Despite the relentless challenges—the physical labour, the long hours, and the emotional toll of sustaining a legacy—the passion for dairying persists. For the Irvine sisters, Clover Hill is more than just land; it is a testament to resilience, a beacon of heritage, and a promise of continuity in the face of adversity.
As in McLeod’s Daughters, the Irvine women of Jamberoo have dedicated their lives to keep Clover Hill Dairies in the family.
Olwyn Irvine, 83 sparks up the combustion stove in the old Jamberoo farmhouse – it will cook the nightly meal and heat water for their daily shower. Her sister Molly, 81 carts in the firewood as she has done since she was a girl. The stove is solid and reliable – a reminder of a simpler life.
“We’ve had this stove for 50 years and never thought to get a new one,” says Olwyn.
Step outside the Irvine’s front door and 30m away is some of the most advanced computerised technology known to the dairy industry. Along with farming partners Michael and Lynne Strong, the four sisters, including Valma and Nola, have helped transform Clover Hill Dairies into one of the most productive dairy farms in the country. Deregulation forced their hand. The sisters, accustomed to sacrifice and hard times, didn’t blink when in 2000 the Strong’s put forward a daring proposal to keep the farm afloat.
Nick Strong continues the Irvine Sisters’ legacy
Clover Hill has been a bit like the television series McLeod’s Daughters. After their father died in 1949, the girls stayed on the land to help their mother run the farm – finishing their schooling by correspondence. They never married or had children and they’ve always lived in the farmhouse, enjoying each others company around the old kitchen table.
Nola, Valma, Olwyn and Molly ( Myra) Irvine with their mother Ivy and father Robert Irvine
In 1939 a battery run wireless was their only link to the outside world, but today a television positioned in the kitchen keeps the women informed.
Valma, Molly and Olwyn continued to play and active role in the dairy into their 80s
In the last two years Valma, 83, and Nola, 78, have died leaving Olwyn and Molly to make the tough decisions. But dairying is in their blood and the women have shown the same resilience their forefathers did 150 years ago.
The original Clover Hill homestead and dairy
The farm has been in their family since 1851, when their great great grandfather James Irvine and his son purchased the land naming it Clover Hill. With 180 degree views of the ocean, the Irish settlers cleared the rainforest and forged a new life for themselves in a strange environment.
Molly and Olwyn’s grandfather James and his wife Sarah ( nee Purnell ) on their wedding day
There have now been four generations of Irvine’s farming on the side of Saddleback Mountain. When the sister’s were young there were 300 dairy farms in the Kiama area – today there are just 30. In the six years since deregulation 50 per cent of dairy farms in NSW and Queensland have disappeared.
Deregulation has halved the farm-gate price of milk, but the drought has been the tipping-point for many asset rich, cash poor farmers who’ve made the agonising decision to walk away from their land.
Those who survived were forced to change. More milk had to be produced to make the same amount of money. A decision was made at Clover Hill to “ramp-up” the operation and to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars back into the farm. It was a defining moment for the Strong’s.
Lynne, a pharmacist for 25 years, gave up her career to return to the land full-time, so too did their only son Nick, who had just completed his HSC.
“Most people sold their cows, but we did the opposite,” says Lynne. “We’re now running four times the amount of cows per hectare than we did before deregulation.”
To finance the move the Strong’s and the sisters sold a 280ha joint investment property out west. With the money they built a state-of-the-art $300,000 milking shed which has the capacity to milk 28 cows at a time. Now instead of 80 cows a day, they milk 300.
It was 28 years ago when Michael, then 23, began share farming at Clover Hill. The women took a chance delegating responsibility of their livelihood to someone so young – but it wasn’t to be their last leap of faith in him.
The sisters had grown up with Australian Illawarra Shorthorn cows (AIS), but Michael was keen to swap the herd for Holsteins, a breed which produces more milk. Just before deregulation they reluctantly agreed.
Each cow is now considered a potential elite athlete and the farm hires a full-time nutritionist to feed them a combination of pellets, vitamins, grain and corn.
“If you change a cows diet overnight and you get it right there’s more milk in the vat the next day, but if you stuff it up you get less milk,” explains Lynne. “The results are instant, it’s just so dramatic. There’s a huge amount of research into the science of this industry.”
Hard work and clever decisions have paid off and now Clover Hill Dairies is regarded as one of the most productive farms in the country, with four of its cows this year becoming Australian record holders.
In the show ring too they’ve had success winning the All Australian Three-Year-Old, the first time the farm has ever taken out the award.
“This farm would be up there with the best in the country,” says Lynne. “But people are out there doing it equally as well.”
The view from Clover Hill is spectacular, but Michael Strong isn’t taking in the scenery. Instead he casts a critical eye over his herd of Holsteins. Despite having some of the best and most productive cows in the country he’s still not content. He’d like all of his cows to reach an elite level.
