Before entering the dairy industry five and a half years ago, Charlie McCaig said that he had never really come within three feet of a cow. Moving to New Zealand from office jobs in Britain, Charlie and wife Jody had envisaged a similar lifestyle in Auckland and Wellington. However, five years on, the Taranaki-based couple have been awarded New Zealand Sharemilkers/Equity Farmers of the Year at the recent NZ Dairy Industry Awards, and foresee a positive future in dairy farming ahead.
The awards represented an opportunity for the McCaigs to build profile and networks in the agricultural industry. "Neither of us come from farming backgrounds, so we got into the dairy industry on the bottom rung. It was pretty clear straight away that you need to have good networks in farming in order to succeed," Charlie says.
"The competition sells itself on two fronts really; one is to give you the ability to benchmark yourself against other people and see how well you're doing, and the other is building up really good networks of people, being either peers or people who are way ahead of you."
The couple first began to dabble in dairying as they helped with relief milking for Jody's brother. Over time, as they expanded to relief milking for other farms, the appeal of full-time dairy farming grew. "The more people you talk to, the more people start talking about their journey through the industry. There are a lot of people who don't start off farming ... Once we were in and started talking to people, we saw how much positivity there was about the progression that you can make in the industry and the expertise that you can build.
"We had aspirations of doing something interesting with our lives, and for me, pretty quickly that thing became dairy farming," Charlie says.