Noldy & Bev Rust

Hi I'm Noldy. My wife Bev and I live at Te Pahu with our four children on a 52 effective ha farm milking 210 cows. We love the family farm setup that we run and really enjoy being owner operators. Bev works in town as a receptionist, our eldest daughter is a pharmacist and two other daughters attend Te Awamutu College. Our 6 year old foster boy is at Te Pahu Primary School.

We changed our farming system from a relatively all grass system to a more intensive system about 5 years ago, lifting our stocking rate from 3.2 to 4 cows per ha and bringing in maize and PKE. Our system is still simple to run with our emphasis being on maximizing profit as simply as we can in order to enable us to be involved in the many off farm activities that we enjoy.

I am thrilled to be involved in SMASH and am looking forward to the various events as I believe there will be huge value for all who attend both in the presentations from the speakers and also from the networking with other farmers of similar herd size.