The Path for Young Farmers Starts at Jeff Farm
Two young school leavers will soon be on their way to a Southland farm for an adventure that will shape the rest of their lives.
They have been chosen to be the latest farm cadets at The Salvation Army’s Jeff Farm at Kaiwera, near Gore. In two years, they will each leave with a team of trained dogs, a wide range of farm skills and ready to work on any dry stock farm. They will also have developed life skills to carry them through the rest of their lives.
Jeff Farm cadets are aged between 16 and 20 and receive hands-on sheep, beef and deer farm training during a two-year cadetship. This includes mustering, shearing, general stock work, tractor work, fencing, winter grazing rotations and training dogs. They learn to drive a range of vehicles, and how to butcher stock and handle a chainsaw safely. They also have the chance to do levels 2 and 3 New Zealand Certificate in Agriculture qualifications.
Farm in demand
Jeff Farm can accommodate only five cadets at a time, and demand for the programme is high. In July, up to 100 visitors—would-be trainees and their families—attended an open day. Farm Manager Michael Benton says it was a great success. They had to organise the visitors into three groups to manage the tour of the farm. He says the applicants were not just from farming or rural areas, ‘We had almost more North Islanders this year’.
Michael tries to get a good mix of cadets. ‘We do try and select the kids who wouldn’t have an easy path to farming.’ The hotly contested selection process starts at the open day but some, he says, are just too young. ‘It’s easy to weed out a few early on. They need to be bold.’
Many of the candidates are coming straight from school—some have no background in farming—and Michael fields a lot of questions. ‘A lot of the conversations are with the parents to be honest. It can be hard to get words out of teenagers.’
Michael is not too concerned about their school qualifications—some of them have struggled at school—but he is interested in one thing above all. ‘Attitude—100 percent attitude.’ Applications close a few weeks after the open day, and the application forms start arriving almost immediately. Michael will interview six or seven people, and he decides in September who gets to start at Jeff Farm the following January.
2026 first-year cadets with their heading pups. (L–R) Lilly McQueen with Jess, Ollie Walker-Leach with Meg, and James Read with Tig.
Starting out
The second-year cadets are encouraged to act as mentors to the first-years and are brought in to tell the families what they found hard to begin with—often it’s a lot to do with living in shared accommodation. Cadets are housed in single quarters and are fed by an onsite cook. Getting up and going to work every day can be hard to get used to, and the work is hard, but Michael also knows the importance of giving them some time off and encourages them to play sport and get involved in the community.
He doesn’t often get it wrong when choosing candidates. ‘It has very rarely not worked out. I have only ever had one not make it through since we have been here.’
Jeff Farm cadets are paid an hourly rate rather than an allowance, which helps to create the right employee–employer relationship and sets expectations on the trainees.
‘They get a fair bit of responsibility and the pressure to perform,’ Michael says.
‘There are no shocks when they leave here. If they need to get up at 4am, they get up at 4am.’
It also helps them to start assembling their team of dogs. ‘We encourage the cadet to source a heading pup, then after a while they look for their first huntaway. They buy their own pups, and we help them train them.’
‘I found Jeff Farm. It’s only a half-hour away from home, but it’s way different farming. Being in a cadetship, they take time to really teach you.’
Trained and ready
Two second-year cadets, Jake Anderson and Noah Monson, will graduate on 22 December and can expect to walk into jobs on farms as fully fledged shepherds.
Jake’s parents have a sheep and beef farm at Tuatapere. When he left school, he says he had two options, either go to university or do something else. He chose the something else. ‘I found Jeff Farm. It’s only a half-hour away from home, but it’s way different farming. Being in a cadetship, they take time to really teach you.
‘I didn’t really have a clue. I expected to be put to work. I expected to learn.’ But his first lesson was that, unlike university students, there’s no ‘O week’ at Jeff Farm for cadets. Jake says he started at the beginning of January, and it was hard work from day one.
‘It’s pushed me out of my comfort zone quite a lot, having to interact with people you don’t really know.’ Looking back though, he can see how much that has changed him. He recalls he used to stand back when farmers were talking about their farms, now he understands what they are talking about. He’ll even offer his parents some advice. ‘I certainly come home with some new ideas—some that they like, some that they think, why are you doing that?’
