Dairy stalwart Rob Moyle hangs up his boots

“Did that for a couple of years. It taught me a fair bit about work ethic,” Mr Moyle said.

“I finished up there and then moved back up to Bunnaloo and did 10 years of broadacre farming.”

In 1982, he got married, but when disaster struck, he had to say goodbye to the town he moved to.

“We were going to stay farming up that way, the farm I was working on, there was a drought. Really, really tough going,” he said.

So, he made a deal.

If his wife could get her job back in the Kyabram area, they would move back.

And so she did.

When he moved back, he got a call from a company called J.S. Brooke & Co, asking if he could give them a hand.

And so he did.

“Twenty years later is when I left that business,” Mr Moyle said.

“I was really, really fortunate to get that job, and be able to stay there for as long as I did.”

When he did leave, he moved straight back into another dairy role, working as a vet following his interest in mastitis.

“Rod, who was a vet, he convinced me to leave the milk machine business company and go and work at the vet clinic,” he said.

“We did that for eight years or so, then Rod decided to open his own business called Dairy Focus and asked me to go and work with him.

“So I went and worked with Rod for 10 years.”

He left Dairy Focus in 2019.

“I left in 2019, which was a really tough time for farmers,” Mr Moyle said.

“Water was dear, food was scarce, the milk price was terrible, and, we just basically ran out of work.”

But his trend of getting head-hunted came into play again, when leading dairy possessor Saputo approached him.

“They asked if I was interested in going and ... helping their milk quality field service, which I did for five years,” he said.

“It was really quite interesting to come from working in a small business to go to a big corporate business.

“Somebody said to me, it’s like trying to turn the Queen Anne around on the Murray River.”

He closed his chapter at Saputo earlier this year, after hearing his body ask for a rest.

“I turned 70 in February, and my body was starting to let me know that,” he said.

“It was hard to make that decision, because I still feel that I’ve got stuff that I can offer the industry.

“But having a little grandchild made me realise how much I’d missed out on when our two children were young because of working.”

Spending time with family will fill his retirement calendar, as well as travelling in his caravan.

His work in the dairy industry has sent him across the world and plastered him on newspaper pages, including Country News.

His travel includes the US, New Zealand and South Africa as well as across Australia.