Dairy Farmer June 2020

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JUNE 2020

A lifelong love of red cows Farmers pay less for biosecurity Milk prices: Heading into the unknown

Environmental stewards Waikato farmers want to leave the land in great shape for future generations

June 2020 Editor

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COVER Tim and Rachael Phillips farm using their strong environmental values.

Photo: Mike Walen

Incl $8.95 GST

JUNE 2020

A lifelong love of red cows Farmers pay less for biosecurity Milk prices: Heading into the unknown

Environmental stewards

22

Waikato farmers want to leave the land in great shape for future generations

www.farmersweekly.co.nz ISSN 2624-0939 (Print) ISSN 2624-0947 (Online)

2

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Contents NEWS 17 Milk Monitor Is the milk outlook any clearer?

18 Paying less Biosecurity response levy reduced 20 Possible solution Solving winter grazing controversy in Southland

ON FARM STORY

8 Looking after the land Waikato farmers Tim and Rach Phillips farm centres on environmental protection

22 Seeing red Mid Canterbury farmers Mark and Jenny McDonald are big fans of Milking Shorthorns

FARMING CHAMPIONS

6 Guest column Jules Benton

32 Dairy champion Tania Burrows

8

SPECIAL REPORT 46 Dairy or plant nutrition?

48 Farming in Oz

REGULAR FEATURES 31 At the Grassroots – Alex Walker 36 Women in agribusiness – Michele Connell

GlobalHQ is a farming family owned business that donates 1% of all advertising revenue in Farmers Weekly and Dairy Farmer to farmer health and wellbeing initiatives. Thank you for your prompt payment.

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4

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

NEWS

Wide milk price forecast HUGH STRINGLEMAN

F

ONTERRA is on track to make a return to profitability this financial year while paying its supplier-shareholders about $7.20/kg milksolids, the fourth-best payout in its 20-year history.

Whether that milk price will be topped up with a dividend has yet to be decided though the co-operative has confirmed its earnings guidance range remains 15c to 25c a share.

The financial results for the third quarter of FY2020 showed a steady return to profitability and a quiet optimism the full-year trading will produce the expected numbers.

Chief executive Miles Murrell has said several times Fonterra will deliver what it says under his leadership – a good return on capital, a healthy balance sheet and a dividend.

On the evidence of the financial results so far in his first full year in command those objectives are likely to be met, including a return to dividend payment.

For the nine months to April 30 Fonterra’s revenue was $16 billion, $1b more than the previous corresponding period in the 2019 financial year.

Total group earnings before interest and tax were $1.1b, three times the relevant comparison.

After normalisations such as asset sales and restructuring costs, ebit was $815 million, up from $514m.

Operating expenses have been reduced by $148m to $1.665b.

Free cashflow was $698m, up a staggering $1.4b and debt was reduced to $5.7b from $7.4b.

The much-improved cashflow and lower debt cost was used to change the advance base rate structure for the new season to bring more money forward to benefit farmers’ cashflows.

Fonterra’s first forecast of the farmgate milk price for the 2021 season is a very wide $5.40 to $6.90/kg, reflecting the considerable uncertainties around the world caused by the covid-19 pandemic.

At the mid-point of that range, $6.15, Fonterra will begin by advancing 65%

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Fonterra chief executive Miles Murrell has said several times Fonterra will deliver what it says under his leadership – a good return on capital, a healthy balance sheet and a dividend.

We are saying that the final milk price in 15 months’ time could have a five in front of it but global economies may pick up faster than predicted, hence the six.

Miles Hurrell

or $4.01/kg instead of the 60% paid historically.

However, there is no disguising the $1.05 reduction in the mid-points of the milk price forecasts from 2020 to 2021.

That reduction represents $140,000 to $150,000 less income for the average dairy farm from one season to the next.

Hurrell explained the very wide range in the forecast.

“We are saying that the final milk price in 15 months’ time could have a five in front of it but global economies may pick up faster than predicted, hence the six.

“As an exporter of 95% of our production, many of our markets are prone to sudden shocks.

“However, the global nature of covid-19 is like nothing we have experienced before.”

Chairman John Monaghan said a cloud hangs over the food-service trade and northern hemisphere dairy production is providing added competition for sales.

Restaurants, bakeries and cafes were closed under lockdowns, especially during the second quarter.

While Chinese food service has recovered it is not back to 100% and now shutdowns are affecting Oceania, southeast Asia and Latin America.

“The supply and demand imbalance has impacted Global Dairy Trade prices for the products that determine our farmgate milk price.

“In United States dollar terms the GDT prices for whole milk powder are down 17% since January.

“Looking to next season a global recession will continue to reduce the purchasing power of consumers.

“It is not clear what impacts government interventions in the European Union and US will have on curbing their milk supply.

“However, we expect our competitors to put more of their milk into the product types that determine our milk price as they chase government support and favour longer-life products.”

DairyNZ said its farmers’ break-even price for 2021 is now $5.80 to $5.90, excluding principal repayments or asset purchasing. n

5

GUEST COLUMN

Online meet stays on track The Dairy Women’s Network annual conference was just one of the many industry events cancelled because of the covid-19 lockdown. Chief executive Jules Benton gives an insight into switching to an online event.

W

HEN restrictions around the covid-19 pandemic cancelled our face-to-face conference in May we immediately knew we would have to find another way to deliver it.

Fast forward six weeks and our Allflex DWN 2020 Make.It.Matter Conference Online was launched with the original content reshaped to reflect our very new situation.

Right from the beginning we knew there was no way we would cancel the conference altogether.

Farmers are lifetime learners – they need to be lifetime learners given the changing landscape of the industry – and we know they take the opportunity to attend events whether they are delivered online or in person.

It would have been a lost opportunity for them and for us if we didn’t go ahead in some way, shape or form. With that in mind we began to explore other options.

When our members requested more webinars during lockdown to support their learning we decided to move the programme online.

Our face-to-face conference takes 12 months to plan and prepare. We had a matter of weeks.

We turned to Russell Brown and his team at digitalstream, our digital partner,

Dairy Women’s Network chief executive Jules Benton and her team faced an enormous challenge when the covid-19 lockdown took effect, meaning the annual conference could not be held.

for advice and in return were provided with the platform for the conference, constant training in the technology when it was needed and coding.

While we’ve come a long way in those six weeks we still have our limits.

Luckily for us, and in Russell’s own words, “The team at digitalstream and virtualevents.nz were very excited to

With the conference going online, changes had to be made to all publicity material.

6

work with Dairy Women’s Network to help deliver New Zealand’s first cancelled conference as a virtual conference within a very short timeframe to meet existing dates”.

“The Dairy Women’s Network were already well versed in delivering recorded and live webinars to their membership so we quickly planned out what was required to deliver an online experience that would deliver all the engagement and tools needed for attendees, speakers and sponsors.

“It was really important that they could support their farming community and deliver their conference virtually during covid-19 and bring their members together to learn and celebrate all that they do.”

The rest of the conference was made possible by the willingness of the rest

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

of our industry partners to jump on board. We saw a new side to our speakers during those six weeks as we navigated technology and social distancing together.

While we were unable to move everything online, the 26 sessions and digital trade stands we could adapt for this new virtual platform embodied resourcefulness and an eagerness to join us in trying something new.

I heard this from Jared Briggs, general manager of Allflex NZ. “As a company we were impressed with the agility of Dairy Women’s Network during this time.

“Allflex Livestock Intelligence is a longstanding partner of the DWN conference and it involved creativity on all fronts to deliver this event. At physical events we aim to open the conference with a certain level of energy that sets the tone for the whole event. This became even more important for the virtual event and we worked hard to support DWN with an energetic introduction, filmed in isolation by our APAC chief executive Shane McManaway.

“DWN took the opportunity that was presented to them and delivered a fantastic virtual event for the industry.”

The main challenge lay in redesigning 10 months’ worth of preparation and finding a platform that would allow the same level of connectivity and energy that our conferences are known for. The original programme was packed full of interactive, collaborative sessions, shared Kickstart Breakfasts and a Fashion Through the Decades themed gala dinner to announce the winners of our Fonterra Dairy Woman of the Year and Regional Leader of the Year awards.

Right from the beginning we knew there was no way we would cancel the conference altogether.

This was possibly our biggest loss as the dinner highlights the work our nominees put into the industry.

How were we to recreate the sparking atmosphere of the night? How would we provide the opportunity for our dairy women to dress up and celebrate each

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Ten months of planning and preparation for the Dairy Women’s Network conference had to be redesigned in just six weeks to hold an online event, which was even harder to plan and prepare while working in separate bubbles.

other? Well, we thought, when all else fails – use Zoom. Watch parties were set up, our members dressed up with bubbles in their bubbles and together we were brought into the homes of Ash-Leigh Campbell and Tania Burrows as they heard themselves announced as our 2020 Women of the Year along with the rest of the country.

The awards evening was a highlight for our incredible MC Julia Jones, head of analytics at NZX. She says “The opportunity to interact with incredible speakers, work with the DWN team and experience the emotion of the awards evening all first-hand was an absolute privilege. I learned so much through the process and I’m grateful for the opportunity.”

This year’s Allflex DWN 2020 Make.

It.Matter Conference is a testament to the Dairy Women’s Network team being brave, bold, and willing to do something that we had never done before. We didn’t fear failure but saw the bigger picture, tried something new and embraced new opportunities and technology to provide our members with what they asked of us.

It is not an easy task to plan and prepare a conference. It is even harder to plan and prepare a conference online while working in separate bubbles. But with record registrations it seems as though our collective exploration into the unknown paid off. Russell sums it up best when he says “It was great to see a higher amount of ticket sales as dairy women

across the country could easily attend from the comfort of their own homes”.

This year our options were limited but do we do this again next year? Do we alternate between online and face-to-face conferences? We would love to know your thoughts and what you need. n

Ngai Tahu farm manager Ash-Leigh Campbell from Christchurch is the 2020 Fonterra Dairy Woman of the Year.

7

ON FARM STORY

Tim and Rachael Phillips now work off-farm but have spent years creating an awardwinning farm business centred on environmental protection.

Photos: Mike Walen 8

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Water work wins award A Waikato farming family live by the philosophy they are environmental stewards and have focused their effort in leaving the land in great shape for the future without compromising productivity or profitability. Gerald Piddock reports.

O

TOROHANGA farmers Tim and Rachael Phillips have created a farm business centred on environmental protection, profit and creating a balance between work and farm life for themselves and their family.

Their 78-hectare farm, Waipa Meadows, borders the Waipa River on its southern and western boundaries for about 1.3km, making them conscious of their nutrient load into the river.

Rachael says she inherited strong values and an enjoyment around the importance of native tree planting from her parents.

For Tim environmental protection comes down to being a good steward by looking after the land and leaving it in great shape while being profitable and productive.

“I just want to do a good job and leave the farm in a good state for whoever farms it next, whether it’s our kids or someone different.”

To protect that waterway they have 1.5km of native riparian plantings as part of their involvement in the Waipa

Rerenoa Restoration Project, headed by neighbours Rosemary and Graham Davison.

The farm also has 1ha of mature kahikatea protected by a QEII covenant put in place by the previous farm owner.

It is the remnant of a larger kahikatea stand, preserved by Tim’s greatgrandfather.

But underneath the trees are widespread privet bushes they have worked hard to remove and replant with a native understory over the past three years.

Apart from buying a few traps for possum control the biggest expense has been their time. They were ably helped by the Waikato weed busters group whose time and expertise have been invaluable.

“Without their help we would still be lost in the privet,” Rachael says.

Tim says it is nice to have a project on the farm that is not directly related to profit.

“It’s something that’s long-term and it’s got productive value that’s not just related to money.

“It hasn’t cost us a lot to do but it’s been

FARM FACTS n Owner: Tim and Rachael Phillips n Location: Otorohanga, Waikato n Farm size: 78ha (effective) 82ha total (1ha QEII covenant) n Cows: 285 Kiwicross cows n Production: 2019-20 – 105,000kg MS (five-year average 105,000110,000kg MS)

a really enjoyable thing and we can look at it now and think we’ve done something really cool.”

They are low nitrogen users, using on average 70-80kg/ha a year, but are stocked at 3.5 cows/ha, meaning their nitrogen leaching rate according to Overseer is 55kg N/ha.

“It’s highish but it’s a reflection of

Continued page 10

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Rachael and Tim Phillips won the Massey University Innovation Award at this year’s Waikato Ballance Farm Environment Awards.

Photo: NZ Farm Environment Trust

I just want to do a good job and leave the farm in a good state for whoever farms it next, whether it’s our kids or someone different.

Tim Phillips

stocking rate and pasture harvest, not nitrogen inputs,” Tim says.

The challenge will be reducing that without compromising their profitability and business.

They use a farm environment plan and under the newly revised Plan Change 1 from the Waikato Regional Council they will likely need a resource consent to farm.

Their strong environmental values 10

drove the pair to resolve a water leak issue on their underpass, which had been a longstanding environmental challenge.

The property was split by a public road with two-thirds of on the river side.

“The underpass links the cowshed to about two-thirds of the farm so it’s a pretty critical piece of infrastructure,” Tim says.

It was built before the Phillips bought the farm in 2010. The base is below the water table for much of the year, causing a lot of groundwater to seep through the underpass.

“When you walk through it in the middle of winter it’s like there’s a creek bubbling out of the ground,” Rachael says.

To keep the area as dry as possible it is continuously pumped throughout winter.

“We had the significant challenge of about 400,000 litres of water a day that we were getting into that underpass that we had to deal with as well as farm effluent,” Tim says.

“If we didn’t pump it daily it would flood to a depth of 1.5m within the space of about three hours.”

The water was stored in a sump then pumped to waste because it was usually clean.

They were fully aware there was a compliance risk if mismanaged because it would be easy to accidentally pump water into the effluent system and overwhelm it or pump effluent contaminated water into the waste water system.

