Farmer Bill

New Zealand agriculture has seen huge changes in the period from the end of WWII to the 2000 Millennium. Mechanisation, new products, new plants and animals, and changing financial fortunes. Technical and management changes on farms and political and economic influences off it. Horses were replaced by tractors and trucks, haystacks by barns and bales. Urban attitudes to farming changed. However it is still the essential base to our economy and place in the world. Farmer Bill is a fictional life story of a typical pastoral farmer through a career starting as a shepherd in the 1950s and retiring from farming in the new Millennium. He was just an ordinary farmer like thousands of others, not especially notable or noteworthy, but who was part of the ongoing platform of the relative prosperity of the period.