“When you win at the shows you think well I’ve done an alright job,” says Michael. “But when I stand there and look at the herd, I’m pretty critical, I want them all to look wonderful every day of the week.”
Every 12 months the Strong’s and the Irvine’s reinvent the farm. This year they made another decision to increase milking from two to three times a day -starting at 4am and ending at 10pm.
Nick’s decision to follow in his father’s footsteps, although celebrated by both families, also increased the pressure to produce more milk.
“You’ve got to produce a million litres a year to support one family, so obviously we had to double that,” says Lynne. “Now we produce 21/2 million litres and we’re now heading towards three million.”
Before machinery the sisters would have to milk 50 cows by hand twice a day.
“I was very good at milking,” says Olwyn proudly. “‘I used to milk eight cows in one hour and that was good going. It’s hard to deal with all the progress, but we’ve just accepted everything as it’s come, you’ve got to move into the modern world.”
The farm has always been the centre of their lives and they never had any desire to travel overseas or have a family of their own. They still have their jobs around the farm to do, Olwyn mops up the buckets after each milking and Molly teaches the calves to feed.
“We grew up in the war years so I suppose we just stayed on the farm and worked,” says Molly. “I did have some admirers though.” “So did I,” chimes in Olwyn. “But none I wanted to marry.”
Olwyn admits that as a girl she never imagined that the farm would always be her whole life.
“It’s been a hard life I suppose in a way, it’s the same thing over and over, but there’s been lots of pleasures.”
The farm house has always been full of children, either relatives or the offspring of the share farmers working on the farm.
Nick spent his afternoons after school sitting around the Irvine’s kitchen table playing with toy farm animals waiting for his father to finish the milking. Clover Hill has always been his home and the sisters consider him part of their family.
Lynne doesn’t fit the farmer mould and happily admits to never having milked a cow in her life. But having grown up on farms she’s not scared to get dirty and it’s her job to look after the calves. She’s also in charge of the never-ending bookwork and data-entry with each cow having a record since birth.
Since deregulation the dairy is run more like a business. “In one way deregulation was good for us,” says Lynne. “We’ve made wise choices and we’ve become more efficient.”
But it’s been a risk and at times they’ve wondered if it will work – particularly as the drought begins to squeeze.
“The drought is tough, it’s really tough and because the animals are so important to us we don’t downgrade the amount of feed we use, we take the view that the cows are number one in our operation and they have to be looked after. I think though if it goes on for another year all dairy farmers will have to review their situation.”
Grain has doubled in price in the last month and 2007 is already shaping up to be a bleak year for many farms. Thanks to Lynne’s bargaining skills the farm was lucky to have locked in grain at the old price until the next harvest.
The drought has turned cows into a valuable commodity and there are now plans to diversify the business. In the future they hope to sell 30 high pedigree cows a year on the international market – so the dairy won’t be so dependent on the farm-gate price of milk. But first they need to improve their progeny. Twice a year a specialist vet from Victoria transforms a section of the farm into a mini fertility hospital. In August 14 cows of high genetic merit were chosen as donors and were super-ovulated. A week later the embryos were flushed out of the cow’s uterus and viewed under a microscope with the live embryos then being either frozen or implanted into surrogate cows.
“Each year there’s a new development in the research,” says Lynne. “It’s like the dairy industry is the frontier of IVF and I imagine that a lot of the success on dairy farms actually goes back into the human research.”
There have also been massive changes to the farm’s physical boundaries and a road now runs through the middle of the property. To ensure a sustainable and viable dairy long-term, in 1998 they swapped two parcels of non-farmable land for 40 farmable hectares. Today there are seven Torrens Title lots on the 120ha property, of which two-thirds is rainforest, creating a rural hamlet within the working farm.
With the sale of each lot came a list of covenants to ensure Clover Hill Dairies always had the right to farm. There are never any complaints about the odour, the lights or noise and there are strict rules about pets and priority water for the farm.
“It’s a fairly unique situation,” says Lynne. “We have urban and rural co-existing together. “The sub-division has been developed around the dairy and the sizes of the blocks haven’t impacted on the farm at all – most of the lots are rainforest and allow for only a small section of land to be built on.”
But even with close neighbours dairying can be a harsh and isolating life.
“It’s not so much hard work, but hard hours, you get tired of course and you get your down moments when you wish you’d done something else with your life,” says Michael. “But it doesn’t last long, the cows are my passion and that’s what keeps me going.” “I’m always thinking about the heritage of the farm, it’s been such a privilege to live here. The sisters have made a lot of sacrifices to keep the farm going and I’d like to think that there will be a dairy farm on Clover Hill for many years to come.”
#IrvineFamily #CloverHill #FamilyLegacy #RuralAustralia #FarmingHistory #JamesIrvine #SarahPurnell #SaddlebackMountain #Resilience #HistoricalAgriculture
This blog post is a reprint of a story by Jodie Duffy in the Illawarra Mercury Weekender 21 October 2006 and is part of the Irvine Family history series