It was also labour-intensive to maintain and was a hurdle that needed addressing if they were to be able to move off-farm.

“It became a real barrier for us doing that because there was always this risk that somebody was going to get it wrong.”

It was not environmentally sustainable over the long term and they started looking for a permanent solution.

“It was a compliance issue no one could solve,” Tim says.

“If we built a standard 3m litre pond we would fill it up every week just with the underpass water. It wasn’t feasible.”

They first tried a well liner on the bottom of the underpass and reducing the level of the ground water. That removed about 60-80% of the water inflow.

“It didn’t really cut it but it helped,” Rachael says.

Tim says an out-of-the-box idea from Rachael based on creating an internal bridge in the underpass to keep the cattle out of the water was initially rejected by him thinking it was not feasible.

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

However, after the attempt at dewatering did not produce the desired results they revisited the idea. They designed and built the bridge with his father and some skilled helpers.

“The end result was a team effort all round,” he says.

The water flowed under the bridge and was pumped out on one side and any effluent from the bridge was captured in a sealed chamber and pumped through a separate pump to the effluent system.

It was installed in the summer of 201819 and last winter was the first time it was properly tested.

“It worked a dream. It’s amazing, you can look down into the groundwater sump and it’s crystal clear water.

“It’s a fairly simple solution to what was a head-scratcher of a problem,” Rachael says.

The groundwater issue also had implications for the farm’s effluent system.

Originally, the effluent system consisted of a direct irrigation sump with 2.5 cubic metres capacity that had to be pumped multiple times each milking.

That very limited system was upgraded soon after they bought the farm with a bigger sump and more effluent irrigation area added to the system.

Effluent storage has since been added in the form of an above ground flexitank bladder.

The farm’s shallow groundwater made it impractical for them to use a more traditional, in-ground effluent pond.

They can now irrigate the effluent on 25ha.

After being persuaded by a family member the couple entered the farm in this year’s Waikato Ballance Farm Environment Awards and won the Massey University Innovation Award, largely because of the work they did to fix the underpass.

There was also a sense most of the

Tim Phillips hoses out the underpass that connects the cowshed to about two-thirds of the farm and was a big part of their award. improvements they had been working on in the last few years were finished and they felt confident about entering, Rachael says.

It was also the last year they would be on the farm before they moved to Tauranga.

Rachael says they have different backgrounds that mean different approaches to farming.

This difference has the potential to cause disagreements or be a source of wider access to creative thinking and a great asset.

“The trick is learning to communicate and listen to each other’s thoughts and allow yourselves time to ponder the various potential solutions together.

“I think the award we got was a reflection of us coming together with a shared vision of how we want to farm together.

“That’s why we entered. We felt like we were finally doing this as us.”

The relocation to Tauranga was a shift that was a long time coming. Four

years ago, in a low-payout season, they began to consider off-farm income to better support themselves and spread risk.

“We have kids and I wanted to have more time off-farm with them and I wanted a job to allow me the freedom to do that,” Tim says.

Tim now works as a farm consultant for AgFirst and Rachael is studying to be a counsellor.

They also wanted to separate family and farm in their financial affairs.

“The idea of Tim working off-farm was to balance that so we could say ‘this is for the farm and this is for us’,” Rachael says.

Tim says getting the balance right can be a challenge.

“It’s certainly helped us get some balance in that whole scenario.”

The farm is made up of a 73ha home block and four lease blocks bordering the home farm which add up to 9ha.

It belonged to Tim’s aunt and they 50:50

Continued page 12

The family, from left, Hayden, 14, Reuben, 10, Tim, Nathan, 7, Rachael and Anna, 12, with familyFARMER friend Alavina Latu, now lives in Tauranga but still visits the farm regularly.

DAIRY June 2020

11

The 285 cows at Waipa Meadows produced 105,000kg of milksolids last season on a System 3.

We don’t know how lucky we are.

When Kiwi farmers start grizzling we need to go and see how other people live.

Rachael Phillips

sharemilked for her from in 2008 and bought it in 2010.

They were also 50:50 sharemilking a second farm belonging to Tim’s parents, Ken and Liz Phillips, called Roanoak Farm and, in the middle of some busy years, raising their four children They continued to sharemilk that farm after buying Tim’s aunt’s farm. The two farms are run as separate units.

Roanoak Farm is now leased and both are managed by contract milkers and some relief staff.

Stepping back allowed the contract

milker at Waipa Meadows to step up, which the Phillips say he has done admirably.

A key part in successfully making the transition is mutual trust between staff and owner. Staff value independence and input, they say.

“When you do that you start to see their ingenuity and creativity, which you wouldn’t see if you were managing them too tightly,” Rachael says.

It also gives the staff the chance to make and learn from mistakes, Tim says.

“If I’m running the farm I’m going

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Stepping back allowed Tim’s and Rachael’s contract milker on Waipa Meadows to step up. Tim is now working as a farm consultant for AgFirst and Rachael is studying to be a counsellor.

to make mistakes and if I’ve got staff running the farm I can’t expect my staff to get everything right.

“I have to be prepared for them to make a mistake and for something to go wrong, for them to learn from it because if they learn from it then we all benefit from it.”

When the Phillips ran both the farms directly they had three full-time staff.

During their years running the farms themselves one of their top priorities was to ensure they and all staff had time off.

To do that they created a winter roster then a second roster from the beginning

of calving to the end of the season.

“We like to give our staff six months’ notice ahead so they know when their time off is,” Rachael says.

That gives staff certainty and avoids last-minute rostering, which can happen in the industry.

Rachael’s observations while on work placement as a trainee-counsellor last year showed her farmers do not always look after their staff well.

“A lot of staff and their families have hard times due to isolation, moving jobs often and some of the crappy systems

Waipa Meadow borders the Waipa River and to protect that waterway they have 1.5km of native riparian plantings as part of their involvement in the Waipa Rerenoa Restoration Project.

Photo: NZ Farm Environment Trust DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

put in place by bosses. We don’t want anything like that for our staff,” she says.

“We see the farm as supporting a number of families – ours, our staff and their families too – and we’re not wanting to bleed them dry. We want to support them and make it enjoyable for them as well so the whole system can work well for everyone.”

Tim describes their farming philosophy as being pasture based, using medium levels of inputs, focusing on simple, efficient systems and looking after people and animals well.

“I do run a pretty careful ruler over things and try to keep our farm working expenses as low as we can without compromising our system. I don’t like spending money unnecessarily but at the same time you have got to do production to keep the interest costs reasonable.”

Tim’s target for farm working expenses is under $4.50/kg MS and he says they have often been under that figure. This season has been a challenge with the effects of the drought.

Their approach has been consistent over the years, brought on by the desire to add more resilience to their farm system after experiences with previous droughts and low payouts.

“We seem to have weathered the ups and downs with this consistent

Continued page 14 13

Team members at Waipa Meadows load stock being moved to off-farm grazing. approach,” Tim says.

“This season just ending with the drought has been tough but we have managed to get through it okay.

“We have our systems. We go OAD early, as soon as the summer pressure comes on and we take a cull straight away before the works chock up.”

The cows are milked through an old 24-aside herringbone, which is simple but does the job.

The herd has just dried off with production at about 105,000kg of milksolids, which is a bit below the midpoint of the farm’s five-year average of 105,000-110,000kg MS. They do not have a feedpad and stand the herd off on the cowshed yards if they need to over winter.

At that time of year 50-60 cows are

moved for about six weeks to off-farm grazing.

To prevent pugging they buy hay and feed it out when it is dry, keeping the cows in tight areas on the paddock.

When it is wetter the paddock area is opened to give the cows more space and prevent pasture damage.

The cows work on a 100-day round over winter, opening to a 21-day round over spring before extending it out again over the summer and autumn.

Maize and grass silage are bought in as a summer feed. No summer cropping is done on the farm.

The farm is flat and bounces back reasonably quickly following rain. If it does turn dry the farm policy is to switch from twice-a-day to once-a-day milking proactively, once milksolids

Waipa Meadows has a 1ha stand of mature kahikatea protected by a QEII covenant which was put in place by the previous farm owner. Photo: NZ Farm Environment Trust.

14

drop to about 1.4kg milksolids a cow a day.

Over the past six weeks they have started drying off the lighter cows with the season wrapping up in early May. Calving begins on August 1. The calves go off the dairy platform in December to a grazier and return as in-calf heifers on May 1.

They use sire-proving Kiwicross genetics in their herd. AI starts in late October for five and a half weeks followed by bulls till Christmas.

The Phillips have also visited farmers in Sri Lanka. In 2016, Tim went there as a volunteer, firstly as part of Fonterra’s farm development programme. They also visited a Tear Fund development programme.

Rachael says it made her so appreciative of what NZ has after seeing the poverty and living conditions for many people in that country.

“We don’t know how lucky we are.

When Kiwi farmers start grizzling we need to go and see how other people live.”

Tim says it made him realise how easy NZ’s farm systems are in comparison.

The heat, poverty, extreme weather, civil war and small quantities of land mean Sri Lankan farmers have to cut and carry feed to the cows, which are usually permanently housed, often without mechanical support.

“The farmers work hard and have come up with some extremely clever adaptations to farm in their environment.

We were impressed with what we saw.

“It puts life and our challenges in perspective.” n

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Tim and Rachael Phillips aim to be environmental stewards by looking after the land and leaving it in great shape while being profitable and productive.

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MILK MONITOR

Crystal ball needed Each month the milk monitor Stephen Bell delves into the dairy industry and gives us the low-down on the good, the bad, the ugly and everything in between.

O

H DEAR. Fonterra doesn’t know.

At least that’s impression we might reasonably get from its unprecedentedly wide farmgate price range prediction of next season.

But then nobody else has a clearer picture.

If the experts are to be believed everyone in the dairy sector worldwide is holding their breath while the markets tread water and people wait to see which way to jump.

Hence, Fonterra’s extremely broad prediction range for next season.

The good news, and I use those words in the sense it’s nowhere near as bad as some feared, is the mid-point starts with a six.

It’s $6.15 to be exact and that’s what initial payments will be based on.

However, that $5.40 to $6.90 spread tells us there’s a lot of, I was going to say uncertainty but that doesn’t really describe it.

It’s more than people being uncertain.

They just don’t know.

And if all the experts including those in the industry as well as market analysts, economists and futures traders don’t know then the rest us are left well and truly in the dark.

And what’s more we can’t control or influence what will happen in global commodity markets with the Europeans and Americans setting up various Government support schemes to see their farmers through. They are much bigger hitters than New Zealand so they and Chinese buyers will determine what happens.

However, we are coming off a good payout year and we know things are not likely to be as bright this season.

We know the loss of the food service sector is a big blow. Even when restaurants reopen their patronage might be down because a lot of people have lost their jobs. People are still eating at home but the intelligence tells us they are going for the cheaper options when buying food.

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Sustainability means ensuring farmers’ financial survival as well as looking after the environment.

All this brings me to the word sustainable.

It’s probably got a bit of a bad reputation in the rural world because it seems to be associated closely and solely with the environment and notions of farmers not being nice to it.

We must make sure farms are also financially sustainable.

I think farmers should reclaim the word and make it their own again.

Farmers have always aimed for sustainability.

They get through each year with the aim of having the farm in a condition to carry on the following year. Each generation farms with the aim of handing over to the next. Again, that means sustainability.

Now there’s nothing wrong with

associating sustainability with the environment, biodiversity and clean water.

But we must make sure farms are also financially sustainable. If they are not then who is going to pay for all the other things?

We need dairy farmers and others to succeed, now more so than ever.

It’s not much use cleaning up the environment, and most rural people accept things must change because, once again, they have remained sustainable though the generations by embracing change and using things like bullocks pulling ploughs, then tractors and now drones and computers.

Industry leaders are telling us they now have the ear of the Government and the politicians are listening and are willing to work with farmers to get things done rather than just coming up with ideals and imposing rules.

So now’s the time for farmers to keep reminding them sustainability entails financial survival.

Farms are no good to anyone if there are no farmers left standing as a result of sustainability. n

17

NEWS

DairyNZ generic cows: Farmers will pay less for their Biosecurity Response Levy after the rate was dropped for this season.

Biosecurity levy falls SAMANTHA TENNENT

F

ARMERS are receiving a reduction in the Biosecurity Response Levy rate they pay for the Mycoplasma bovis response in the 202021 dairy season.

It has been set at 2.4 cents a kilogram of milksolids. Last season the rate was 2.9 cents/kg MS. “The levy reduction is good news for dairy farmers. It was supposed to reduce as things improved and we started getting on top of things so it’s reassuring to see that’s what is happening,” farmer and Rural Support Trust member Rachel Cvitanovich says.

“And it’s good to have something positive happening among everything else people are dealing with at the moment.”

The levy took effect in September and

by March $43.5 million was collected

by DairyNZ and paid to the Primary Industries Ministry to cover dairy’s share of the M bovis programme. The repayment plan is tracking well and in line with the work done to date.

DairyNZ is continuing to work on behalf of dairy farmers to ensure all

18

programme spending provides value for money.

“There’s no question that M bovis has had a huge impact on our sector, particularly for some individuals and families,” DairyNZ chairman Jim van der Poel says.

It’s good to have something positive happening among everything else people are dealing with at the moment.

Rachel Cvitanovich

“Latest data from the 10-year programme gives us confidence that we are making progress in our objective of eradicating the disease.

“DairyNZ managing the Biosecurity Response Levy ensures dairy farmers

have a voice and DairyNZ sits on farmers’ behalf at the decision-making table for biosecurity responses.”

DairyNZ consulted farmers before the levy took effect. Farmers voted for their industry-good organisation to manage the levy on their behalf, which gives them the assurance it will be spent on response activity and DairyNZ has a seat at the decision-making table. It will let farmers know each year what the levy will be in writing at least 30 days before the effective date.

