It's dairy farming like it used to be.
Cows with story-book names like Buttercup, Dolly and Lily chewing their cud and producing milk which is sold direct from cow-to-consumer in recyclable glass bottles.
And while that might speak to the past, it was also something that The Natural Dairy owner Glen Claridge believed should be the future.
"New Zealand should be the Natural Dairy; that’s what we were, we need to get back to that," he said.
The former top-dressing pilot is a fourth-generation town supply dairy farmer; his father Frank milked a 70-cow herd in the late 1970s when deliveries to the door of glass bottles of milk were standard.
After literally a high-flying career, which included exploits around the world, Mr Claridge decided to return to his roots and continue that family legacy.
Now that legacy has even more significance as he has committed to continuing his and his late wife Bronwyn’s vision of sustainably producing quality whole milk and recycling and reusing glass milk bottles.
Mrs Claridge, a very popular part of the North Otago community, died in April last year after a courageous battle with breast cancer.
Now sole parent to the couple’s 11-year-old daughter Amelia, Mr Claridge runs The Natural Dairy while also helping out at his brother’s building business.
Life was busy, although he still occasionally managed to whip up a batch of cinnamon oysters — his signature dish — but there were no regrets about choosing life on the land, he said.
Brought up at Maheno, Mr Claridge always knew that he wanted to be a farmer. He was also keen on being a top-dressing pilot; he had a cousin who flew out of Naseby and would sometimes land at the Claridge property, and he was young Glen’s "superhero".
After secondary school at St Kevins College in Oamaru, Mr Claridge was unsure what to do. The top-dressing industry was difficult to get into straight away and, buoyed by a friend who was joining the air force, he decided to apply as a pilot.
But pilots needed to exude a certain amount of confidence; the young lad from North Otago had always been — and remains to this day — far happier to be out of the limelight than in it.
Describing himself back then as being "as quiet as a little mouse", he fared OK on pilot aptitude and academic ability but his personality was rated poor, and so that particular plan was scuppered.
Instead, he completed an aircraft engineering apprenticeship which "set him up"; it got him involved in both flying and travelling the world, as he worked his way into his own pilot’s licence under his own steam.
After leaving the air force, he headed to Wanaka for an engineering job. It coincided with the opening of Wanaka Skydiving and he also got a job there — his days were spent running between the hangar and the plane — both flying and engineering.
Then he got what he described as the the best job he ever had — at Martins Bay in the Hollyford Valley — flying for a season, before moving to Christchurch for a job at Air New Zealand as an engineer.
Adventure beckoned when he got a random call from a 74-year-old asking him to go flying in southern Africa in a four-seater plane for several months, visiting old haunts.
From there, he went backpacking in Botswana and worked in a lodge and had a close call with an African bull elephant on the road.
While driving an ex-army truck with women on the back, he thought it would be like a cow on the road, and move off as he continued to drive.
But it did not and the women were banging on the roof telling him to stop, as the elephant flapped its ears in objection. It eventually wandered off.
At night, he could hear the "snuffling and slobbering" sounds of hippos outside his hut.
While there, he heard many stories of tourists either being killed or maimed by animals that did not get in the news.
Flying to London, he saw a job advertised in Spain growing commercial spinach and lettuce. He phoned about it at 6pm and was bound for Spain at 6am the following day.
Back in the UK, he returned to engineering and was working on the likes of private jets, at one stage living in a campervan in the car park of Manchester Airport.
After a six month engineering contract in France — a company had gone broke and it had planes "in a million bits" which had to be put back together and flown to England — he returned to North Otago.
Local pilot Phil Brown was advertising for a loader driver and Mr Claridge saw that as a good way to get into top-dressing.
In hindsight, it was probably lucky that he was not in his early 20s — "or I probably wouldn’t be here".
"I was a bit more sensible by the time I got into it," he said.
Mr Brown turned out to be "the right guy", doing a very good job in training him. For a hands-on pilot, it was the "coolest job in the world" — "maxxed out, flying outside the envelope every day".
