The Country 17/07/25: Abbi Ayre talks to Jamie Mackay

This month’s Farmstrong farmer hails from Reefton, where she and her husband are dairy farmers. She talks about shed shouts, and super yachts. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Every month here on the country, our partners at farm
Strong put up a farm Strong farmer for us to
have a yarn to. They're always interesting characters with a
great backstory. This month's farm Strong farmer is no exception.
Her name is Abbi here. She's a dairy farmer in
reef Than along with her husband Fricky. They've got two
young kids. And Abby, I'll come to your backstory in

(00:21):
a minute. But why do you think farm Strong have
picked you and puts you up this month?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Great question? No, they seem to just keep asking me
and I don't know why. I think I follow loosely
the five Ways to well being without even really knowing
I'm doing it.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Well, you're a bright and bubbly character. I know that
from just talking to you in the commercial break. What's
your background to becoming a dairy farmer in reefed And which,
by the way, Abby, I think is one of the
prettiest little towns in this country.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
It is pretty cool. I was adamant we were not
going to move here before we came here, but now
we're here, I I love it. I think I think
more people should move to the coast.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
That's great, Well, isn't like reefed and a we micro climate.
You miss a lot of the bad weather that you know,
and I'll get told off by coasters here that they
get actually on the coast. You're inland and your prone
believe it or not, as I understand it to being
summer dry.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, we act she had a really really dry summer here.
It was like the dry summer in fifty years that
someone described it to me. It's almost like Alexandra, like
you can take the weather that's happening in Alexandra and
and it'll be here in Reefton as well.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, the winter fogs, Yeah that as well. Now I
know that your connection with farm strong kind of is connected,
if that's the correct word around a shed shout you
and your husband, Hobby Fricky did for your neighboring farmers.
Tell me about that.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, I guess I'd been in the back of our
head for a while and it was kind of like
a combination of a few ideas and terms of we did.
We called it a dry off party back then, but
it was nothing really like that. We just dropped a
whole lot of pamphlets and our neighbors letter boxes because

(02:12):
we'd never met them. This was when we were in
covid And and had everyone around to the cowshed and
we're just all chatted, and I thought, oh, that was
a cool idea. And then somewhere when we were in
dun True, we had this really cool thing where every
Friday throughout carving we would go to somebody's cows shed
and just like have a bear or whatever and catch

(02:33):
up for the week. And that was like a real
nice way of knowing that everyone was going through the
same shit. And so I thought, oh, we talked about
doing it last season, but we never got around to it.
And then I thought, shit, we've had a pretty hard
season here in Reefdon was like from the weddest of
winter spring and twenty five years to the dry summer

(02:55):
and fifty and I thought, oh, well, let's just pull
everyone together and yeah, just basically have a really low
key chat. And then I sort of mooted the idea
about would you guys be keen to like jump round
some cow sheds over over carving. So yeah, that's kind

(03:15):
of where it came from.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
You've ld quite a transient lifestyle in the dairy industry.
You mentioned Culverdin, done True, Canterbury, North Otago and then
back to the coast. Where did you come from?

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Originally I grew up in between Monaker and hardware. But
we've we've done a lot of the South Island. This
is the first time actually we've stayed. We're staying somewhere
for three seasons. We did a lot of one season,
one season, two seasons, two seasons, and some of those
like we're out of our control, and some of those
were decisions we made to move on. So you're happy

(03:47):
not to have to do Gypsy Day this year.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
You've got a storied background. You told me that you
once worked on super yachts. In fact, you've moved one
from the Caribbean to Tonga. You were living the dream
where you're rubbing shoulders with the famous It must be
a bit boring dairy farming and reefed and by comparison,
oh not quite.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
I didn't. I didn't make it to the Soupayocht level.
I just did a yacht delivery on a fifty foot yacht.
I wanted to work on soup yacht after doing my
three month stint on a sheep and bee farm. And
if I didn't have a course to go so I
probably would have stayed working there, and then it was
throughout that trip that I realized I was like, shit,
the food is not this is not normal food. Just

(04:28):
like like little things like the eggs you were getting
were like these tiny little eggs and they were like
a white shell and you just pack act and then
like the bacon was probably like I don't know, twenty
thirty centimeters by five and by the time you cooked
it it was like fifteen by two, and you were

(04:50):
like having to drain the fat off the pan as
you were cooking it. And I was like, I know
where foods come from, and I want I want to
do that more and follow that journey. So that was
why came back and started working on dairy farm.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Well there you go. You've had a wonderful life story.
How's the season treating you? You'll just be getting ready
for carving, are you?

Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah? I keep getting memories popping up of today is
going to be the first day of a calf. So
I'm still waiting. But you're hoping for a wee bit
of a dry we've had. We've had quite a lot
of rain, considering we had the dry summer and fifty
years we've already had over our half of annual year rainfall.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, no doubt you've got a bit of the tail
end of that stuff that at the Tasman Nelson region.
But you've got to count your blessings, haven't you. Hey,
it's been lovely to chat to you, bubbly person, Abby
Air out of Reefed and good luck with the upcoming season.
You are our farm strong farmer this month, all

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Right, thanks for having me