The money can be spent only on response and recovery of an incursion.

The sector is paying back the response costs and the levy will continue to drop with the response costs. The levy is in place permanently and the rate is set each year.

It is separate from the DairyNZ milksolids levy that DairyNZ invests on farmers’ behalf in research, development, advocacy and expertise. Farmers have just voted on the milksolids levy, which happens every six years by mandate from the Government.

The change in the biosecurity levy takes effect on June 1 and will show as Biosecurity Response Levy on a milk docket. n

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

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NEWS

Southland mud solution found

F

GERARD HUTCHING

ARMING leaders believe they have found a solution to avoid a repeat of last year’s winter grazing controversy in Southland.

This season Southland farmers face a double whammy of unprecedented conditions following February’s floods and a backlog at freezing works because of covid-19.

As a result some farms are carrying more stock into winter than their consent or the permitted activity criteria allow.

The solution entails a farmer simply writing to Environment Southland informing it of the changes this winter and the council will allow them as a deemed permitted activity. Federated Farmers Southland vice-president Bernadette Hunt said it is great a solution has been found. The federation had led the process and brought on board Environment Southland, DairyNZ and Beef + Lamb.

“This is a simple process that enables farmers to be compliant with regulation despite the unpredictable situation they are facing this season. This is a great example of strong and effective collaboration by agencies to provide the best possible solutions for farmers.”

Initially it was thought there would be a significant number of farmers using the process but it is likely that has reduced because the processing backlog has improved.

A special group has been set up to monitor farmer performance. If people are concerned about a practice they can contact the group, which will decide whether it is sufficiently serious for the farmer to be spoken to.

“There’s an industry group for each region and they will nominate a person to speak to the farmer. Often it’s an education thing. We try to get them to put better practices in place and get ahead of the issue.

“If the farmer refuses to engage the second step is we work with either the council or the Ministry for Primary

20

Flooding in Southland followed by delays at freezing works mean farmers are carrying more stock than usual but work is under way to ensure animal welfare issues are addressed.

Industries, depending whether it’s an environmental or animal welfare problem,” Hunt said.

She imagines green groups concerned about the problem last year will be very happy with the process though the solution was not created for them but for farmers.

Environmentalist Angus Robson, who was the public face of last year’s protests, said it is unlikely the solution will improve environmental outcomes but he is giving farmers a chance to demonstrate their good intent.

“There are people who really try but there is a group of laggards who don’t give a stuff. They’re the sort who are hard to reach because they don’t join Federated Farmers,” Robson said.

In response to last year’s investigation that showed about 80% of Southland farms were keeping cattle miserable and wet, Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor intervened by setting up a task force.

DairyNZ strategic investment leader Dr David Burger said a new wintering consent or variation usually takes up to six months to apply for and receive.

Now applications for deemed permitted activity notices will be processed within five working days and issued for this

winter and end on September 30.

Farmers can complete and submit the covid-19 Pandemic Farming Questionnaire on the Environment Southland website.

“This process will help farmers keep their primary focus on looking after their farms and the environment so they can ensure the best care for their cows, land and water, particularly as we head into winter and then calving.”

Environment Southland acting consents manager Aurora Grant said the council realises the exceptional circumstances the Southland farming community faces might lead to technical temporary or marginal non-compliance with the rules.

She said deemed permitted activity notices do not negate the need for farmers to continue to implement good management practices. They will provide relief for those who need to hold over stock till they are able to get them off farms. n

MORE:

Farmers planning to carry more stock or use a greater area of winter grazing should get in touch with the Environment Southland consents team on 0800 76 88 45 or email esconsents@es.govt.nz.

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

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ON FARM

Mark and Jenny McDonald milk 440 Milking Shorthorns and 105 Friesians on their 190-hectare farm at Ashburton.

Photos: Tony Benny 22

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Faith in red cows pays off

S

A young boy growing up in Taranaki saw something special in Milking Shorthorns that has carried on through his farming career. Tony Benny reports.

INCE growing up on a Taranaki dairy farm Mark McDonald has had a thing about red cows and today he runs one of the biggest milking Shorthorn herds in

the country.

Mark and his wife Jenny milk 440 Milking Shorthorn and 105 Friesian cows on their 190-hectare farm near Ashburton, Mid Canterbury.

The Milking Shorthorn is no longer common in the country’s dairy herds with only few being milked today.

“I guess they’re an endangered breed so they should be looked after. It would be terrible to lose them because once they’re gone, they’re gone,” Mark says.

Milking Shorthorns were the first cattle breed to be introduced to New Zealand by Samuel Marsden in 1814 to provide milk and meat as well as transport through bullock teams but today they’re seldom seen on dairy farms here, replaced for the most part by Friesians.

Mark has been smitten with the redhued breed as long as he can remember.

“When I was a kid for some reason I found Milking Shorthorns interesting.

My father gave me a Shorthorn calf when

I was about 10 years old. That was the start of my lifelong love for the breed,” he recalls.

Early on in his farming career Mark realised the Shorthorn gene pool was too small for him to easily build a purebred Milking Shorthorn herd.

“The next best thing was to go for a herd that looks that way but has used outside blood, even from time to time a little red and white Holstein, which are quite popular in other parts of the world.”

Mark says he’s aiming to get the best version of a Shorthorn he can and believes his animals match Friesians for production with the bonus of better fertility and good temperament.

“I use Australian semen and at the moment Danish red semen from Viking Genetics. You just have to look around the world and use what is there.”

Every year two or three of his bulls are selected by local AI companies for semen and this year semen is, for the first time, being sent to Australia.

Despite the breed being uncommon Mark reckons most people like them once they’ve been around them for a while.

“People who come to work with us

FARM FACTS n Owners: Mark and Jenny McDonald n Location: Ashburton, Mid Canterbury n Farm size: 190ha, effective 180ha n Cows: 440 Milking Shorthorn, 105 Friesian n Production: 2019-20 220,000230,000kg MS n Target: 2020-21 230,000kg MS

generally haven’t had much to do with them but nine or 10 times out of 10 if you ask them which cows they prefer to milk they say the red ones.

“Their temperament’s good and they’re a fairly low maintenance sort of animal.

You don’t have to mollycoddle them as they’ll look after themselves. They’re pretty similar to the black and whites, just a different colour.

Continued page 24

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Mark and Jenny McDonald have spent countless hours and thousands of dollars planting and caring for thousands of native trees and shrubs along the spring-fed waterways on their farm, creating a beautiful wetland.

“I wouldn’t say the population in NZ is increasing but a lot more people are prepared to use a bit of Milking Shorthorn in their herds.”

As a youngster he enjoyed showing cattle and his family used to take up to 20 animals to the Stratford and Hawera shows. Even when he had only eight cows on the lifestyle block he showed them and in 1990 one of his cows won at the Royal Show in Waikato.

But it was at the NZ Dairy Event in Feilding in 2013 he had his greatest success, winning the six-year-old cow class across all breeds.

“She beat the Jerseys and she beat the Holsteins. It’s kind of like East Coast taking the Ranfurly Shield off Canterbury because Milking Shorthorn cows just don’t win all-breeds classes,” Mark says.

“After that, you retire.”

Though he came from a farming family Mark became a sign-writer and painter.

Jenny also grew up on dairy farms with her parents’ sharemilking in Wairarapa and Horowhenua before buying a Lands and Survey ballot farm in Bay of Plenty in the late 70s.

She went to Massey University and did an accounting degree. They met during the summer break before she started her graduate job in Wellington.

24

“I went to visit my brother and some friends in Taranaki and met Mark in the public bar of the Stratford Hotel,” she laughs. She transferred to New Plymouth 12 months later.

We’re not just about putting as much milk in the vat as we possibly can. A big part of our income comes from stock sales.

Mark McDonald

After they married they bought a 4ha block and soon had eight red cows, milked through a two-bail, walk-through cowshed.

Jenny worked as an accountant for the local newspaper. They moved an old convent house onto their land and spent seven years renovating it.

By that time they were in their 30s with successful careers but had a strong desire to go farming and searched for a sharemilking job, preferably in Taranaki.

“We put in a couple of applications in and we didn’t even get an interview because we’d had no experience,” Jenny recalls.

But thanks to Mark’s interest in red cattle they soon got their chance when Morrinsville Shorthorn breeder Ian Dibble, who owned a farm in Canterbury with his brother Jim, offered them a sharemilking job there.

“He’d known us for a number of years and was keen to see us get a chance so he gave us the opportunity,” Mark says.

It wasn’t quite that simple though because they agonised about leaving their beloved forever house as well as family and friends.

“Ian phoned us and said, ‘I need to know if you want the job because I’ll need to advertise it if you don’t’,” Jenny says.

“We said we couldn’t decide and he said ‘if you can’t decide, it’s obviously not for you’.”

But he agreed to give them an hour to think about it.

“We sat there and I had tears streaming down my face and I said to Mark ‘I think we need to go’,” Jenny laughs.

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

“Once we’d made the decision we were fine.

“It was a lucky break and there was no reason why we couldn’t go down so we thought ‘let’s give it go’, bought the cows already on the farm from him and away we went,” Mark adds.

Selling their house and moving south happened quickly and they hadn’t had time to finalise finances to buy the herd when they arrived with a one-year-old son and Jenny seven months pregnant with their second child. They have three children Jack, George and Annie, who are all off pursuing their careers.

“Literally in the first week our loans manager came out and said we need to sort this money out and I said ‘no, no, first we need to sort out a doctor’,” Jenny says.

The idea was they’d do their threeyear contract in Canterbury, make their fortune then buy a farm back in Taranaki but it didn’t turn out that way.

“Cow prices had just started to skyrocket and we paid $1100 for our cows but they dropped to $800 the next year so financially we went backwards and had to stay on. Then the longer we stayed the more it became home,” Jenny says.

“The herd that we bought was predominantly Friesians and we brought our few Shorthorns from the North Island and put them in with the black and whites. Over the years we built up numbers,” Mark says.

They stayed in the sharemilking job for 12 years, gradually building their herd from 230 cows to 540 as the farm owners bought more land and they progressively introduced more Shorthorn genetics.

In 2000 the McDonalds bought and converted a new farm across Ashburton River from where they were sharemilking.

They sent all their red cows to the new property where they employed a manager

Mid Canterbury farmer Mark McDonald has been smitten with the red-coated Milking Shorthorns since he was a young boy and has had success in the show ring with the breed.

and they kept the sharemilking job and their Friesian herd.

“When we converted that farm we had to buy more cows so we bought about 100 red and white Holsteins and picked up

other cows from here and there to make up 480 cows in the first year.”

Eventually they gave up sharemilking

Continued page 26

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Milking Shorthorns were the first cattle breed to be introduced to New Zealand to provide milk and meat as well as transport but are not a common breed in the national herd.

and moved to their own farm, by which time most of the herd was Shorthorn-type animals with about 10% Friesians.

“There’s no real reason for that. It’s just the way it’s gone, Mark says.

“We have enough replacements to go all red but we also know one day we’ll have to retire and it will be easier to sell a herd of 300 Shorthorns than 500 Shorthorns.”

“Last year the average production for the Milking Shorthorns was 431kg of milksolids but if you included the Friesians that brought the average back by about 5kg.”

Annual production from the 550-cow

herd is between 220,000 and 230,000kg MS, 1250kg to 1300kg MS/ha.

They run a low-input system feeding about 400kg of drymatter a cow during the season. It consists of bought-in barley and grass silage. The herd is wintered on a 115ha runoff they bought in nearby Mayfield five years ago where they feed kale, pasture and sometimes silage but that is in short supply this year.

“That means we have complete control over everything. We’ve got a closed shop and are not subject to getting caught out

by Mycoplasma bovis or any other health issues that might arise.”

Mark says he could achieve higher

production but that would come at the cost of higher inputs.

“That’s just not the way I want to farm,” he says.

“To get that production you’ve got to stack the cows on and use a lot of nitrogen.”

He uses about 90kg/ha of nitrogen but says it’s not uncommon for dairy farmers in the area to use closer to 200kg/ha.

They run a different system to the average Canterbury dairy farm, he says.

They try to keep the number of bobby calves to a minimum.

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Mark and Jenny McDonald in the wetland they have created. The area now has nearly 90 types of native plants growing around the pond and farm streams.

to a week old and they’re snapped up.

They’re about the same size as Friesians but they grow particularly well and people who’ve bought them say the weights they’re selling them at as two-year-olds are extremely good so they keep coming back year after year.”

They also keep more heifers than would be usually kept on a dairy farm and sell the surplus throughout the year and there is a steady demand for them.

“We’re not just about putting as much milk in the vat as we possibly can. A big part of our income comes from stock sales,” Mark says.

“A lot of people just like a bit of colour or have had grandparents who had them and they have a soft spot for them so when they grow up and become farmers themselves they just want a few Shorthorns.”

When they moved to Canterbury from Taranaki Jenny was pretty lonely at first, stuck at home with two young children and a third coming, away from her friends and family.

“We’d only been down here eight months and I went back to work two days a week to go into Ashburton so I could meet people locally and just get to know the town a bit better and carrying on from that I’ve always worked, usually parttime,” Jenny says.

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

She worked for Synlait Farms, now Purata, when the company was getting established and now works full-time as group management accountant for a South Island-wide tyre service and retail company based in Ashburton. She’s also broadened her skills.

We sat there and I had tears streaming down my face and I said to Mark ‘I think we need to go’.

Jenny McDonald

“When all the kids left home I was at a bit of a loss and looking for a change of direction so I did the AgriWomen’s Development Trust’s Escalator Programme, a woman’s leadership programme, which I found excellent, meeting new people and gaining new skills, getting to know myself better and learning some new leadership skills.”

She is now the national finance chairwoman on the board of Rural Women.

As well as farming Mark is an accomplished artist and often fitted painting around the farm work but nowadays most of his spare time is taken up planting and caring for thousands of native trees and shrubs along the springfed waterways on the farm and creating a beautiful wetland.

