Life on the farm

AUCKLAND – Jonathan Madera attached four teat cups to a cow’s udder, fiddled with the gate control panel, and attached cups to the next cow.

As the milk flow dropped, the cups automatically detached, and the cows tried to kick them away, scattering manure in the process. Madera grabbed a hose and sprayed the revolving platform to flush out the manure.

It’s dirty work, and Kiwis are increasingly refusing to do it, or even the cleaner aspects of dairy farming.

So they are bringing in foreigners to do the job. Madera, a native of Maasin, Iloilo, is among a growing number of Filipinos working in the dairy farms of New Zealand, most of them in the southern region. 

Madera’s employer Ben McConnell, a fourth-generation owner of two farms with 1,350 dairy cows, employs three Filipinos and three Kiwis in the mechanized farms called Siberia, in the Canterbury region.

McConnell, 25, told me he and a number of Kiwi farm owners prefer Filipino workers because “they’re willing to learn anything and conscientious.”

Madera managed a cattle-fattening farm of banker Deogracias Vistan in Mexico, Pampanga for 10 years before he was lured by higher pay in New Zealand in 2007. Estranged from his wife, Madera told me he needed to earn more because his two children were entering college.

Now 46 and on his second Kiwi employer, Madera describes McConnell as “a very good friend of mine… wala ka nang hahanapin sa kanila (you can’t ask for anything more from them).”

And yet life on a dairy farm, in a country where there are more cows and sheep than the 4.4 million population, can be lonely. Madera’s Filipino co-worker, with whom he shares a three-bedroom house and a regular supply of fresh meat and eggs from the farm, wants to bring over his wife and children. McConnell thinks there isn’t enough room for the family on farm housing facilities.

President Aquino, addressing the Filipino community in this city last Monday, said he was doing his best to make the Philippines a better place so people would not need to find decent employment overseas.

This has to be one of his most ambitious goals.

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Housing, long working hours, and overcharging by recruiters are among the problems initially brought by Filipino dairy workers to the attention of the Filipino Dairy Workers of New Zealand.

The group was organized in September 2007 following the first influx of Filipino dairy workers in New Zealand. From an initial membership of 15, the group has grown to 500.

The group’s president, Samuel Bruzo, 45, told me in Christchurch that most of the complaints were addressed and the number has tapered off. Bruzo, a marine transportation graduate, has worked in different parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, mostly with corporate inspector SGS. He told me that compared with employers in other countries, up to 85 percent of Kiwi employers were “good.”

“It’s much better here,” he told me. In the other countries where he worked, he said, “you have no freedom. You have no employees’ rights. Only the employers have rights.”

He said several of the complaints in New Zealand were the result of misunderstanding about the unusual working hours on a dairy farm, where cows must be milked twice a day.

Working schemes vary on each farm. Some employees work 11 days straight, then get three days off; others get a day off only every other week.

A typical salary for a farm worker is $35,000 in New Zealand money a year, or a fortnightly net of NZ$1,350. Those on a two-year working visa, or who have worked in the country for two years straight under the original contract, enjoy total medical coverage, just like Kiwi citizens.

Housing is typically free and spacious. Bruzo, for example, stays in a 900-square-meter, three-bedroom house with a lawn. He lives there with his wife and five children, aged 3 to 20. They are happy in Christchurch, he said.

Madera told me he also received NZ$30 a month as telecommunication allowance.

The pay and benefits are tempting enough for a graduate of veterinary medicine from the University of the Philippines in Los Baños to work as a “milker” on a farm.

Earl Magtibay, 29, worked for six months at Bayer in the Philippines before a friend referred him to a dairy farm recruiter. He arrived in New Zealand in 2007 and has no immediate plans of returning home to Los Baños for good.

That’s one veterinarian (specializing in swine) that the Philippines has lost.

There are also professionals, among them Sonny Sanchez, who worked in quality operations at Wyeth in Laguna before becoming the quality manager of Synlait, a nutritional milk processing company which also operates dairy farms in Canterbury. The company employs a growing number of foreign workers. Sanchez’s team includes workers from Brazil, Fiji and India.

Bruzo estimates that 5,000 Filipinos are now working in 90 percent of the dairy farms in New Zealand.

Immigration officials are tightening requirements, with applicants now required to undergo two-year training in the Philippines before coming to this country.

Magtibay has the training and has no complaints. He stays in a one-bedroom house and enjoys one-month holiday in Los Baños every year.

Isn’t milking cows hard work? “It’s well compensated hard work,” he told me.

Until P-Noy can offer a better alternative, we will see more Filipinos seeking greener pastures in New Zealand.