The family has lived on their lifestyle block since 2013, and, in 2019, they were looking at adding to their already large menagerie of animals and opening it to the public.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile the Covid-19 lockdowns affected our main cafe business of 20 years as we had to shut it for months, it actually gave us the time to work together on the farmyard concept and open in 2022,\u201d Amber said.<\/p>\n
Livestock management<\/p>\n
The yard area has an outer ring of paddocks where the cows, sheep, and horses are cross-grazed.<\/p>\n
This also assists with reducing parasite loads on the pasture.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the old-fashioned way, animals are rotated and then we harrow the paddock.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t have to collect dung as it all gets broken up and goes back into the land.\u201d<\/p>\n
About 6ha of grass silage and conventional hay bales (for easier management) are grown on the land annually.<\/p>\n
This is sufficient to feed the animals in winter or summer drought.<\/p>\n
The inner paddocks house the goats, donkeys, pigs and baby animals that aren\u2019t with a mother.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe get in lambs and calves each season so children can bottle feed baby animals.\u201d<\/p>\n
An old cowshed on the property provides the perfect sheltered area for the house pets.<\/p>\n
Visitors get to cuddle guinea pigs and rabbits and watch the antics of mice, chinchillas, rats, bearded dragons, water dragons and the blue-tongued lizard.<\/p>\n
Breeding and feeding<\/p>\n
Week old lambs in the shed. Photo \/ Catherine Fry<\/p>\n
\u201cWe allow selective breeding so that people can experience seeing babies with their mother.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have five breeding ewes and Nala, our speckled park cow.<\/p>\n
\u201cRed, our bull, has sired some of our cows.\u201d<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t move around the farm without an entourage of ducks and chickens.<\/p>\n
While their breeding isn\u2019t thwarted, eggs are collected daily, so it is rare for anything to hatch.<\/p>\n
Amber with their Flemish Giant rabbit, Lenny. Photo \/ Catherine Fry<\/p>\n
Care is taken with prolific breeders such as rabbits, mice, rats and guinea pigs, keeping males and females separate unless babies are wanted.<\/p>\n
Rick and his daughter, Katie, do most of the work on the farm.<\/p>\n
Keeping the pet animal cages clean takes a considerable amount of work each week.<\/p>\n
Children Sophie and Jake, and Amber and her parents, all muck in on open days.<\/p>\n
When pony rides are on, it\u2019s labour-intensive for safety reasons.<\/p>\n
Amber feeding Halcyon Hills Sir Totara, the pure-bred red poll bull, aka Red. Photo \/ Catherine Fry<\/p>\n
\u201cThe grazing animals eat the pasture and home-grown supplement feed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe horses do require more specialised feed, but we have found a pretty universal pellet that a lot of the animals can be hand-fed by visitors.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pet animals enjoy greens from a local greengrocer, and the pigs eat the other vege scraps.<\/p>\n
Amber said Red the bull loved eating bananas.<\/p>\n
Wheelbarrows and buckets of appropriate feed are stationed around the farm walk so visitors can hand-feed the animals themselves.<\/p>\n
Red the bull will meekly take silage from over the fence.<\/p>\n
Amber hastened to add that even if they don\u2019t go in with him at close quarters, \u201cat the end of the day, he\u2019s a bull and precautions are needed\u201d.<\/p>\n
With home section sizes getting smaller and smaller, Amber said it was getting harder for children to be exposed to pet and farm animals.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s such a pleasure to see the excitement on the children\u2019s faces when they actually get a close-up encounter with an animal they\u2019ve only previously seen in a picture or on TV.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt really makes the hard work worthwhile.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The family has lived on their lifestyle block since 2013, and, in 2019, they were looking at adding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[2840,50,1863,3390,6326,651,2841,49239,3685,2109,3233,31178,2082,6637,16655,49240,78,8454,296,1899,121522,6187,663,3234,111,43,139,69,2680,4517,49238,6289,762,3175,147,544,6182,1361,7563,61,810,121521,379],"class_list":["post-224700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-across","tag-animals","tag-back","tag-best","tag-biggest","tag-close","tag-country","tag-enjoy","tag-events","tag-family","tag-farm","tag-favourites","tag-for","tag-gave","tag-glimpse","tag-haup","tag-in","tag-including","tag-into","tag-kids","tag-livelihoods","tag-lives","tag-looks","tag-months","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-opens","tag-past","tag-petting","tag-readers","tag-review","tag-rural","tag-science","tag-some","tag-stories","tag-that","tag-those","tag-to","tag-up","tag-yarns","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}