“I think there was one beech tree and a couple of flaxes here when we came and they were really the only native plants on the farm and now there’s tens of thousands so I think we will be leaving it in a better state than it was when we got here,” he says.

They started planting in 2009, finding out what grew where, what species thrived and what didn’t by trial and error.

For some of the earlier projects they took advantage of funding from Environment Canterbury but much of the work has been done at their own expense and hard work.

“There was no great plan. It was just a case of putting things in and seeing what happens.

“We’ve made every mistake you possibly could as far as species go

Continued page 28 27

Tens of thousands of native plants and shrubs have been panted around the wetland, which is clear and home to various fish species.

– sometimes they didn’t like it here, sometimes I was over-zealous with the spray.”

But while they might have lost a few plants along the way most have survived

and thrived and they have learned what works to ensure that survival.

“Buying the plants and getting them in the ground is the cheap and easy part of it but it’s the few years of maintenance

The McDonalds employ a manager and two full-time staff plus one extra in spring.

Maria Emilia Otero from Argentina in the cowshed.

28

afterwards that makes the difference.

That’s where people fall down if they don’t maintain it,” he says.

“We’ve lost a few areas when you’re running behind with the spray and if you don’t keep the electric fences going you can lose them to cattle. In one day they can wipe out a year’s worth of growth.”

As part of the farm development they took advantage of a very dry year to clear a swampy part of the farm by removing willows, broom, gorse and blackberry and putting in new tile drainage. But once the water returned, he found the drains couldn’t cope with the volume and soon blocked up thanks to sandy sediment carried in the spring water.

“The swamp started to come back and cows used to get stuck in it so about eight years ago we got the digger in and opened it up and made a pond out of it and fenced it all off and it’s developed into a really nice area.”

He estimates there are now nearly 90 different types of native plants growing around the pond and farm streams.

Recently, he sowed lancewood seed given to him and now faces a big planting project.

“It was two seed heads off a tree, I think, just a handful. I got the chopping board and a knife and split them open and the

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Mark and Jenny McDonald intended to stay in the South Island for only three years but 26 years later they are still there farming their red Milking Shorthorns.

counted them out and there were 2500 seeds. I planted them in a seed tray in spring hoping some of them would come up. Some did and they carried on coming up and I think I potted up something like 800.”

He hopes the beautiful farm he and Jenny have created will be an example to other farmers of what can be achieved.

“The more places you get, for example,

like ours, the more it’s going to happen because people see it and like it and think ‘I can do that’ and away they go. It’s fascinating and it’s kind of addictive. You get a kick out of growing things.

“The more people learn how to do it the better it’s going to be for us all.”

It is 26 years since the McDonalds moved south from Taranaki and their plan to move back home once they’d made

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“It’s nice to go back to Taranaki but when it comes to milking cows it’s pretty hard to beat Canterbury,” he says.

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June 2020

29

AT THE GRASSROOTS

Getting through together Drought has affected many parts of the country leading farmers to dry off early and quit stock. Many are still suffering from the effects and have little feed going into winter. Farmers in other regions are rallying around and donating feed to those worst-affected though they themselves have been affected. Central Hawke’s Bay Mayor Alex Walker sends her thanks on behalf of the region.

T

HE weekend of May 16 saw a ray of hope arrive in Central Hawke’s Bay and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Finally, many of us have seen some desperately needed liquid gold fall from the sky.

It’s not enough to solve all our problems but it’s something and it’s great for the spirits. What’s even better for the spirits, though, is when we all stand together in solidarity and in Central Hawke’s Bay we have been lucky enough to experience just that when our friends from Wairarapa gave us an unbelievable gift in the Rapa Feed Run, which brought more than 600 bales of hay and balage.

Movement restrictions from the covid-19 lockdown plus widespread dry across the North Island, in particular, have put feed in extremely short supply and the logistics of transporting from other parts of the country are complex and sometimes costly.

Heading into winter drought is a disastrous situation and even though feed is expensive, bringing it in to feed what stock is left is still the most cost-effective way of getting through. Hawke’s Bay has been thankful for incredible support from farming communities around the country and, in particular, Wairarapa and the Rapa Feed Run. Your show of solidarity in delivering feed to our region has given an incredible boost to the spirits of our farmers and I want to send a huge and personal thank you to the legends who made it happen.

Thank you, thank you, and thank you again from the bottom of my heart.

The primary industry is the backbone of our region and our economy and it’s essential that our region stands up to help farmers as the drought now heads into winter, doing everything we can do to get them back on their feet as we come out of the covid-19 crisis.

Wage subsidies and loans are helping support businesses across the country but there is very little financial support for farming.

30

Central Hawke’s Bay mayor Alex Walker says ongoing drought in the region is disastrous going into winter.

But we are here for our farmers.

This month Hawke’s Bay’s mayors and the regional council chairman established the Mayoral Drought Relief Fund – an initiative I am passionate about driving for our rural communities.

Heading into winter drought is a disastrous situation.

The purpose is to raise funds to allow the Rural Advisory Group to help alleviate the financial burden for farming families across the region who are feeling the burn of the drought, focusing on the cost of transport and logistics to get more feed on the ground.

Central Hawke’s Bay has kick started

our contribution to the Mayoral Drought Relief Fund putting $100,000 toward the cause – with $50,000 each pledged by the council and consumer-owned local electricity lines company Centralines.

Hawke’s Bay’s other Councils as well as the Government have contributed generously to the fund, with Agriculture Minister Damein O’Connor pledging $500,000 to assist our farmers through the drought.

This might seem like a small drop into a huge issue but with close to a million dollars now raised our Rural Advisory Group has the funds to transport significant amounts of feed into Hawke’s Bay to help get as many people and animals through the winter as we can.

More information about how you can help will be coming soon, please keep a watch on the council’s Facebook page and website for details.

We are in this for the long haul but our network in Hawke’s Bay and beyond is truly incredible. Together we will get through this. Kia Kaha. n

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

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DAIRY CHAMPION

Huge gains to be made The inaugural Dairy Women’s Network Regional Leader of the Year is passionate about helping people learn. Her background in teaching fits perfectly with her role. Gerald Piddock reports.

G

REAT leaders are people who can bring out the best in others and use people’s strengths when working towards a common goal.

It’s these core leadership principles Dairy Women’s Network’s Regional Leader of the Year winner Tania Burrows hopes to share with other women in the industry as she looks to establish a new mentor programme to help them develop their leadership capabilities.

“You’re on the same journey together and everybody wants to be on that boat with you,” she says.

“My goal is to be able to support regional leaders with a mentor programme to grow themselves as leaders in their community and in the industry.”

She believes a big thirst for growth exists in terms of mentoring in the network’s membership around strong leadership and communication skills.

“There are a lot of farmers out there already who are doing a really incredible job of working into that space but I think there’s still huge gains to be made and I think that’s identified in the Dairy Tomorrow strategy.”

It is a strategy the network partners with other industry groups such as DairyNZ. Burrows says it is a huge honour to be the first winner of the award. She was chosen from the 70 volunteer regional leaders throughout the country.

Four finalists including Burrows, Sue Skelton who farms southwest of Whangarei near Waiotira, central Southland sharemilker Jessica Goodwright and North Canterbury contract milker Rebecca Green were chosen.

She says it was pretty special to be selected from that group.

Network chief executive Jules Benton says these leaders are their organisation’s lifeblood.

“It’s so important to acknowledge their efforts and celebrate their leadership in the dairy industry and their communities.

“All four finalists showed a real passion for leadership and for making a real difference, not only in their farm roles but for the network and in their personal lives as well. All are committed to ensure the dairy industry thrives.”

Crombie Lockwood key partnerships head David Rayner says Burrows

Tania Burrows joined the Dairy Women’s Network because she wanted to reconnect with the community after she took a more hands-on role with the farm. Lucy Sewell, Nicole Williams and Tania at a social dinner aimed to get the local community off farms and connected ahead of the new season last year.

32

Mid Canterbury farmer Tania Burrows is the inaugural winner of the 2020 Dairy Women’s Network Regional Leader of the Year. demonstrates a real strength in connecting and helping other people in her community to thrive.

“She received some very strong recommendations for the award from DWN members and everyone commented on the way in which she lives the DWN values.

“Apart from the effort that she makes within her region she also provides assistance to other regions and the wider dairy community. There was clear evidence of leadership and Tania is a very worthy recipient of this award.”

Her background in education gave her a solid base for her leadership development.

Burrows says she chose a career in teaching because she wanted to make a difference in the world.

She enrolled in training for early childhood teaching straight out of school and worked in that industry for 12 years while having her children.

That profession exposed her to a lot of leadership training and work when she was a full-time teacher and managing up

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

My goal is to be able to support regional leaders with a mentor programme to grow themselves as leaders in their community and in the industry. to 150 children, their families and a team of seven staff.

It also exposed her to a lot of studies around how people learn.

“There’s so much information out there around how people work well together in groups and how people learn and I feel that those are areas that if we understood more about ourselves – what we value and what makes us tick – that can be quite powerful when you’re working with other people.

“I’m really passionate about helping people learn, how to learn and learn about themselves in terms of building that awareness and emotional intelligence. It really helps them relate and work well in a group.”

She began her career in dairying in 2010 when she and husband Johno entered into an equity partnership on a North Otago dairy farm where they also sharemilked under their company name Alpine Dairies.

They were fortunate they could take a lot of ownership over the day-to-day management and some of the big picture decisions on that farm.

They sold their share in the partnership

Tania Burrows has been a regional leader with the Dairy Women’s Network for five year and enjoys supporting women taking up and developing leadership roles.

in 2017 because they wanted to move back to Canterbury and be closer to a teaching job Tania had at the time in Geraldine.

Today they are at Valetta in Mid Canterbury where over the past two years she, her husband and three children lower-order sharemilk a 255-hectare 1000-cow farm.

“We’re pretty lucky. It’s a relatively new conversion and it’s really well designed with a good lifestyle,” she says.

They also run the farm’s runoff block

which holds 1000 younger stock, meaning they manage a combined 2000-cow operation with their four to seven staff.

The shift to Mid Canterbury coincided with Burrows’ decision to train as a coach with the International Coach Federation.

That training helped her bridge her leadership learning between teaching and dairy farming.

“It meant I could use a lot of what I had learned during my teaching career

Continued page 34

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Tania has a background in teaching as she has a passion for helping people learn.

around how people learn and how people communicate with each other and how to get groups to get together to work effectively and apply a lot of those skills into the primary industry in supporting dairy farmers.”

Burrows says a lot of the skills are easily translatable from teaching to farming.

“When you’re managing a business and working with people at the end of the day, people are people and it doesn’t matter whether they are farmers or parents.”

Coming into the dairy industry from education, Burrows says there is a missing link in the industry in terms of people’s own development and how they effectively run teams.

While there are tools available it is not something farmers are readily exposed to.

Farmers also often train as they transition through the dairy industry whereas in other industries people are put through leadership programmes in the lead-up to when they take up positions where they have to lead large teams.

“Farming’s a unique journey in that respect.”

One of the beautiful things about being a regional leader is that it supports women taking up and developing leadership roles, she says.

She became involved in the network because she wanted to reconnect with the community after she took a more hands-

Tania Burrows and husband Johno, walking the Queen Charlotte track, run Alpine Dairies and are sharemilkers on a 1000-cow farm at Valetta in Mid Canterbury.

34

on role with the farm and parenting when they moved to Mid Canterbury.

She is now into her fifth year in the role.

“I’ve always been heavily involved in community through my teaching roles so when we decided I’d be more of a full-time mum and got more involved in our own farming business I missed that connection and being with the community and being able to give back some of those things.

“It helped me make that transition from working off the farm to how I could support the community and have some connections with some women and men who understood what my life looked like.”

As the 2020 DWN Regional Leader of the Year winner she receives registration for the Women’s Leadership Symposium in Auckland in late September that includes travel and accommodation and two mentoring sessions.

Burrows says it will be exciting to be in a room with women who are doing incredible things in a wide range of different industries.

“The learning that will come out of that will be pretty amazing.”

She says it is great how the network works with partners like Crombie Lockwood and DairyNZ to help fund and support the different opportunities it has.

“There’s a lot of collaboration and I think that’s a pretty special part of being involved with the DWN. “The relationships you build with all sorts of different people doing what you are doing but slightly differently all around the country is a huge asset.” n

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

BACK UP.

GOOD CALL. At FMG, we know that more than 10% of our milk claims are as a result of power loss.

It’s this kind of specialised rural knowledge that allows us to pass on valuable advice to farmers to help manage risks. Like making sure you always have a back-up generator on a dairy farm. At the end of the day, if we can help you avoid loss, it reduces stress, lost production and downtime. So why not get in touch with FMG to see how we can help you make some good calls on your farm. Call us on 0800 366 466, or go to fmg.co.nz

We’re here for the good of the country.

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WOMEN IN AGRIBUSINESS

Michele with one of the herd, which has been on once-a-day milking for 15 years. As well as working on the farm she also runs a company overseeing events and their accommodation business.

Off the Beaten Track A Waikato farmer knows a thing or two about building a business from the ground up and in her latest venture is combining her love of business and farming to help get holidaymakers better acquainted with some of the country’s most beautiful spots. Cheyenne Nicholson reports.

M

ANY an idea has been sparked from watching the longrunning television show Country Calendar.

But it wasn’t a good farming tip Michele and husband Roy Connell got, it was a business idea.

The idea was nurtured, investigated and eventually flourished into Off the Beaten Track (OTBT), a rural, Kiwi-owned accommodation business that gets visitors into private, unspoiled places often not seen or even known about other than by the farmers who own them.

Michele and Roy farm 80ha in Waikato.

Their 230-cow herd has been on once-a36

day-milking for 15 years, being one of the first farms to adopt the system. Producing on average 84,000kg MS a year, the herds’ foundations can be traced right back to the herd Roy’s dad bought in 1958.

