DOWN ON THE FARM

When he was a kid, Sam Spencer-Bower used to help out his grandfather Marmaduke in his massive vegetable garden, just across from the farm cottage where he lived with his parents. He didn’t realise at the time that his grandad was something of a legend in Canterbury farming. His family had worked on this land ever since great-great-grandfather Marmaduke Dixon came from Claxby in Lincolnshire and in 1852 established a large farm in North Canterbury, near the gravelly north bank of the Waimakariri River.

In fact, Marmaduke Dixon was one of the first in New Zealand to irrigate his land, initiating flood irrigation from the Waimakariri before 1900. Sam’s grandfather, Marmaduke Spencer-Bower, farmed the land until he was about 95 and wrote a book about the farm and Marmaduke Dixon’s legacy. In other words, Sam Spencer-Bower — middle name Marmaduke — had a lot to live up to.

By the time his grandfather died at the age of 98, Spencer-Bower was already well on the road to taking over the fifth-generation family farm. He was studying for a degree in farm management at Lincoln University. That’s where he met his wife, Jo, who was herself from a sixth-generation farming family (her brother is former All Blacks captain Richie McCaw). At the time, Jo recalls, she liked the fact that Sam had a “sensitive side”, that he was “not a big showman”.

In 2012, the year after they got married, Spencer-Bower became Claxby’s operations manager. He and Jo urged the family to convert what had been a 1400-hectare mixed sheep, beef and cropping farm to dairy.

It was a huge decision for a family that had farmed sheep for generations. There were sound reasons to do it: “The economic future of sheep farming on irrigated flat land was grim,” explains Spencer-Bower, who is now 37. Still, without his urging, his parents might not have made the leap. That meant the pressure for success was riding largely on Sam and Jo’s shoulders. And because they were learning as they went, things took twice as long. At the end of each day, Spencer-Bower found it increasingly hard to switch off. “I felt like I didn’t want to waste any minute, I needed every spare minute to be working, to get things done.”

Around that time, Jo, who was the farm’s management accountant, started noticing that her normally thoughtful husband would get angry and upset by small things — fixating on her grammar, obsessing over a tiny mistake on a spreadsheet, or “worrying about a scratch on a