The Murphy family — who milk the largest shorthorn herd in Southland — are calling time on more than a century with the British breed.
Paul and Isabel Murphy will host a herd dispersal sale on their farm in Kennington, near Invercargill, on March 19.
"It is exciting but scary," Mr Murphy said.
He acknowledged the day he put his cows on the truck to move to new homes would be sad but he would be pleased they would be putting milk in vats.
"They are going on for another life," Mr Murphy said.
"You are going to make me cry," Mrs Murphy added .
The couple had been empty-nesters for a while, their daughter Laura, 29, works in finance in Auckland and their son James, 26, lives in London, working in food science.
The oldest cow in the mob is 16-year-old in-calf Grosvenor Laura, who was named after their daughter.
Most of the cows were older than 10 and were performing better than ever.
"They are peaking now," Mr Murphy said.
They were exiting the dairy industry when the herd was producing its most milk and the payout was more than $10/kgMS.
The couple run Grosvenor Stud, which was named after the place where they meet on the outskirts of London in 1992.
He began milking cows on his family farm at 10 and began working full-time in the business after leaving school.
Sheep once featured on the family farm but it had been only cows, mostly Shorthorns, for the past 25 years.
The in-calf heifers have been sold to a farmer in Riverton and it was nice they were not going too far away, Mrs Murphy said.
All of the remaining herd is on offer comprising 110 mixed-age milking cows and 29 weaner heifer replacements.
About 20 were Holstein-Friesian and Shorthorn cross and the rest were pure Shorthorns.
When they bought the Kennington farm, they bought the black and white cows as part of the deal because they wanted to increase the herd size and there were no pure Shorthorns available to buy.
About 210 cows were milked at the peak of the season.
They used semen from two Shorthorn bulls and two Swedish Red bulls to artificially inseminate the herd this season, allowing them to deepen the gene pool.
Mr Murphy was the fourth generation to milk Shorthorns in Southland.
After immigrating from Ireland, his great grandfather David Murphy began farming a property nearby in Southland in the 1920s and imported a dozen Shorthorn cattle from England and traded as D. Murphy & Sons.
The Shorthorns continued to be milked and bred by his grandparents John and Isobel Murphy and his father David Murphy and late mother Ruth Murphy.
His 83-year-old father stopped milking cows last year.
"The older generation keep going and keep going, they don’t stop," Mr Murphy said.
The Murphy family no longer shows cattle.
"There were less and less Shorthorns and you were going to compete against yourself, so we pulled out," he said.
Their breeding programme focused more on production than pedigree.
The two studs were run on the same farm, 127ha of flat land on an all-grass system, which runs from State Highway 1 to the Waihopai River.
He and his father used to share the workload but now his father was reducing his hours, the workload was increasing for Mr Murphy and the demands were wearing him down.
The size of his herd did not warrant employing a full-time staff member.
A relief milker was needed to get a break from the farm but the phone needed to remain on hand in case anything went wrong.
The milking shed was a six-aside walk through when his father bought the farm and launched Roslyn stud about 60 years ago.
After three renovations, the shed was now a 22-aside herringbone and needed another upgrade.
An investment in the shed would require him to milk for at least another decade, which was something he did not want to do.
The weather patterns in the past five years had made farming more challenging and he described the past spring as "horrendous".
Summers were drier and he reduced his milking frequency from twice-a-day to every 16 hours after Christmas to combat a lack of grass growth, he said.
Although there was less milk in the vat, there was a silver-lining.
The couple were keeping the farm and planned to stay living on it for at least another decade.
That way if either of their children wanted to farm the property, they could let it be known then, Mr Murphy said.
Once the sale was over, they would decide how to use the land but he was certain it would not involve him milking cows, no matter how high the milk price gets.
"I need a change from milking cows because the drive is not there any more and I’m worn out ... I’ve been doing it for 45 years and it is time to move on and get my energy back."
After the sale, he would take six months off to decide his next career step.
Mrs Murphy, a self-employed gardener, said the time was right for her husband to find a new challenge, when he was fit and happy.
"Hopefully you’ll find out what your passion is," Mrs Murphy said.
A thing she would miss about being in the dairy industry was the easy access to swedes and having milking as a reason for leaving a social event early.
"We are not going to have an excuse any more and I’m not looking forward to it because I am such a lightweight," she laughed.
Mr Murphy was looking forward to being able to listen to heavy rain on the roof and not have to think about its potential for pugging or being woken by a mooing cow which had broken out of a paddock.
He would miss the excitement of calving though.
"It is nice in the springtime to go out in a paddock and see what is being born."