“There has always been a passion for and strong emphasis on breeding and with our eldest son Taylor now working for LIC this has continued. We do love our cows and all the challenges they throw at us,” Michele said.

Michele, who grew up in the horse racing industry, took to the farming lifestyle quickly. Though she enjoys wearing her farmer hat she has always been drawn to business. She has founded and built several award-winning companies.

“The episode of Country Calendar

we watched was a beautiful farm down in Christchurch. It was at a time when the dairy payout wasn’t the best and it got us thinking that there must be other landowners living rurally, not realising they could share their piece of paradise and diversify their income.”

From a young age Michele has owned her own businesses and revelled in the chance to put her stamp on the business world.

“I enjoy the challenges that having to make a business work brings. My kids say I would be a terrible employee because I’m so used to doing things my own way.”

She began with a retail business, Country Bumpkins, which won regional awards including best small business.

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

After selling Country Bumpkins the couple moved to Roy’s family farm and had three sons, now all in their early 20s.

It wasn’t long before an idea for a new business started to form.

“When the boys were young I often thought to myself how hard it was to get their hair cut. Getting a small child to sit still for any length of time is a mission. So I decided to open my own children’s hair salon.”

The salon, Cool Haircut, was equipped with everything to entertain a child for the duration of a haircut from televisions to Playstations and even a cafe for the parents. The salon won many business awards in 2001 and 2002 for innovation, customer service and ultimate business success.

Speaking on what it takes to run a successful business Michele says with any new business it takes commitment to make it work, an investment of time, adaptability and a great team.

“Sometimes there’s no choice financially but to make it succeed so you have to keep thinking outside the box for creative ways to maximise opportunities or market the business.”

A chance meeting with the chief judge at an awards evening eventually led to Michele take over the reins of one of Waikato’s largest events, Balloons over Waikato.

“In business and in most other parts of life a lot of opportunities come through your networks and who you know. I was fortunate, I think, to end up chatting to that judge that evening because as a younger person in business it can be hard to meet the right people and feel confident enough to forge those relationships.

“Six months after meeting her I mentioned to her that I was thinking of selling Cool Haircut. It wasn’t an industry I was overly familiar with and I was ready for something new. She said ‘can you be at my office in an hour, I think I have the perfect job for you’.”

She was offered the job of helping promote and grow Balloons over Waikato.

The 15-hour workweek slotted in nicely with the children and the farm but the departure of the event manager saw her tossed in the deep end and promoted to that job.

“I’d never run an event before. It was a baptism by fire. We had five days of amazing weather and the event was a success. I don’t think I’ve ever learned so much in such a short space of time.”

One of the saving graces was having the sanctuary of the farm to return to each

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

The glamping tent on the Connells’ Waikato farm is set up to ensure camping is a glamourous and comfortable affair.

day where she could switch off.

“I think that’s one of the reasons I really believe in Off the Beaten Track.

“It can be incredibly restorative to spend some time in a beautiful, quiet place and it reinvigorates you to tackle the day.”

“I enjoy the challenges that having to make a business work brings.

Michele Connell

Fifteen years later she is now general manager of Balloons over Waikato and 10 years ago started her own event company, Classic Events. The company runs five key events: Balloons over Waikato, Lugton’s Round the Bridges, NZMCA Motorhome, Caravan and Leisure Shows, North and South and The Great NZ Food Show.

The catchcry for Off the Beaten Track is unique, Kiwi, rural experiences, a sentiment Michele feels very strongly about. With many tourists often focusing their time in the larger centres she sees OTBT as a way to encourage tourist dollars into smaller, rural communities.

“What we’ve found is that increasingly people are shying away from spending their holiday at crowded motor camps.

They want more of an experience to create memories with their family and friends and holidaying somewhere unique is part of that.”

When the Connells took their idea out to test the waters they were overwhelmed with positive feedback from landowners and holidaymakers alike. After dancing around the go button while they did more research they launched the business in late 2017.

“We thought if we don’t do it now someone else will. I think my advice for anyone who’s got a business idea is to just do it.”

Despite being a veteran of traditional brick and mortar business models Michele had never run an online business and says that was her biggest challenge.

With multiple website rebuilds and hitting the pause button a few times the start to the business was anything but smooth.

“It was a huge learning curve. We were really fortunate to be accepted into the business incubator SODA Inc, who were instrumental in linking us with people to talk to for advice. It’s all sort of snowballed from there and we have a really great network of people we can turn to for advice and guidance.”

Being a small start-up company with limited funds, lateral thinking has had to

Continued page 38 37

Roy and Michele Connell camping on the farm. They camp with a normal tent but guests are treated to a glamping experience.

be employed at every stage of the process along with leveraging off their farming networks and thinking of ways

to make their brand stand out.

“Building a portfolio of properties and building relationships with those

landowners has been challenging but that’s where being farmers has been really helpful. We know that farming can be economically challenging and we really do see this as a way farmers can diversify their income a bit.”

“It’s also a really great opportunity to share authentic rural experiences with everyone. Country people are really welcoming and a lot of the feedback we’ve had from people who’ve stayed at our landowners’ properties has been around how eye-opening it was to see a farm in action.”

The idea of sharing the farming experience with everyone has become a tactic she uses on the OTBT social media platforms. She can often be found out in the paddock with the cows and her video camera in the other hand recording content as a way to promote OTBT. “It’s a way for people to get to know who we are and making the brand relatable. It’s also about linking in the idea of it not just being about finding somewhere to stay, it’s about finding somewhere to have an authentic Kiwi experience in a rural setting and because we firmly believe that holidays really are better Off the Beaten Track.” n

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Farm Gauge boosts skills Nicole Hammond

Southland consulting officer

I

T’S been a challenging season for many farmers but they can be proud they are still producing food for New Zealand through drought and flooding and significant disruption from covid-19.

At this time many farmers will be thinking about how they can improve farm performance over the next year and make their businesses more resilient.

When it’s busy it’s not easy to find time to look at where they can make changes.

Fortunately, DairyNZ has a quick, free online tool that can help identify what they can focus on to improve their farm operations.

It’s called Farm Gauge.

Already, 1400 Kiwi dairy farmers and rural professionals have used Farm Gauge and DairyNZ is encouraging more farmers to see how it can benefit their businesses.

Farm Gauge looks at eight areas of farm operations: strategy, feed, finance, health, safety and wellbeing, herd management, people, environment and infrastructure.

There are a few questions to answer in each area and they can often be completed in an hour. Farmers don’t have to complete all sections but can focus on a couple of areas that matter to them.

Once they have completed the short self-assessment Farm Gauge will produce a report highlighting their performance.

That comes with links to resources to improve their knowledge and suggestions for further training.

Farmers at a Southland Biz Grow event I organised last season found Farm Gauge a useful tool to help identify where they could focus to improve how they farm.

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Farm Gauge can help farmers assess and improve all aspects of their farm operation.

with DairyNZ We actually shared the results in the group and it allowed those who were experts in different topics to share their knowledge with others who wanted to develop their understanding.

Farm Gauge can be used by farm owners, managers, sharemilkers, contract milkers and staff. They can share results across a farm team to see what strengths everyone brings to the operation then share knowledge among staff or plan more training.

If Farm Gauge is completed each year farmers can also track how their skills develop over time.

Improve your farm with Farm Gauge and win DairyNZ is encouraging farmers to try Farm Gauge. If they use Farm Gauge

The Farm Gauge app is a free online tool.

by June 30 they go into a draw to win a $500 farm store voucher from Farmlands or Farm Source. Two vouchers will be awarded per region.

To be eligible, just complete three or more of the eight Farm Gauge sections. n

MORE:

Go to dairynz.co.nz/farm-gauge for information.

39

INNOVATIONS

Give calves a good start

V

A small start-up company is doing big things for the industry’s new-born calves.

Anne Boswell reports.

ETS see firsthand the many challenges farmers face each season, particularly with animal rearing but what makes a vet go one step further and turn a creative solution into reality?

“Naivety,” laughs Antahi Innovations director Ursula Haywood.

“And the desire to help more farmers than I ever could with one-on-one consultations. By creating solutions to universal problems we’re able to reach more people and that is very important to us.”

Antahi, based in Waikato, was named for the reciprocal relationship between farmers and stock. The an comes from animal and tahi means first.

As a veterinarian Haywood spent years watching farmers using suboptimal equipment such as tube feeders on newborn or sick calves, leading to unpleasant experiences for both farmers and animals and unintentional injuries.

Antahi has been an outlet for Haywood, with husband Mark, to indulge her creative side and use her hands-on experience to design and make innovative products for easier and more successful stock-rearing in a period that has a huge impact on the rest of an animal’s life.

“Our products are designed to work with the animal, achieving the lowest stress and the greatest result, which, in

Waikato veterinarian Ursula Haywood established Antahi Innovations after spending years watching farmers use suboptimal equipment to feed newborn or sick calves.

Photos: Anne Boswell turn, makes a farmer’s work easier,” she says.

The company has gone from strength to strength since it launched its first product, the Trusti Tuber, in 2016 at the National Fieldays. It was developed to solve farmers’ concerns about calf safety and comfort with traditional oesophageal feeders. It won the Fieldays Commercialisation Award followed by several others overseas when entered in competitions by its distributors in 40 countries.

Antahi’s latest offering, the Trusti

The bags are reusable and easy to clean and calves can be fed straight from them.

40

Pasteur and Trusti Colostrum Bags, take that ethos even further back, to the very first few hours of an animal’s life.

Haywood says no other supplement has as much impact on a calf’s life as its first colostrum feed.

“Calves that receive high-quality colostrum are healthier in general and have been shown to have a definite advantage in reproduction and milk production,” she says.

However, the process of handling colostrum varies hugely from farm to farm.

In 2015 a NZ study found over 95% of farms fed substandard colostrum to their calves, with a low antibody concentration or a high contamination level.

“Spring is a really hectic period in our system and the correct storage and feeding of colostrum can be pushed to the side,” Haywood says.

“It is worth getting it right, though, because the impact is huge. Calves that don’t receive high-quality colostrum quickly are 10 times more likely to become sick or die.”

Poor quality issues can be largely solved by a quick Brix test, clean harvesting equipment and appropriate refrigeration of colostrum to avoid deterioration

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

but Haywood says pasteurisation is an effective way of ensuring calves receive maximum antibody absorption and minimal disease.

She says colostrum is a basic concept – it’s what nature provides, it’s free and it’s incredible but farmers need to make sure a calf receives it properly.

The Trusti Pasteur can pasteurise two, four-litre Trusti Colostrum Bags at once or thaw those bags from frozen in 20 minutes.

The bags are reusable with large spouts for easy filling and cleaning and attach to the Trusti Tuber drencher or a teat for feeding directly from the bag.

“Colostrum is harvested and placed straight into Trusti Bags,” Haywood says.

“If the colostrum is fed immediately after clean harvesting there is no need to refrigerate but it can be maintained at high quality for three (unpasteurised) to seven (pasteurised) days in the fridge or can be frozen in the Trusti Bags for 12 months.”

Haywood hopes the streamlined process will enable farmers to feed calves colostrum within the critical six-hour timeframe after birth.

The Trusti Bag’s thin wall means the colostrum can be warmed quickly with farmers rotating as many bags as necessary in and out of the Trusti Pasteur’s consistently warm water.

The bags make it easy to transport colostrum to a paddock to achieve the early feeding in between calf pick-up times. In the shed the bags can be put in a feeding rack or hung from a hook or nail for teat feeding or fed via the Trusti or Flexi Tuber oesophageal tube. There is a

Ursula Haywood with her new product, the Trusti Pasteur, which can pasteurise two, four-litre Trusti Colostrum Bags at once or thaw those bags from frozen in 20 minutes. thermal sleeve to help keep colostrum at optimal warm feeding temperature.

Farmers can also pasteurise and freeze colostrum for use at the beginning of the next calving season when the very early calvers often do not have good colostrum.

Haywood says colostrum pasteurisation is less common in NZ than in non-seasonal farming systems overseas where calves are fed from frozen colostrum banks.

“The cost benefits of pasteurising colostrum are cleaner, healthier colostrum but in the past the outlay has been huge,” she says.

“The Trusti Pasteur was designed with

this issue in mind and is approximately one-fifth the price of the European units on the market.”

Though the business has been far more time-consuming than she anticipated it has also been a way to use her creative side, learn about new industries and provide stock-rearing solutions for farmers both here and overseas.

“A strong start for a newborn is crucial for optimum health and productivity for life,” she says.

“Our goal is to continue to focus on developing better animal-rearing equipment and providing it to farmers and veterinarians around the world.” n

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Coping with uncertainty Learning to live with uncertainty is top of mind for many New Zealanders at the moment.

Whether it’s covid-19, drought or flood it pays to have strategies for managing stress when you’re confronted by unexpected events.

S

ARAH Donaldson is a clinical psychologist from a farming background in Wairarapa. She also works for the Rural Support Trust.

Farmstrong asked her for some pointers for farmers, their families and teams who might be feeling under the pump. Here’s what she had to say.

Build in recovery time Everyone has different levels of capacity to deal with the extra stress and pressures.

The easiest way is thinking about it as your coping capacity. When we have multiple things coming at us we can feel squeezed. For different people this can come out in different ways. Some people can get emotional and more tearful, irritable or intolerant and let this out on things happening around them or the people they are closest to.

Also when we are stressed, we tend to speed up or slow down. The stress hormones in our body can pump us up to go faster and work harder and be more alert but they’re only built to do that for distinct periods.

You need to give your body a release from all those stress hormones so they can then function and peak again.

It’s important to realise that when we 42

Sarah Donaldson from Rural Support Trust says strategies will help people cope with stress and pressure.

speed up we actually start to become less productive and more inefficient.