But it was also "the most ridiculous industry in the world" and the general public did not understand how dangerous it was.
Asked whether that ever troubled him, Mr Claridge said it bothered him now when he was sitting in his home talking about it.
Working on the edge was exhilarating and it was an amazing thing to be part of, but he tired of the risk and pulled the pin in 2017.
He and his family went straight to Canada, he had already been there several times spraying crops, in between top-dressing at home, and he had also been to China spraying the likes of rice.
He had previously met his future wife at Oamaru pub Fat Sally’s; Bronwyn was then teaching at Pembroke School and the shy pilot recalled how he had a 20-minute window of opportunity to approach her.
The couple spent several years looking at lifestyle properties before their current property at Deborah, just south of Oamaru, came on the market.
They bought it in February, 2020 and, around the same time, the couple along the road, Bryan and Bethan Moore, who founded The Natural Dairy, put their property on the market.
The Claridges’ offered to buy the business and, during the Covid-19 lockdown, Mr Claridge built the cowshed.
It was the perfect pairing; Mr Claridge had always been keen to return to his love for the land and livestock, while his wife was very environmentally and community focused.
In their first year alone, they were proud to have been responsible for 25,000 less two litre plastic bottles going to landfill.
Still, it was a very steep learning curve and it continued to be so. While he had not studied agriculture, Mr Claridge said he did not want to be too scientific — instead, he wanted it to be like the sort of farming that his father did.
Farming, he believed, had become extremely complicated, yet the crux of it was about feeding cows and "looking after your girls".
He called himself a regenerative farmer; really, it was about "just taking some moral ground", and not using weed-killer or traditional fertilisers, or growing winter feed, he said.
At the moment, winter milking was "a bit of a challenge", but he hoped that he could get his soil right to ensure a better result in winter.
The Natural Dairy had about 30 cows on the 28ha property and milked, on average, about 15. Mr Claridge was conscious that customers were waiting for milk, so he had a responsibility to make that happen.
With a shop on site, about 20% of sales were through the cowshed and he estimated about 85% to 90% was sold within about a 10km radius. That was the ethos of the business, it was all about the local economy.
Milk was also dispatched to Waimate, Timaru and Twizel and also to Dunedin’s Gelato Junkie — "I love she’s doing something cool with it" — but the ultimate goal was to sell everything locally.
Rather than continuing to increase production, Mr Claridge said he was limited by what he could produce.
"I’m about happy cows, I’m about that story ... it’s not about getting rich."
WHILE the base of existing customers had doubled and there was greater awareness around what people were consuming, consumers had the power to "change the world" — "and it’s really frustrating that they don’t," he said.
He knew he needed to push The Natural Dairy story and that was something that was also his weakness. His late wife had a "magnetic personality" and was comfortable to be the face of the business, but that, he readily admitted, was his weakness.
Referring to some recent speaking engagements, Mr Claridge reckoned Bronwyn would "laugh like hell when I get up and speak in front of 60 people". "She’d be like, ‘where did that come from?’."
And he also acknowledged that he spent a lot of time worrying about what his wife would be thinking.
The toughest night of his life, he reckoned, was last year’s Waitaki Business Awards where The Natural Dairy was named top agricultural business, and runner-up to the supreme award.
It was a vote of confidence and the increased exposure was good for the business, but it was also very difficult not having his wife beside him.
But The Natural Dairy was the place where he needed to be.
"I need a focus ... I could go and buy a shoe-box [house] in town and work, but it would be soul-destroying, I need to be going good too, for Amelia," he said.
He was also very grateful for the support from both family and community. The experience with his wife’s illness had made him much more aware of the importance of community.
Mondays and Thursday were delivery days and Amelia would accompany him in the van, getting dropped off at school part-way through the run.
He was grateful for a neighbour who helped out with milking and bottling and, after school, most of his time was focused on his daughter.
"We’re all about Amelia," he said.
And Amelia was very good at naming the cows who shared their home with Piggles the Lowline bull.
"He’s a winner, he’s exceptionally good at his job," he said.
