DAIRY PEOPLE » Evan & Jan Billington
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NZ Dairy
Awards reward for hard graft and planning Tony Orman Evan and Jan Billington, who farm near Ngatea on the Hauraki Plains, are the 2015 Auckland-Hauraki Sharemilkers/Equity Farmers of the year, and the winners of national merit awards for farm safety and health, risk management and interviewing. The successes have vindicated Evan’s long-held wish to go dairy farming, as well as allowing him and Jan to work together while increasing equity and. Evan, now 47, spent boyhood school holidays
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on his uncle’s dairy farm, where the ambition to one day be a dairy farmer was born. But his first steps on leaving school were as an apprentice chef, then into the police force. After 18 years of police work and two years with Environment Waikato, he decided to realise his latent dream and go dairy farming. Evan and Jan, who was a school teacher, had bought a lifestyle block and, when the neighbouring farm sold with a farm job on offer, Evan grasped the opportunity and went to work for Terry and Irene Assen, near Tirau. He spent two seasons there as the assistant manager, learning a wide range of practical farming skills. The couple then shifted to Waharoa, near Matamata, where he took a job as a farm manager for Steve and Trish Atkinson, milking 290 cows. There he learned the importance of pasture management and feeding cows well in a low-input system to maximise production. The couple then successfully applied for a 50:50 sharemilking position at Ngatea, on the Hauraki Plains, milking 350 cows for Ken and Pat Jones on a 100-hectare farm. After two seasons, they bought another 350-cow herd and took on the Jones’s second 50:50 sharemilking position on their other farm across the road. That gave them a total of 700 cows in a 50:50 sharemilking arrangement. “Basically we had sold our Waikato lifestyle block and invested that money into dairy cows,” says Evan. “We’ve learned to do our budgets and to analyse our results, and as a result of lots of hard work, our equity has doubled in the last four years.” All of this time he had been gaining valuable experience on farm and education via Ag ITO training. The Billingtons are now in their fifth season on the Jones’s two farms, each of which has a herringbone milking shed (a 42-a-side and a 30-a-side).
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Hauraki Plains sharemilkers Evan and Jan Billington
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