We become a bit like headless chickens running around trying to do lots of

different things.

The thing is to be aware of this and slow down.

And how do we slow down? It’s doing

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

things away from the farm that aren’t farm tasks and give us a release.

The antidote to stress is leisure and pleasure.

So that could be moving our body by doing some exercise or sport, it could be spending time with other people and talking about things that are non-farming.

If we are mentally busy and our head is full of worries and what-ifs that can also be very fatiguing. We need to recognise that and tell ourselves we haven’t got a solution for this mental chatter right now

so need a break from it.

If you can distract yourself mentally or physically and do something else there’s less ability for that little voice in your head to be chipping away.

Another good technique is helpful thinking. Ask yourself if how you are thinking is helpful.

Focus and ask if this thinking is actually helpful right now. If it’s not going to help you achieve or solve something then often it’s not. Ask yourself if you can’t get the answer to that right now, ask what you

can solve and put your energy into.

Our thoughts can directly impact on our emotions. So coping thoughts will mean a better chance of feeling on top of things.”

“So instead of thinking, next year’s looking pretty bleak in terms of the forecast, try to think about that situation in a different way and give yourself a more helpful message for example, well, I guess that’s the ups and downs of farming, but if we plan ahead early we might be able to mitigate some of those losses.” n

Kane Brisco 50:50 sharemilker, Ohangai, Taranaki Keeping everything in balance is a constant challenge but what’s really helped me is the notion that I can’t help anyone else unless I’m in a good place myself. As much as I love farming and spending time with my family I also need my own time, even if it’s just 30 minutes a day.

It’s just about getting out and doing something you like.

The antidote to stress is leisure and pleasure.

Angela Reed Dairy farmer, Waikirikiri Farm, Canterbury If people’s lives have balance and they’ve done something they’re passionate about in the weekends they come back to work with renewed energy for learning and doing a great job. It’s also important to ask people how they’re feeling, to look out for signs of stress and fatigue and help them understand that it’s okay to talk about these things. Everyone has times when they are feeling overwhelmed. It’s nothing to feel afraid of. The important thing is to ask for help, if you need it.

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Blake Marshall Dairy production manager Canterbury Often there’s an event on farm you can’t control – that’s like the first kick and you can’t change that. But you can stop yourself getting kicked twice, getting stressed all over again, by having a good response to it.

“ANCALF IS OUR NATURAL CHOICE.” ANDREW GRANT BELFIELD DAIRIES, GERALDINE.

Closest to mother’s milk, high degree of faith.

It’s Ancalf’s ability to curd, just as nature intended, that gives calves such a good start. They can digest the milk more efficiently and their young stomachs can absorb all the nutrients – leading to better weight gains and healthier calves all round.

For Andrew, transporting milk is an expensive and cumbersome option. So having a supply of Ancalf on hand is definitely beneficial. It suits his multi-farm system, his team and of course, his calves.

At the end of the day, the decision to use Ancalf is always an economic one and Andrew makes no bones about that.

“Roughly, our feed cost is budgeted at around $200 per calf, but it’s definitely not an area we want to scrimp on... which is why we never use any other CMR.”

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“We’re looking for a protein that’s at least 26% and Ancalf always delivers on that. I know a lot of other cheaper products don’t achieve the same sort of numbers that Ancalf does.”

“We find that there’s less variability in what we’re feeding them, so there’s no chance of them having some slightly dodgy milk.”

ANCALF

Andrew Grant knows calving is a very difficult time for a lot of farmers. Anything that makes life easier, has got to be good news. His team at Belfield Dairies are feeding up to 1200 calves a day, so he wants a calf milk replacer that delivers.

ANCALF™ THE WORD ON THE FARM

FIELDAYS

The media-rich Fieldays GERARD HUTCHING

T

HE most challenging National Fieldays in history – that is the reality facing organisers as they redirect their energies from managing a physical event to a virtual one.

Marketing and communications manager Taryn Storey said this year’s online Fieldays will run from July 13-26 and she expects exhibitor numbers will likely be half the normal 1100 who pitch their stands at Mystery Creek.

Among the hurdles to be jumped are the fact some of the big drawcards will not exhibit, the event is taking place at the beginning of calving and a significant percentage of the target audience has inferior broadband for what will be a media-rich experience.

Big hitters such as farm machinery dealers will not be there because they already have a strong online presence so it will not add value to their businesses.

On the plus side, dairy stalwarts such as Fonterra and DeLaval will participate in the slimmed down event.

Fieldays has also teamed up with TradeMe to give sellers and buyers a trusted platform for e-commerce. It will be particularly useful for exhibitors who do not have e-commerce capability on their digital platforms. Fieldays will not take a commission on sales.

Exhibitors will be able to drive traffic from their exhibitor page to their website and to a Fieldays’ TradeMe storefront.

A number of exhibitors who have paid a deposit have sought and received refunds, as has happened at Central Districts Field Days, but the organisers hope to retain them in other ways.

“Exhibitors can hold the existing site fees in credit and apply that to a Fieldays online site or any future Fieldays physical event or even if they wish to use it against a booking of the Mystery Creek venue for a conference or meeting,” Storey said.

While some site prices start at as little as $1000, large exhibitors and brand partners such as banks, car companies and Fonterra are known to pay more than $100,000 across combined marquees.

Storey knows some farmers can’t readily participate because they don’t

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

The crowds and marquees are missing at Mystery Creek for the 2020 National Agricultural Fieldays, which will be held as an online event instead.

have a good internet connection.

“The vast majority in New Zealand have access to broadband but for those who don’t we’re looking at the options of broadcasting it to give access to content and also the creation of a hub event at local community areas.”

The organisers are working through the logistics of how to present drawcards such as the innovations awards, Kitchen Theatre, presentations or seminars by economists and politicians.

“We’re looking at how we can create that interactive experience and provide the opportunity for organisations to hold seminar series, webinars – whether on their own exhibition site or as part of a wider programme of activity on Fieldays TV,” Storey said.

Site visitors will not be charged but they must register. Specific sites can be accessed through the platform’s home page, which will contain an interactive map, allaying fears from smaller exhibitors they will get lost on a site with a wealth of information.

Just as with the physical Fieldays, some sites will be more visible than others.

“There will be an element of exclusivity on the top-tiered sites. The top tiers will have greater visibility than the lower tiers sites and a lower percentage of these sites

We’re looking at the options of broadcasting it to give access to content and also the creation of a hub event at local community areas.

Taryn Storey

will be sold when compared to the lower level sites,” chief financial officer Brian Corfield said.

Organisers are optimistic the event will succeed and cite the example of the recent Geneva motor show, which was similarly a virtual one.

Storey said there has been significant international interest, which could see attendee numbers as high if not higher than for the physical event.

For more information visitors can go to the Fieldays Linkedin site. n

45

SPECIAL REPORT Milk from cows is a source of high-quality protein, essential minerals such as calcium, phosphorus, zinc and iodine and vitamins A, B and D.

Plants and animals aren’t equals Burgers have dominated the war of words over plant food versus animal nutrition but dairy products are also on the front line. Tim Fulton reports.

T

HE amount of commercial investment in plant protein is unprecedented, international agri firm Lux Research says.

It’s report Plant Proteins: Present and Future shows most of the extra activity in plant protein markets has been since Los Angeles startup Beyond Meat went public in May last year.

The big three plant proteins are staple crops soy, wheat and rice while the alternative up-and-comers are peas, canola, oats and chickpeas, lead analyst Thomas Hayes says.

Plant proteins are a specialty for Jan Hales, founder of Canterbury food industry consultancy The Nutrition Bureau.

Many new plant-based alternatives to animal products are nutritionally inferior and don’t resemble anything like the food they started as, she says.

“The end product risks being less healthy than the product they are supposed to be replacing.”

A 2018 Plant and Food Research study, Opportunities in plant based foods – Protein, outlines plant crops that show significant potential as sources of high46

quality protein for ingredient and food production in New Zealand. They include alfalfa, amaranth, cereals, kiwifruit seeds, oilseeds, potatoes, tree nuts and wrinkled peas.

However, the study found one of the challenges for plant protein ingredients isolated from single crops is their incomplete essential amino acid content.

Combinations of plant proteins are therefore often required for a complete diet.

Hales notes the combination proteins tend to include ingredients with lowerquality scores, meaning the body can’t use the protein as well as it would from dairy products.

Hales says nutrition studies show eating a diet with a high proportion of plants is good for health and associated with fewer cases of disease. Plant-based diets are generally healthier.

But there’s a shortfall of scientific information, not only because the studies show only an association and not a direct cause and effect but also because it’s assumed that plant-based diets are made up of mainly unprocessed plants that are close to their natural form.

“The issue is that when we start tinkering with a plant product, like

stripping out the fibre and complex carbohydrates to gain protein, then adding salt and sugar to make it taste better, we’re likely to end up with a product that isn’t much better nutritionally than junk food,” Hales says.

An example of this type of food is milk alternatives. Milk from cows is a source of high-quality protein, essential minerals such as calcium, phosphorus, zinc and iodine and vitamins A, B and D. Plant-based alternatives for dairy milk include nut options such as almonds and cashews as well as coconuts, soy, rice and oats. None of them naturally contains the same nutrients or the same amount of nutrients as dairy milk so they are not nutritionally equivalent.

To improve their nutritional content plant-based milks need to have vitamins and minerals added.

Comparative data of various milks show soy is the only alternative with appreciable amounts of vitamins because vitamin A, riboflavin, vitamin B12 and vitamin D have all been added.

The level and quality of protein in plant-based beverages are often much lower than animal milk with the poorer quality being caused by plant proteins not having the same profile or concentrations

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

of essential amino acids as animal milk.

The nutritional differences between the various options are also similar in plantbased cheese and meat alternatives. Both substitutes are often enhanced for flavour with sodium.

While some meat alternatives do have similar nutritional profiles, key factors can’t be shown in a graph or in the nutrition panel of a label. One of the most important questions is how the body uses essential nutrients, namely protein, iron and zinc. These nutrients can be harder to obtain from plant-based proteins than animal proteins.

Food manufacturers looking to offer a plant-based alternative to a core food should be considering nutritional equivalence, Hales says.

Rather than focusing on consumer perception and trying to replace a product with one that looks like it, the food industry should consider the impacts the replacement products have on consumer nutrition and health.

Food manufacturers could also educate the consumers and position themselves as experts in plant-based nutrition.

By looking at what a product lacks nutritionally and understanding its limitations the industry could make improvements by fortifying products with vitamins, minerals and fibre or using spices rather than sugar and salt to add flavour.

Better still, manufacturers could develop products that use less processed plant foods and so retain inherent nutritional qualities.

“Being low in saturated fat and a valuable source of complex carbohydrates, soluble and insoluble fibre, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants are what will make plant-based diets healthier,” Hales says.

But developing product alternatives might be easier said than done for entrepreneurs.

The Plant and Food study shows most plant proteins used in the country’s food industry are made overseas and most of the requirements for isolating and making plant proteins are similar to those for dairy proteins. Manufacturers might need expertise from the dairy industry to develop a new plant-based protein food industry in this country.

It also found the nitrogen footprints for plant production are many times less than those of livestock farming and the nutrient leakiness of plant production systems is lower.

While NZ’s protein production focuses on proteins sourced from dairy and

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Canterbury food industry consultancy The Nutrition Bureau founder Jan Hales specialises in plant-based protein and says many new plant-based alternatives to animal-based products are nutritionally inferior and don’t resemble anything like the food they started as.

meat there is ongoing debate about sustainability limits for those industries and the role of diversification into other protein sources for premium future foods.

Many niche locations are potentially more suitable for plant-based protein production than animal-based protein production, the report says.

On a global front Lux Research found conventional meat, fish and poultry are insufficient to sustainably satisfy protein demand.

Among the staple alternatives, Lux Research analysts conclude that in Europe wheat is and will be the continent’s top resource for plant protein.

“In the grand scheme of things Europe appears to be lagging behind North America in creating manufacturing infrastructure for pea, canola and oat proteins. Ingredient companies and CPGs should be proactive and set up joint development agreements as a first step.”

In Asia, though rice protein is not as ubiquitous as soy and wheat protein, Hales says “This only highlights an opportunity that companies, either Asia-based or foreign, should seize. The region also has a plethora of other protein sources that allow for differentiation, including chickpeas.”

In North America soy will remain the number one plant protein source for at least the next five years.

“As the supply chain for pea protein rapidly matures and looks to compete

with soy newcomers should place their attention on oats and canola for the North American market.”

Lux notes that as the global population swells toward 10 billion there is more demand for animal protein as more countries grow richer. That has given rise to next-generation methods for protein production, including plant and insect proteins, algae and cellular agriculture.

While global interest in developing the next-gen plant proteins has levelled off in the past decade that should not be misconstrued as a lack of momentum.

Rather, the apparent tail-off in activity is a sign of commercial maturity following a surge in product launches, market growth and construction of manufacturing facilities. n

47

SPECIAL REPORT

Victoria farmers Erwin and Stacey Reesink are 55% sharemilkers milking 360 cows a farm at Dumbalk in the south Gippsland area of Victoria, Australia.

Farming in the land of Oz A farming family from the Netherlands took the plunge and moved to Australia where they are firmly established in the dairy industry. Samantha Tennent reports.

U

PROOTING your life and moving to the other side of the world is not for the fainthearted nor is it an easy process when there are red tape and strict requirements but a Victoria, Australia, farmer who did just that has no regrets.

Since migrating from the Netherlands in 2012 Erwin Reesink has progressed through the dairy sector, establishing a successful farm business with wife Stacey and their young family.

The differences between farming in the Netherlands and Australia and New Zealand are a world apart but the one thing they have in common is there is always work to be done.

The average herd size in the Netherlands is 85 cows whereas in Australia it is 280 cows. Farms in the Netherlands operate a year-round system and the cows are housed and rarely graze on pasture. In any one day they would be checking springing cows, calving cows, mating cows and managing calves.

