A man for all seasons

Since the end of the 1880s generations of the Stringer family have lovingly tended the land at Pig Valley near Nelson. Now contractor Jim Stringer has reluctantly called it a day, though he’s still got his farm.  BY GAVIN RILEY

For well over half a century Jim Stringer has worked the land. He has never wanted to do anything else and has loved it so much that he hasn’t had a proper holiday in all that time – just the occasional week’s shooting trip in the hills or attending a contractors’ conference. 

Now at 68 he’s had to give it away – the long hours and the hard labour. And not surprisingly, retirement is not proving easy for a man who in his working lifetime has spent more than 50,000 hours operating bulldozers.

“I’m sad about giving up work. I’m missing it already,” he says from his home at Pig Valley, 30 kilometres from Nelson and five from Wakefield, where Stringers have lived for the past 120 years.

An earlier retirement than Jim would otherwise have chosen has been prompted by the legacy of a severe work accident six years ago, and a broken leg suffered in July by his wife Rose, keeper of his business accounts.

It is sometimes said that for rural folk the clock ticks slowly and time is measured by the seasons, and in a sense that’s the way it’s been for this agricultural contractor and part-time farmer.

In selling his contracting business Jim has parted with clients he has served for 30 years, and with the D6B bulldozer he bought in 1983 and in which he has clocked up 23,000 hours. Gone too are his discs, heavy harrows and root rake. But he’s keeping the 100hp Track Marshall he bought in 1980 and will use it around his farm.

Jim’s land used to be part of his father Keith’s 480 hectare sheep and cattle farm, which was bought by Jim’s great-grandfather, head plumber at Nelson Hospital, after migrating to New Zealand from the London area in 1889.

When Jim was only 13 he was driving an Allis Chalmers WM crawler tractor which replaced horse-drawn ploughs on the farm. He began contracting on his father’s behalf in 1961, a year after his father bought his first Track Marshall. Jim and his elder brother had shares in the contracting enterprise, which provided a service for neighbouring farmers and also prepared ground for growing fir trees for timber company Baigents.

In 1979 Jim decided he had saved enough money to go out on his own as an agricultural contractor, a move which did not please his father.

“But I still did work he needed doing on the farm, so he couldn’t complain too much,” Jim says.

He bought two 56hp Track Marshalls, then the 100hp model he still has. Because his big set of discs needed a bigger machine, he then acquired the D6B bulldozer.

Much of Jim’s work over the years has been clearing land and sowing it for pasture, but he’s also been involved in forming roads and preparing residential sites. Some of the land clearing has been hard yakka on hilly terrain, including removing up to 300 hectares of gorse and manuka on each of two farms, a task involving root raking, discing, harrowing, sowing and harrowing again.

In 1986 Jim did a different job, which led to his joining the Contractors’ Federation. He was offered a subcontract on Wilkins & Davies’ Matai Dam construction project – 1000 hours of land clearing and “general dogsbody work”. But the man offering the job, the federation’s local branch chairman Bob Taylor, made it clear (as he always did in such situations) that he wanted the work to go to a federation member. So Jim joined.

When the federation’s rural section broke away to become the Rural Contractors’ Federation he joined that too, remaining a member of both organisations until his retirement. 

Jim admits to a liking for working on steep country, finding no challenge in working on flat land. But such work is dangerous, and he’s had his share of accidents.

The first occurred when he was doing tree-planting lines and his Track Marshall nose-dived into a three-metre hole and landed upside down. Fortunately, Jim managed to bail out in time, though he had to reach under the upturned tractor to switch off the engine.   Had he stayed on board, the machine’s light canopy would not have protected him.

The second accident happened when Jim was completing harrowing on a block. He was operating the D6 in third gear when he failed to see a stump and suddenly the machine was upside down – with him still in it. Fortunately, the farmer-client was able to use his bulldozer to right the machine. After checking the D6’s oil level and hooking the harrows on, Jim resumed working.

Another time he was using the D6 to form a road on a steep face above a swamp when the ground beneath the machine gave way. He somehow managed to reverse the D6 to safety as part of the road tumbled into the swamp, but it was left poised on the edge and had to be hauled clear next day by a 20-tonne excavator belonging to Taylor’s Contracting.

Jim’s worst accident occurred in December 2003 while he was sowing on a 28-degree slope and the D6’s bulk sower tumbled into a gully, catapulting the machine into the far bank. An unconscious Jim was stretchered out by firemen and a rescue helicopter flew him to hospital where he was found to have a broken pelvis and vertebrae. He has no memory of the accident, though he believes it was caused through brake trouble he was having with the D6.

He was back at work in mid-February, not at all concerned about the danger of working on steep slopes.

“It didn’t worry me at all. Over the years I’ve been more afraid going to and from work in the vehicle. I thought I might have an accident there,” he says.

However, his injuries left him with some loss of feeling in his legs, which meant relying on his eyesight to maintain his balance. After his wife Rose’s recent accident, when she slipped on a mat at home and was in hospital for nine weeks, Jim decided it was time to retire.

He has leased 370 acres of his farm to one of his former clients to run cattle on and will use the remaining 60 acres himself for fattening about 20 young stock over 12 months then selling them and repeating the process. That will still leave him time for day fishing trips in the boat he has owned for 20 years, visiting friends at the foot of the South Island with Rose, enjoying being a social member of the Contractors’ Federation, and seeing more of his family – an elder son who is a computer technician in

Christchurch, a daughter and a younger son who live locally, and a total of six grandchildren.

Contrary to Jim’s hopes, his younger son, a foreman in a bush gang, was not interested in taking over the contracting business. So Jim has sold it to a long-established local contractor, David Krammer, who first approached him about buying it 12 months ago. 

Although Jim did such a good job over 30 years that he never had to advertise for clients, he’s confident David is a worthy successor.

“He’ll do as good a job at contracting as I can,” Jim says.