'The face of the earthquake': What became of Kaikōura’s stranded cows?

When the ground was wrenched apart beneath Derrick Millton's north Canterbury farm 10 years ago, three of his cattle were left clinging to a tiny island of grass – as the whole world looked on.

The magnitude 7.8 Kaikōura earthquake struck at two minutes past midnight on November 14, 2016, killing two people, tearing through farmland, cutting off towns and causing damage as far north as Wellington.

Within hours, aerial footage captured by Newshub of the two Hereford cows and calf, stranded after the paddock collapsed around them, was beamed around the world.

A decade on, Millton told 1News the cattle became the image people remembered the most.

"If you look at people during an event like that and you say, do you remember the cows on the hill? Well, 90% of the people, you know, following on from that earthquake knew about the cows," he said.

"Somehow everybody had seen it wherever. That was the face of the earthquake, really.

"We didn't realise at the time, but obviously there was a lot of other damage as well, but those cows seem to steal the hearts of a lot of people."

With their lives more isolated than ever, the Milltons had no idea how far the footage had spread. Having no television or internet, the first inkling came when the phone started ringing with calls from international media.

"We had no idea what the world was saying or thinking about us," Millton said.

"These calls would just arrive and you'd tell them what was going on, and they were really interested to know whether we were bona fide farmers and whether we actually knew what we were talking about."

He saw it as a chance to share with the world that New Zealand farmers knew what they were doing.

"Part of it was to try and tell them that we actually were professional people and we were handling the situation as best we could."

Getting the stranded cattle to water was the first priority. Millton and a small team dug a track by hand across broken slip country to reach them.

"It took about, I think, three hours to get them across what normally would have taken 10 minutes for them to walk," he said.

"Once they were out and they had water, and they had grass, there was plenty of grass around. The cows were happy."

He said there was no time for long meetings about how they would get to the stranded animals.

"Farmers don't make plans, they just get out there and do it, really. I mean, we're not a government department. We just get on."

A day or two later, the Ministry of Primary Industries rang to say the family had handled the situation well. Millton said officials told him the world was watching it as an animal welfare issue – far more closely than the family had realised.

"It covered the thing off quite well from a farming aspect, rather than people around the world thinking that we were just plonkers."

Once the cattle were safe, the family followed them around the paddock to get photos for the world's press.

The cattle stayed on the farm and were mated about two weeks later. One had a calf the following year.

Millton said both cows have probably since died, "because they don't last forever", but their story lives on in a children's book.

Millton's wife, Jane, wrote Moo and Moo and the Little Calf Too, which grew out of a poem she wrote in the early hours of the day after the quake.

Millton said he and his family were in a good place 10 years on.

"I think we're all back to where we should be, apart from the odd scar on the farm and here and there, and we've got some much better assets and better roads and better things in Kaikōura," he said.

But he said there was one thing he still wanted to do: thank the people who helped.

Locals from Marlborough turned up within a day or two to fix fences, and food parcels arrived from Southland, Otago and inland Canterbury, often with notes from schoolchildren.

With roads cut, a Defence Force NH90 helicopter dropped supplies into one of the Milltons' paddocks.

"The pilot was only on the ground for about a minute… and then they just gave me thumbs up, and off they went again, and it was just absolutely amazing," Millton said.

"You simply can't grasp it until you have something like that happen – how vast the care of people in this country is really. It was very emotional at the time.

"Those people, probably we never publicly thanked them, but this is a good opportunity to do that."