A Southern Hawke's Bay farmer has found one way to beat the boredom of daily feeding-out in the drought by turning the paddocks into a film set for a developing craft of sheep art.
But there was no need for any Hollywood extravagance – just a paddock and a hillside on a 300-plus hectares farm south of Dannevirke, farmers Garth and Wesley Coleman and daughter Lucy, a quadbike, a camera, sheep and maize.
The result was a series of videos based on Garth Coleman's patterned feeding out of the stock, a choreographed munch-up including one drawing the unsuspecting sheep into a form of the Buy New Zealand Made kiwi logo.
Lucy Coleman, a 27-year-old Massey University PhD animal science student at home during the Covid-19 lockdown, said it was all her dad's idea.
She came into the house one day and from the kitchen saw her dad already had the idea well under way in the kitchen, working out where he would line and place the feed in a strategy to form the patterns from the elevated points Lucy – "just the video operator" – would capture the history later.