Farm Sitting In Walton

I moved to a new farm sit just the other day. This property is in the Walton locality, and about 10kms from Matamata. The owners have taken off to London for a few weeks to visit family. I’ll be looking after this place until just after Christmas.

It’s a nice modern house, and a tidy farm in a really nice location with plenty of rolling contour and hills. There’re no cows to milk here – this is a drystock property where calves are bought in and raised to be sold later on. There are about 120 odd animals grazing here, split into four mobs. One mob is made up of yearlings from last year; one mob are autumn calves from earlier this year; and then there are two mobs of calves born during winter/spring 2025. Basically, my job is to keep an eye on their water, electric fencing, and shift them onto fresh pasture when they’re needing it.

The 2 mobs of winter/spring calves have just been weaned from meal so they’re having a bit of a moan at the moment, but they’ll settle down to their all-grass diet before too long. There’s plenty of grass on the property. I think around 100-plus bales of silage were recently done, and already those paddocks are growing back at a good rate.

Pet-wise, there’s a dog named Blue who’s supposed to be a boxer but the owners suspect he has some other breed in his genes. He’s not the pure boxer like Beryl is (from my Rongotea sit). Nevertheless, Blue’s a really nice doggie with a friendly nature and he likes to tag along with me when I do my twice-daily patrols of the farm.

There’s also a younger cat who goes by the name of Louie and he’s super friendly. He camps with me at night and follows me around the house.