\u201cWe are both from farming backgrounds and after university we intended to return to my parents\u2019 farm in Zimbabwe and diversify from tobacco into berries and stone fruit,\u201d Lance said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen we got the call in early 2000 saying, \u2018Don\u2019t come home, get a job\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth family farms had been requisitioned by the Zimbabwean Government, and with no farms to go back to, everything was lost for both families.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the early 2000s, Nikki\u2019s mum, dad, sister and two brothers had emigrated to New Zealand.<\/p>\n
Lance\u2019s family went overseas, but his father remains in Zimbabwe.<\/p>\n
A few fresh starts<\/p>\n
\u201cI followed Lance, and we went to the UK on an ancestral visa as we both had UK grandparents,\u201d Nikki said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt gave us the space to earn over there and work out what to do next.\u201d<\/p>\n
This path led them back to Africa in 2003.<\/p>\n
Lance worked for a British company on a Kenyan flower farm that exported to Europe.<\/p>\n
The couple had two children, Hayley (now 17) and Matthew (now 14) and enjoyed living on a 20,000ha game farm with 200-300ha set aside for the flowers.<\/p>\n
They described it as beautiful and remained there for 10 years until political unrest between Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan made life dangerous once more, and the family left the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had visited my family in New Zealand several times over the years, so it made sense to come here. They lived a safe and peaceful life with their families,\u201d Nikki said.<\/p>\n
The Dodds moved to the Bay of Plenty in 2012, with Lance finding work in the kiwifruit packhouses and later working in a management role.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard starting again from scratch, but we knew we had finally found somewhere safe and around family and where we could finally put down roots,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A place of their own<\/p>\n
Nikki in the truffi\u00e8re training Indie the springer spaniel pup to hunt for truffles. <\/p>\n
The couple began looking at lifestyle properties where they could live, work and give their children a rural life similar to the one they experienced when young.<\/p>\n
When Lance first saw a truffle farm near Te Puke for sale, it was out of budget, but he noticed it again 10 months later, and the price was now within reach.<\/p>\n
\u201cLance looked at it with a friend, and before he even had time to tell us, he\u2019d put an offer on and approached the bank for finance!\u201d Nikki said.<\/p>\n
The property was an 8ha block where previous owners, Maureen and Colin Binns, had established a truffle farm and ran truffle tasting tours to teach people about an almost mystical fungus, the black P\u00e9rigord truffle.<\/p>\n
Lance saw the possibilities, and luckily so did his family when they visited for the first time.<\/p>\n
They moved in December 2024.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs well as the truffi\u00e8re, we have an idyllic 3.5ha of QEII covenanted New Zealand bush and a crystal-clear waterway, which Maureen and Colin looked after so well,\u201d Lance said.<\/p>\n
Hayley Dodd with pet piglet Piggywig.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are certainly happy to take over their legacy and have plans to resurrect the 8km of walkways through the forest and share the beauty with others.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having never seen a truffle before buying the property, it\u2019s been a steep learning curve for Nikki and Lance.<\/p>\n
Despite being four hours\u2019 drive away, Maureen and Colin have returned several times to pass on their wisdom and knowledge, something the Dodds are hugely grateful for.<\/p>\n
This included using truffles for culinary delights and how to train a dog to hunt for truffles.<\/p>\n
Six-month-old springer spaniel Indie was doing well, and Nikki said that she had already gone into the truffi\u00e8re and found truffles.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe still rushes a bit, but I\u2019m finding it amazing to be forming a strong bond with a dog and learning to read her,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Hayley has a pet pig, and Lance is interested in seeing if he can train it to truffle hunt, as pigs are traditionally used for that role in Europe.<\/p>\n
Other animals include three cows, 12 sheep for \u201cmowing\u201d, 18 chickens and beehives from a local beekeeper.<\/p>\n
By July 2025, Lance had committed to working full-time on their property.<\/p>\n
Alongside the summer and winter truffle seasons and the summer truffle tours, the couple intends to grow exotic mushrooms such as oyster, shiitake and enoki to provide a consistent, year-round income.<\/p>\n
After being caught up in turbulent times overseas, the family has finally found peace and a home to call their own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe are both from farming backgrounds and after university we intended to return to my parents\u2019 farm in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9600,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[6661,6643,6636,6646,6645,6638,1256,6652,3982,4954,6651,6635,6639,6656,6657,2650,6649,6658,6660,6659,6642,6648,96,6033,6640,6647,6637,6650,1034,465,6644,5827,6655,6653,4822,6641,6654,6634,106],"class_list":{"0":"post-9599","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-zimbabwe","8":"tag-across","9":"tag-back","10":"tag-bay","11":"tag-best","12":"tag-biggest","13":"tag-builds","14":"tag-country","15":"tag-events","16":"tag-family","17":"tag-farm","18":"tag-favourites","19":"tag-from","20":"tag-future","21":"tag-gave","22":"tag-glimpse","23":"tag-in","24":"tag-including","25":"tag-into","26":"tag-livelihoods","27":"tag-lives","28":"tag-looks","29":"tag-months","30":"tag-news","31":"tag-of","32":"tag-on","33":"tag-past","34":"tag-plenty","35":"tag-readers","36":"tag-review","37":"tag-rural","38":"tag-some","39":"tag-stories","40":"tag-that","41":"tag-those","42":"tag-to","43":"tag-truffle","44":"tag-yarns","45":"tag-year","46":"tag-zimbabwe"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}