Keith Austen bought his Karangahake home, Bullswool Farm Park, because he was a thwarted dairy farmer.

'I grew up on a 50 acre Waikato dairy farm, left school and started to work for my Dad and unfortunately horses were just going out and machinery was just coming in. And I was not in tune with machinery.”
Keith says after he had managed to cause a bit of damage, his father called him to one side and suggested a career change.
'He said ‘Listen boy, you try hard and you're a good worker, but you haven't got enough brains to be a farmer. Why don't you go school teaching?' So I did.”
But Keith soon missed the rural life and what he calls ‘the good old days', and he was sad to see so much of what was good about rural life in New Zealand disappearing.
So he began to write about it.
'I choose to write in poetry because I'm a lazy coot,” says Keith.
'You just write a few lines, put a full stop and there's a poem.”
Keith has become quite famous as a rural poet. He is known as the Bard of Paeroa and has two books of his poems published, (Bullswool and Barbed Wire and More Bullswool and Barbed Wire) and has made appearances on National Radio and Country Calendar.
When Keith and his wife Jan first bought their 100 acre hill farm, they ran horses, sheep and cattle on it, but over time Jan's penchant for unusual and exotic animals suggested a new direction for the farm.
About five years ago word had begun to spread of the exotic animals they had on their farm and a school asked if they could come and see the animals. That started the whole thing off – today it's a full time farm park and farmstay accommodation.
'More and more New Zealanders, and particularly children, are losing touch with natural things, with animals. Here our aim is to be as hands-on as possible. They can feed the animals and they can groom the horses.”

Great for kids
Keith says the difference in some children is amazing after they have been at the farm a short while.
'I have seen children come here virtually terrified of the rabbits. Then they go around and they feed the animals and they come back skipping and confident.”
Keith says they breed animals at the farm as well and so at virtually any time of the year there is a baby of some sort.
'And everyone loves babies, whether they're human or animal. So we like to have a few babies around so they can see the cycle of life.”
Keith and Jan's daughter Sue, who is a clinical hypnotherapist, grew up on the farm with them and after a spell living overseas; she has returned to Bullswool with her partner Norm and now manages the farm.
'I still own it but now it's back to my youth when I was the yokel on the farm and not allowed to drive the tractor. Now I'm the repair man, the labourer, mending the fences and things like that.”
Bullswool Farm Park has a broad selection of animals to pet and feed that includes miniature horses, paint horses, miniature cattle, deer, alpacas, llamas, kunekune pigs, rabbits, emus, ducks, rare breed chickens, coloured sheep, miniature goats, and donkeys.

Rare sheepdog
They also have a very unusual dog. Radar is an Anatolian Karabash – so rare in New Zealand that Sue even offered me $100 if I could tell her the breed. I started to get close and she was definitely worried for a moment, but fortunately for Sue, I had never heard of this breed of Turkish sheep guarding dog, so her money was safe.
They perform a similar job to the Italian Maremma sheepdogs, which Coast & Country did a story about last year. Sue says there was only one Anatolian Karabash breeding pair brought into New Zealand.
'So very few Kiwis have ever seen one, and they are an ancient breed – if you look closely you can see the foundations of some more common breeds like the bull mastiff.”
The chooks that live at Bullswool are also a bit unusual.
'We call our farmstay cottage Green Eggs & Ham Cottage, because we've got these Araucana that lay green eggs. When kids come and stay they just go mad over collecting the eggs. You'd think we were on a treasure hunt at Cadbury's.”
Sue says it is surprising sometimes what attractions get the most interest.

Appreciating nature
'It pays for us to talk to our customers and find out what they like. For instance I never thought anyone would be particularly interested in sheep and our flock was always a few paddocks away from our visitors. However, I put a few sheep in one of the petting farm paddocks to munch a few weeds. A kindergarten group came to visit that day and despite all these exotic animals around the kids and quite a few of the parents went mad over the sheep. At the end of the day Bullswool is that authentic type of rural experience that some of us take for granted.”