farm work and contracting too. For about eight or nine years I worked in with a local contractor doing the cutting and teetering of summer harvest hay-baling.

“On the farm we it used it for the silage-making – we did all of our own. And years ago we had the land at the Tauranga airport at the Mount where we used to make big stacks of silage there.

“The rules weren’t so strict those days – you could make the silage and keep it up the end in a corner of the airport land and just cart it out in winter when you wanted it.”

And while Old Blue is still the farm’s everyday mechanical gopher, Graeme is now the farm’s gopher.

He’s out on a tractor most days – but instead he uses a Valtra, which he parks – as most farmers do – as close to the house as possible.

“The Valtra is made in Finland and I use this one for the heavy work. The other day I was pushing out a big barberry hedge, which needed to be heaped up ready for burning. I use it for rotary slashing, silerating with a big basket on the back – that kind of heavy work.

“Old Blue used to do this work but it got too old. We couldn’t ask it to do that now.

“She’s done about 25,000 hours’ work time and has just had a valve grind. She’s never had an engine overhaul – not bad for a three-cylindered tractor,” says Graeme.

“But she is sort of being nursed along and looked after and does the feeding of the round bales and other handy stuff.”

Graeme started off farming as a young fella, helping his mother and father – the late Thomas ‘Dick’ and Eileen Nee – on the same family farm, which is 96ha – with 21ha utilised as native bush and wetlands, protected with 6km of fencing along the Keri Stream, and 75ha pastoral land.

“We came here in the beginning of 1950 – it was the same size it is today,” says Graeme.

“My father, he’d been a high country musterer in the South Island for 13 years and he loved the sheep.

“So we had half the farm in sheep at the bottom end and then the top end we ran the dairy cows. But there wasn’t enough sheep to make it viable.”

When he left school, Graeme started working for his parents. At age 20 he moved into sharemilking for them, bought his own herd, bought their herd and added to it “ the usual things that farmers do” and eventually bought the farm. “Then my father came back and worked for us for eight years.”

Now Graeme, who still owns the farm with wife Jeanette, is farm gopher to his daughter Janelle and partner Mel McEntyre, who runs the dairying operation, and herd manager John Bergervoet, who has been a valued member of staff for 15 years.

Graeme loves it. “I go and get things and give advice – they don’t always take notice of it, but that’s normal.”

He hoses down after milkings, which he finds “very therapeutic”, and during calving time from mid-July to early-September he does the late-night checking of the close lot of birth cows for any problems.

Does your farm or your boss have a pet tractor? Or maybe a pet digger or bulldozer? If so, we’d love to hear about it! Email: merle@sunmedia.co.nz with a photo of it and a contact name and phone number. We might even throw a prize your way for a good yarn.

 


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