Jake, now 19, is looking for a sheep and beef farming job in Southland. But not Tuatapere just yet.
Noah is also 19 and from a farming background. His family has a dairy farm at Methven in Canterbury, and while he says he likes ‘the cow side of things’, the cadetship was the opportunity to learn something new. As soon as he knew he had won a cadetship, Noah left school and found work on a farm to get some money behind him. He says the toughest thing at Jeff Farm is taking in all the information. But he knows he now has a network of mentors and some solid friends who are only a phone call away.
Noah’s ideal job would be ‘preferably a bit of high country and a bit of dog work’. He doesn’t mind where he goes. ‘I’ll leave here being a shepherd and I’d like to go to the best job I could. I’d like to see where sheep and beef take me.’ Wherever he goes, he’ll be taking his team of five dogs along.
Farm foundations
Michael says the Jeff Farm graduates are well regarded, and he is often contacted by farmers looking for staff. ‘They do leave here very well-rounded—they are very well trained; they have got all the tickets.’
He says two years make a huge difference in the life of a cadet in terms of their confidence and communication: ‘They come as kids and leave as adults.’
Michael and his wife Tarryn, farm administrator, say their focus is developing young people. ‘The farming is really the vehicle—we’re ultimately trying to help them grow into confident, capable adults.’
And the wider team is on board with this. ‘It takes a special type of person to be willing to coach, mentor and patiently teach young people every day, while also running a high-performing commercial farming business. Our whole team invests a huge amount into the cadets’ development, and we couldn’t achieve what we do without them.’
They have developed some Jeff Farm foundations—values of communication, accountability, trust, pride and teamwork—that guide everything they do when coaching the cadets. ‘They are just as important to us as the practical farming skills.’
‘It takes a special type of person to be willing to coach, mentor and patiently teach young people every day…’
(L-R): Second-year cadet Noah Monson proudly holding up his 106th sheep shorn for the day; second-year cadet Jake Anderson putting his handpiece together ahead of a day shearing the farm’s hoggets.
The early farm
The 2400-hectare property, between Mataura and Clinton, has been run by Michael and Tarryn for The Salvation Army Trust Board since 2023. Michael is from Kaitaia and has worked on farms throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, including training farms. He values being able to pass on his knowledge to a new generation of farmers. Tarryn is from Southland. For a time, her father was a shepherd at Jeff Farm, and she lived there as a young child. The pair met in Taupo and have been farming together for 15 years.
The Bentons arrived on the farm in 2022, and Michael took over as manager the following year. Jeff Farm is a 25,000-stock unit carrying sheep, beef and deer and is one of New Zealand’s leading agricultural training farms. It is the only Salvation Army dry stock farm in the world.
Previous landowner Edmund Jeff farmed the property before the Second World War with the assistance of local labour. However, the war reduced the pool of workers and, in the early 1950s, widowed and without children, and a farm in desperate need of capital for development, Edmund was faced with compulsory acquisition of his farm to resettle returned soldiers.
Instead, he formed a trust to administer the property and stipulated that the farm was to be gifted to The Salvation Army and used to train young people who could not otherwise have a career in farming. In 1954, Edmund went off to travel the world and The Salvation Army took over the farm and began running it according to his wishes. Young people were trained, and the property was slowly developed and began to show a profit.
In 1982, The Salvation Army Trust Board invited some southern business and farming experts to sit on a farm management board. This led to a massive development programme financed by accumulated profits. Low-lying paddocks were drained and re-grassed, the subdivision improved, new internal roads were built and the farm buildings upgraded.
Forwards and outwards
Nothing stands still on Jeff Farm. They have recently built a new butchery and are upgrading the cattle yards. Accommodation is being expanded so they can boost the number of cadets in the programme from five to six. Michael says they are always looking to improve genetics and to use more technology on the farm. But working dogs will always win over drones when it comes to mustering stock.
Income from the farm allows The Salvation Army to give scholarships to assist young people to study agriculture-related courses at Lincoln University, Telford Rural Polytechnic (now via SIT) and Primary ITO.
Jeff Farm Trust also offers grants to support various Salvation Army programmes in Aotearoa New Zealand and overseas. Funding priority is given to underprivileged youth and includes adventure-based learning, camping, alcohol and drug therapy, training opportunities and supervision for court-related diversion