“Back in Holland it was always busy.

There were always young calves to feed but at least they were all indoors so it’s a 48

bit easier to oversee it all,” Reesink says.

“You do things like heat detect cows as you’re scraping out the bedding.

“Here it’s full on. We don’t sit still but it’s hot and cold. It gets extremely busy when we calve and we synchronise the cows at mating so it’s even busier.

“Then it is silage and haymaking season. It does quieten down here but in Holland it is non-stop.”

Having experienced working in both systems he enjoys them both but finds the different pace of seasonal farming allows him time to cruise and relax, which is great when the weather is good and things have settled on the farm.

Reesink grew up on the family farm in Holland where he spent all his spare time helping out and working for a local contractor. Farming was in his blood and he knew it was all he ever wanted to do.

He knew his Dad Johan had considered moving to Australia to farm because they had family there so when he finished school he encouraged him to investigate.

“Dad said if I wanted to go we’ll make it happen and then he put the farm on the market,” he says.

They visited for three weeks to check out some farms and get a feel for the area.

They had to go through an extensive visa process with help from an agent before they could emigrate. They put a business plan together, gathered relevant evidence and had to complete an English language test to get their visas.

“We understood the basics of English but the test was quite high level so our score wasn’t very good as we rarely spoke English back home but it was good enough and that’s all that mattered,” he says.

Packing their lives into a container Erwin, his dad Johan, step mum Anneke and two younger siblings emigrated in November 2012. Once they arrived they bought a farm and took it over the following May but in the meantime floated around different living arrangements with helpful cousins.

“We did a bit of milking in exchange for housing and some casual farm work to keep busy.

“We just had to wait until we could move onto the farm.”

It was a relief when they moved in, unpacked, got settled and began farming the Aussie way.

Johan bought the 132-hectare farm and most of the existing herd and topped up

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Trevor has been amazing to us.

He’s made it feel like it’s our own and gives us the freedom to farm how we want.

DAIRY BUSINESS OF THE YEAR www.dboy.co.nz

Erwin Reesink grew up on the family farm in the Netherlands and always knew he wanted to go farming.

the owners, not the milk company, paid them.

They spent two years on that farm and got married in January 2015. They tried to get the owners to change the arrangement and formalise things but they would not budge. They found another opportunity, that required a herd, in Dumbalk in the south Gippsland area.

It was a great stepping-stone and they signed a contract for three years. The owners had recently bought the farm and were planning to eventually milk themselves so three years was all they were prepared to offer.

They bought the basis of their herd from farms going out of dairying because of the low payout. Cow value was low but they offered a good price and paid the owners to milk them for another month

before they could move them onto the sharemilking farm.

They bought a few more cows to reach 360 and bought replacements for the next two years till they had their own youngstock coming through. They had financial backing from family, taking lowinterests loans from his parents as well as the bank to build their herd and equity.

The farm presented several challenges and they knew after their contract finished they would need to move. They kept an ear out for opportunities and through the grapevine heard of a farm in Fish Creek worth approaching.

The owner, Trevor Vening, had milked part of his brother’s herd on it for about six months when he ran out of feed.

Continued page 50

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to 200 cows. They also bought some gear with the farm including a tractor, mower and motorbike.

He worked with his Dad for 10 months before he decided to start building his own business. By that time he had met South African-born Stacey through their local church and his dad and Anneke had also had another baby and the farm felt a bit small for two families.

He toyed with the idea of mining or another career but his heart was in farming. He took a job managing a farm for a couple who were heading overseas for a few months, which proved a great interim step. Stacey helped when she could and together they lined up their first variable sharemilking job milking 200 cows for the following season in Wattle Bank, Victoria.

Before they started they spent a month in Holland while they had the chance to spend some time with family and returned to get set up for the new job.

“It was a handshake agreement. We were a bit naive and the owners probably took a bit of advantage of us as a young, excited couple but it was a good start.”

They bought a tractor from the owner who gave them time to pay it off and they started collecting other bits and pieces.

They were on a 40% share but had various expenses they were responsible for and

Erwin Reesink was 19 when his family sold their dairy farm to move to Australia to go farming there.

Vening was running beef on the farm but had all the facilities for dairy.

They approached him about switching to dairy but he was not keen at first because he was happy running beef. A few weeks later he rang to see if they were still interested and offered them a 55% arrangement.

“Trevor has been amazing to us. He’s made it feel like it’s our own and gives us the freedom to farm how we want.

“Before we moved onto the farm we raised concerns over the water system as there wasn’t enough capacity in the paddocks to support dairy cows so we installed 25 new troughs across the farm.”

The farm is 168ha with 150ha effective and they lease a neighbouring 55ha. The lease block has its own water challenges so they milk off only part and graze their youngstock on the rest.

They took 360 cows plus 60 in-calf heifers and 80 youngstock to the farm.

They are contracted for a minimum of 300 cows but they all knew the farm could not support more than 400. They were planning to reduce numbers after they moved but the herd contracted thyleria before they had chosen which cows to sell.

The herd was high-risk because it had not been exposed before.

Vets suspect transmission is linked to ticks on wombats and the new farm had a decent population of wombat pests. A few cows died and others affected were culled. The rest of the herd has recovered well and has some natural immunity now.

They have kept the herd size at 360 but 50

they had to buy 15 cows because of the outbreak. Last season they produced 530kg MS a cow for a total of 190,000kg MS and are 5% ahead this season. They are targeting 550kgMS a cow.

The herd is fed 6kg of grain in the shed made up of wheat, canola and minerals.

They make silage off the platform and feed bales in the fringes. They aim to close the stack by mid April but if they do not get enough rain might use it into June.

The area gets about 1000mm of annual rain so is not as dry as other parts of the country.

The season has been exceptional this year and they managed to close the stack by mid March, leaving about 250-300 tonnes of silage ready for next season.

They plant 5ha of turnips and 6ha of a mixed crop of rape and millet on the platform to start feeding in January.

The herd is break-fed on the crop for up to an hour and a half each day over a week. They target two to three complete grazings before replanting the paddock into permanent pasture.

They are split calving with two-thirds of the herd calving in spring starting August 1 and the rest in autumn starting March 10.

Both matings are six to seven weeks of do-it-yourself AI followed by three weeks with the bull. Most of the herd is Friesian but there are also some Friesian-Jersey, Aussie Reds and a few Montbeliardes.

Recording is manual because most Australian farmers do not use recording programmes like those NZ. They herd test several times throughout the season and the results go into a

database along with their breeding information. In their previous role they were contracted to test monthly but now they just use the service when they feel they need to, for example if the somatic cell count goes up.

Their milk company, Saputo, has a target of keeping SCC under an average of 250,000cells/ml over periods of 30 days.

Their previous company had a threshold of 200,000cells/ml.

Saputo is a privately owned Canadian company that has recently moved into Australia. Even though the Australian dairy sector exports only small amounts of its annual production compared to NZ it is still susceptible to the volatility of the global market because if prices are not competitive it could import more rather than using domestic product.

When they first started sharemilking the payout was good but it started dropping the following season. On the Dumbalk farm they took over an existing contract that secured them A$5.50/kg MS, which they felt was low at the time but there were other farmers getting less. It stayed similar the following season and has begun to climb since. This season they hope to get $7.

The couple have worked hard to get where they are but their latest opportunity is letting them create a great lifestyle and they feel more invested and are enjoying the trust and support from their farm owner.

They say they have been fortunate with their path and feel they always progressed in the right direction and are thankful they kept their faith. n

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

SPECIAL REPORT

Saputo goes big in Australia A Canadian dairy processor is not as big as Fonterra but has established a firm foothold in Australia where it has the lion’s share of the market. Samantha Tennent reports.

C

ANADIAN dairy processor Saputo has become the largest in Australia after multiple acquisitions including gobbling up co-operative Murray Goulburn in 2018.

Murray Goulburn was formed in 1950 and had 10 processing plants across Australia when it changed hands.

Significant debt turmoil lead to the A$1.3 billion Saputo acquisition.

Murray Goulburn’s last chairman John Spark said the weight of debt and significant loss of milk to competitors forced the co-operative’s hand.

The transition had to go through a vote with its shareholders but the directors unanimously recommended the sale.

“The deal represented the best available outcome for the co-operative,” Spark said.

“Securing a sustainable future for Murray Goulburn’s loyal suppliers was of paramount importance to the board and we were pleased with the strong milk commitments as part of Saputo’s offer.”

Farmers got 40 cents a kilogram of milksolids extra payment for milk supplied in the financial year of the sale.

They also had a commitment for milk collection and market pricing into the future.

Saputo already had a large presence in the Australian market. In 2014 it won a bidding war for Warrnambool Cheese and Butter. And it has continued to grow its empire by buying a specialty cheese business from Lion Dairy and Drinks last year.

It is one of the top 10 dairy processors in the world, the largest in Australia and second largest in Argentina. It produces, markets and distributes a wide array of dairy products including cheese, fluid milk, extended shelf-life milk and cream products, cultured products and dairy ingredients including milk powder, whey protein concentrates and lactoferrin.

In the United States Saputo ranks among the top three cheese producers and is one of the largest producers of extended shelf-life and cultured dairy products. In Britain Saputo is the largest

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Canadian dairy processor Saputo is one of the top 10 dairy companies in the world and the largest in Australia. maker of branded cheese and a top maker of dairy spreads.

Fonterra is the second-biggest player in Australia but it does not have shareholders there. The only remaining Australian dairy co-op is Norco, which processes about 220 million litres of milk out of Australia’s annual production of 8795 million litres.

Norco operates two fresh milk plants and an ice cream factory that make up about two-thirds of its business. It is one of Australia’s biggest ice cream makers and produces ice cream that is sold in China, Japan and US and in Countdown supermarkets across NZ. “It’s a different platform in Australia,” Dairy Australia technical and innovation manager John Penry says.

“In NZ there are very large and well established co-operatives where Australia has a lot of different processors who are largely businesses outside of a co-op model and we operate across different states where governance and regulation can vary. It is not a single, nationallevel system.”

Dairy is the fourth largest rural industry in Australia and employs 46,200 people.

It exports 35% of annual production and has a range of seasonal, split-calving and year-round systems.

The number of farms has fallen almost 75% since 1979 with only 5213 still milking. Over a similar period the average herd size has grown from 93 cows to 276.

There are 1.44 million dairy cows across

the country, of which 70% are Holstein Friesian.

There are dairy farms across the whole country but most milk production is in the southeast corner because the climate and natural resources are more favourable for pasture-based farming.

Inland areas are heavily reliant on irrigation schemes.

Supplement feed use is widespread and has increased significantly over the past decade as farmers adapt to drier conditions. The national average during the 2018-19 season indicated 1.6 tonnes a cow a year was being fed, which is consistent with the previous two seasons.

Saputo’s goal is to safeguard the environment while continuing to grow as a world-class dairy processor.

That means meeting compliance obligations, preventing pollution, reducing its impact on and adapting to climate change, using natural resources sustainably, protecting biodiversity and ecosystems and leveraging its capabilities as a business to create positive environmental actions.

Its manufacturing facilities manage their environmental impact with support from divisional environmental teams to ensure compliance with environmental standards.

In 2020 Saputo pledged to accelerate its global climate, water and waste performance and set clear targets and a formal commitment to make significant and sustainable progress by 2025. n

51

NEWS

Dairy, just the job SAMANTHA TENNENT

A

SHARP rise in unemployment is on the horizon because of covid-19 but the dairy sector will offer some reprieve.

DairyNZ is encouraging people to consider work on dairy farms in a new Go Dairy campaign that offers entry-level training to help the transition to farming.

While the Go Dairy career-changers campaign, supported by Federated Farmers, aims to create awareness of the job opportunities there is a big emphasis on ensuring new staff understand what is involved in farm life.

“We want a win-win situation for new dairy farming employees to be happy and fulfilled in their new lifestyle and jobs and for farm employers to have great talent working for them,” DairyNZ chief executive Dr Tim Mackle says.

“For the most part, we’re anticipating interested people will be from the regions where there are big job losses in tourism and hospitality and where there is dairying close by.

“Even though they are new to farming many people already have skills that are readily transferrable and valued on dairy farms.”

Statistics show of the 48,000 people employed in the dairy sector, 34,000 are working on dairy farms with the rest in processing and support operations.

Mackle says opening the door to new people will also help fill the gap this season that farm employers have in the recent years of low unemployment filled with migrants, who are now shut out by border closures.

Grant and Kate McCallum milk 580 cows in Northland and recently hired two new people. They note there is already a change in the employment market.

“We usually get 15 to 20 applicants for a job with only four or five being New Zealanders and the rest from overseas but this round we had over 40 apply and almost all were Kiwis,” McCallum says.

He noted many have dairying experience and there are a lot of people returning to the sector.

“They were very conscious that the job market was going to get tough because of 52

There are job opportunities in the dairy sector for people who have lost their jobs because of covid-19.

We want a win-win situation for new dairy farming employees to be happy and fulfilled in their new lifestyle and jobs and for farm employers to have great talent working for them.

Dr Tim Mackle

what was happening with shutdown and businesses struggling.

“They realised they were going to have to be competitive to get a job and recognise dairying offers a reliable income.

“We need the staff to run the business and we’ve got to make it work economically. Staff costs are the last thing you cut.

“Dairy is going to be a good place to come for those who have lost jobs.”

McCallum can see great opportunities for employers to take advantage of the changing employment market and sell dairy as a career. And he encourages jobseekers to get help and take time to put a CV together and include referees.

“A CV helps us understand people’s experience and adding referees makes our

job as employers easier.”

He expects people to turn up to interviews with a good attitude and professional manner and if they lack experience to be keen and willing to learn.

“It’s worth finding out about training that is available so you can discuss it at the interview. Show us you are interested.”

