"That next step is going to be our last step, so we want to make quite a big step," Mr Kelly said.
About eight years ago, the couple bought a 76ha farm in Wilden, north of Tapanui.
Mr Kelly said the farm was considered "very flat" for the area.
"It is good country but with altitude. We are just short of 500m above sea level, so winter is long."
Their farm had no name.
They floated calling the farm and business Cnoc Baile, a Gaelic term for "homestead on the hill" but they thought it might cause confusion.
"Trying to get someone to look up your name on a computer would be a nightmare," Mr Kelly said.
The plan was to double the size of the farm business, either by buying more land nearby or selling the property to buy a bigger one somewhere in the lower South Island, he said.
"We haven’t quite found the right place yet."
Ideally, a new property would allow them to continue farming Friesian bulls.
About 40% of their livestock were cattle, including a small beef herd.
After buying the farm, they ran mostly cattle and trading livestock.
In the past five years, they had established a Romney breeding flock, Mr Kelly said.
"We have kept our own replacements for three or four years now."
For the first time, this year the couple entered their own flock in the West Otago A&P Society ewe hogget competition and were the runner-up for the top prize.
"It was quite satisfying," Mr Kelly said.
On average, their ewes produced more than one and a-half lambs for tailing.
Hoggets were also mated.
They tailed 690 lambs, produced by 390 ewes and 100 hoggets this season, he said.
"As we don’t have scale, we need that animal performance."
They plan was to take the "robust" Romney flock with them.
Mr Kelly had entered the hogget competition many times before on behalf of Mt Allen, a nearby farm he managed for 15 years.
Under his watch, a Mt Allen crossbred hogget flock won the prize for being the best in Otago and Southland in the early 2010s.
The Mt Allen farm is owned by Nelson and Fiona Hancox and is now run by one of their sons.
Mr Kelly continued managing Mt Allen and working on their new farm, until the Hancox’s son returned home.
Ms Eason works full-time at PGG Wrightson in Heriot.
She recalls the busy time when they bought the farm and they were both working fulltime.
"Shearing sheep at 9pm at night — a bit of team bonding," she said.
"I remember topping paddocks at 4am before I went to work," Mr Kelly said.
Grass growth on their farm was down this season, he said.
Enough grass was grown to feed livestock, including finishing lambs, but not enough to bank the normal amount of supplementary feed.
"Normally I have up to 80 bales of baleage but I’ve only got 20."
The day Southern Rural Life visited, Mr Kelly had been belly crutching some of his sheep.
"I thought I was going to be doing 300 myself but a neighbour came and gave me a hand."
Mr Kelly works for Sonny Paikea Crutching.
More farmers were employing contractors rather than crutching sheep themselves, due to sheep prices improving.
This year, he had two more weeks of crutching work compared with last year, so he had been spending less time on his farm.
"It is very much back to part-time farming."
For about six months, he spent more time crutching sheep than working on his farm and vice-versa for the rest of the year.
The crutching work suited owning a farm because it was not as busy when he needs to be lambing or sowing grass or swedes.
He said he hoped the move to a bigger farm would allow them both to work fulltime in it.
Mr Kelly was born and raised on his family’s sheep farm in Waikaka, Southland.
One of eight children, he completed a bachelor of commerce in agriculture in the early 1990s.
After his parents retired and sold the family farm, he went shearing and then working on farms around the South Island, including three years at Wairaki Station in Blackmount and another three years managing a sheep and beef farm in Wyndham and then to Mt Allen .
He had never considered working in any different sector.
"It is too much in my blood."