DairyNZ is finalising the details of the Go Dairy farm-ready course for career changers who are serious about farming.

The course will provide information about life and work on a farm and teach the basics of animal handling and vehicle safety.

Once on a farm new workers will be supported by the farm employer and colleagues. As many farm staff already do, they can choose to go on to learn more and obtain formal qualifications through courses. n

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

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RESEARCH

Nuffield Scholar and Dutch dairy farmer Heleen Lansink spent time in New Zealand recently researching the role of women in agriculture.

No going Dutch on farms A Nuffield scholar from the Netherlands has been researching the difference in the roles women play in agriculture in New Zealand, which is quite different in her native country.

Gerard Hutching reports.

D

UTCH dairy farmer and Nuffield scholar Heleen Lansink left New Zealand recently with a heightened appreciation of the differences between the roles of women in agriculture in this country and the Netherlands.

Lansink lives and works with her husband Rogier and their four children on

a dairy farm in eastern Holland, close to the German border. They run 85 milking cows on 55ha.

On her trip, which took her around the world, she investigated the evolving role of the farmer’s wife/partner in her key position as a driver in the transition to sustainable, supported agriculture.

Being willing to help her husband run the family farm makes Lansink unusual among her female peers.

The reasons for that are physical and cultural. Not only are farms smaller than in NZ, so there is less space for women to be involved, but most tend to work off-farm because there are so many large centres of population nearby.

A further barrier is the sexist behaviour prevalent in the industry.

For her research she quizzed a gathering of 800 Dutch women who told her while many of them have equal

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Women aren’t heard.

Heleen Lansink

ownership few ever attend a farm-related meeting.

“Women aren’t heard.

“About 80% said if advisers came to visit the farm, the mainly men would hardly ever speak with the women.

These advisers might be bankers, feed or breeding reps, accountants, vets.”

While in NZ she stayed with dairy leader Tracy Brown who farms near Matamata.

Brown is chairwoman of the DairyNZ Dairy Environment Leaders Programme, the Ballance Farm Environment Awards Alumni, the farmer representative on the Dairy Environment Leadership Group and a DairyNZ director.

Lansink was keen to learn about the paths NZ women use to move into leadership positions, avenues that are sorely lacking in the Netherlands.

“When you train women they’ll grab their chances. Tracy started with the Dairy Women’s Network and there are number of regional leaders who are being trained,” Lansink said.

Brown, who intends to complete a Nuffield scholarship and travel overseas including to the Netherlands, said her understanding is the situation for women in both countries is different.

“In NZ it’s more of a 50:50 partnership.

Women in the Netherlands do not usually work on farms and often face a sexist attitude from people in the industry such as advisers but Heleen Lansink does work on the farm. Heleen with Rogier and their young son out on their farm.

You’re an equal decision maker whereas in the Netherlands the farms are intergenerational and small and it simply isn’t economically viable for the female partner to be at home on the farm.

“Here there are a lot of women who have professional roles but they’re doing that from home, juggling family, running a family business and doing something else as well.

“Maybe it’s a downscaled role of something they used to do professionally.

They tend to feed calves, look after the finances and do another job whereas

Heleen Lansink and husband Rogier on their 55ha dairy farm in eastern Holland where they run 85 cows DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

the major focus for women in the Netherlands seems to be working off-farm with little involvement in the day to day,” Brown said.

Lansink noted the Netherlands and NZ face similar environmental issues.

“Our systems are collapsing a bit. You see the problems we’ve got with animal welfare, loss of biodiversity, pressure on air and water quality. Sometimes we step over the boundaries. We have to move to a new, balanced system – regenerative, circular farming are all solutions.”

However, farmers are sometimes not vocal enough about their environmental initiatives.

“For example, we have a frog pool on our farm but no-one knows because we haven’t said anything and then we’re accused of not doing enough for biodiversity.”

On milk alternatives Lansink does not see them as a threat because “it’s all about telling our stories about how nutritious milk is.

“We live in a free world. For some farmers it’s a new challenge.”

There are bigger issues such as the average age of farmers being about 56 and the fact the younger generation is less willing to make farming a career.

Whatever the challenges, Lansink loves farming in the Netherlands. After visiting the United States and China she decided that with all its extra regulation the Netherlands is a good place to be a farmer. n

55

RESEARCH

A vision for the future SAMANTHA TENNENT

A

KEEN 11-year-old from Pongakawa School in Bay of Plenty has chosen dairy farming for his inquiry assignment this term and is seeking some info from farmers.

The focus the class was given was to grow it for a better tomorrow and Devon Jones knew there was a range of suitable topics in dairy farming.

He has found lot of the information for his project on the DairyNZ website but he has also crafted a questionnaire for a few farmers to complete.

“The questionnaire will help me know what other farmers are doing to help the soil and waterways.”

It took a push from his teacher but he is pleased he committed to using dairy farming for his assignment.

“I have been looking at how we can make dairy farming sustainable and better for the future.

“I have been researching soil health and waterways plus looking at how we can keep people wanting to stay in the industry.”

He knew dairy farming would be interesting to investigate and his teacher is passionate about agriculture too.

With his research he has learnt about improving soil health and how the erosion of riverbanks causes flooding. He has learnt how rock walls on the sides of rivers can help prevent erosion.

He is also learning how we can improve soil health, how controlled burn-offs

Bay of Plenty primary school student Devon Jones is doing research for his school project on soil health and waterways as well as looking at how to make dairy farming attractive. can provide some natural fertiliser and how dairy farming can be an attractive workplace for talented people.

Once he has gathered all the information he has to create a vision for the future. With well-crafted statements and images the vision needs to be motivating and intriguing and convince people it is what the future will look like.

Devon thinks that will be easy because farmers are doing a good job to protect the environment and create a good workplace.

The inquiry-based approach to learning is driven by students’ curiosity about the world around them. It emphasises the role of the student in the learning process rather than the teacher telling them what they need to know. It is designed to keep students engaged.

There are 22 kids in his class and they are all researching a topic that interests them, for example running, water polo, rubbish and recycling. Devon is the only one doing dairy farming.

He lives on a family farm owned by his Poppa.

His parents have been sharemilking on the farm for 15 years and have a herd of 270 crossbreed cows.

He is the eldest of four and his mum had him in a backpack from day one.

He spends a lot of time on the farm and hopes to make a career out of it or become a truck driver. n

MORE:

Any farmers willing to answer a few questions for his assignment can email bbjonesy@farmside.co.nz

0508 Animate (264 6283) nzsupport@pahc.com

56

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

RESEARCH

Pamu pioneers fertigation Fertigation allows small amounts of fertiliser to be applied through a pivot irrigator, resulting in more uptake of nutrients by crops.

TONY BENNY

P

AMU Farms has achieved a biennial nitrogen reduction of about 36% on its Waimakariri, Canterbury, dairy farm while maintaining pasture growth and milk production by using fertigation.

Lincoln University, Irrigation New Zealand, Ballance Agri-Nutrients, Fertigation Systems and Molloy Agriculture with extra money from the Sustainable Farming Fund are working with Pamu to see if fertigation improves yield and nitrogen efficiency and whether it has lower environmental losses than solid nitrogen.

Researchers Tommy Ley of Lincoln University and Steven Breneger of Irrigation NZ are running the trial.

Breneger says Pamu approached him two years ago after hearing he’d been interested in fertigation most of his career in his native Australia and in NZ. “The rest of the world do it and we don’t so I’ve been pushing the barrow for about nine years here,” he says.

Fertigation is used in horticulture here but till now hasn’t really been picked up by pastoral farmers.

“Pamu had been doing some thinking about how it can reduce nitrogen loss with a more aggressive reduction than five or 10%. So it was really about tailoring a system to its wants and needs.

“I did three concept designs from what they told me, based on capital cost, farm management and risk and they picked the one that met the majority of their needs.”

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

A 30,000-litre tank was installed on the farm and the liquid fertiliser was spread using pivot irrigators. A smaller 4200-litre tank on a trailer was rotated around the farm and connected to the bases of the pivots.

“Fertigation allows for small amounts of fertiliser to be applied at a time, allowing more uptake of nutrients by crops,” he says.

“Pamu put on about 1.3kg N/ha a week so it’s all tailored to once-a-week application.”

The trial started in November 2018 and the results at the end of the first year were encouraging. Now, at the end of the second year, a clearer picture of what seasonal nitrogen efficiency could look like is emerging.

“I went back to Pamu and asked what they were experiencing. They said ‘these are our numbers. We applied less nitrogen, we’ve grown pretty much the same grass and our milk production, given the seasons we had, was about on par with the five-year average’.”

Other benefits included increase timeliness of applications and the reduction of contractor traffic on the farm.

One year’s result wasn’t enough to prove the concept though.

“We can’t go out and say 42% is achievable because we don’t know if the grass just mined excess available nitrogen that was already in the soil. What we need is year-on-year results on multiple farms to help build the understanding of the potential benefits of fertigation.”

But part way through the second year of the trial fertigation was still holding its own compared with solid nitrogen

Steven Breneger from Irrigation New Zealand has been researching fertigation to achieve a reduction in nitrogen leaching.

application even though grass growth on Pamu’s farm lagged behind that being achieved by a neighbour.

“They said to me in January this is our neighbour’s pasture growth and this is ours, what do you want to do? I asked what their milk vat was saying and they said they were up on budget already.

“I asked why we were doing anything. It was a lightbulb moment and they realised nothing needed to be done.

“We’re looking at the feed value versus the feed yield so the assumption is that cows are actually utilising more of the feed more efficiently and instead of growing great tonnages of green grass we’re growing less.”

The trial is still running and final results won’t be presented till it’s completed but early indications have impressed Pamu, which has indicated it intends to expand the use of fertigation to more of its farms. n

57

RESEARCH

Spikey thorny

A Kiwi company has been developing and testing a tool to help farmers reduce nitrate leaching, which will save them money in the long-term. Samantha Tennent reports.

N

ITRATE leaching is a serious challenge for dairy farmers with 80% of leaching coming from urine spots.

Imagine being able to help the environment by reducing leaching as well as growing more grass and making more profit.

That is what a new implement from Pastoral Robotics claims to do.

Spikey has a series of spiked discs that run along the surface of the soil seeking the urine patches by electrical conductivity detecting changes where the patches are.

It treats the patches with a liquid solution, NitroStop, which slows the conversion of nitrogen to nitrate and keeps it in ammonium form for much longer. That promotes microbial growth and allows the pasture to use more of the available nitrogen to grow and leaves less to leach into waterways.

Pastoral Robotics has invested heavily in research and the trials show Spikey can increase drymatter by 15% and reduce nitrate leaching by about 30% in the urine patches. It has tested the system with Massey University, Landcare Research and AgResearch.

Sales and marketing general manager Denis Collins is excited about what Spikey means for the sector.

“We want to capture and use that nitrogen. We don’t want it to disappear. We want to use it to grow more grass and 58

produce more milk to export with the option of reducing nitrogen inputs.

“The primary focus is helping the environment but for farmers if they can make money at the same time and they can by using Spikey then they will be sustainable. And to be sustainable you need to make a profit somewhere along the line or it could lead to land use changes or something else.”

The firm’s economic data calculates operating costs of about $300 a hectare and at the current milk price the potential return from the extra milk production could be worth $1000 a hectare.

With a working width of 8m, Spikey attaches to tractors between 85hp and 120hp. It can also be fitted with a twin-disc fertiliser spreader that can apply urea prills, granules or blended fertilisers at rates as low as 10kg/ha.

“We had feedback from farmers if there’s already a tractor going around the paddock it would be helpful if it could apply fertiliser too.

“We made it happen and have managed to get the application rate low so it can be applied little and often.

“One farmer in Rotorua describes it as farming hydroponically.” He’s feeding just enough to give the grass what it needs.

It needs to follow the herd within 48 hours of grazing and Collins envisions it will suit a contractor type model for small to medium size farms forming clusters and sharing the machine.

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

tackles problem Pastoral Robotics sales and marketing general manager Denis Collins says the primary focus is helping the environment sustainably.

Spikey has a series of spiked discs that run along the surface of the soil seeking urine patches by electrical conductivity and treats the patches with a liquid solution.

“We have a syndicate of farmers in Bay of Plenty who bought a unit between them. It’s a great concept as they get the benefits from the machine but share the initial outlay costs.

“And that way more farms can get done in a day and if there is a dedicated driver it won’t add to the workload for the existing team which keeps it simple.”

Pastoral Robotics has been engaging with regional councils to encourage them to consider Spikey and NitroStop as a solution for nitrate mitigation. It supports its claims with peerreviewed science and has also been addressing food safety concerns.

“Ultimately, in the dairy industry we are producing milk so anything we do to the pasture we need to make sure there’s no food safety issues.”

In November the firm was awarded the energy, environment and sustainability prize by the Institute of Mechanical Engineering in London.

The prize is awarded to a mechanical engineer who has taken significant steps to bridge the gap between an unsustainable present and a more sustainable future.

“The award recognises the impact our technology will have on the world’s environment, minimising nitrate leaching and greenhouse gas emissions from pastoral farming,” managing director Geoff Bates says.

“It’s great to see New Zealand innovation being recognised by such a prestigious professional body.

“Spikey is an exciting opportunity for farmers to try to combat some environmental challenges at the same time as increasing efficiency and profitability,” he said. n

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

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59

ANIMAL HEALTH & NUTRITION

The No 1 number DR JOE MCGRATH

T

HE milk docket contains lots of information about what farmers send to their processor with several measurements including fat, protein, cell count and milk urea nitrogen (MUN).

MUN indicates how much nitrogen is being lost from the rumen but is also somehow misconstrued as a measurement of energy in the pasture, productivity and a range of other strange extrapolations that have people thinking high MUN is a good thing.

The most important number for a farm business is actually the ratio of milk protein to fat.

For example, if milk protein is 3.9 and fat is 4.9, then the ratio is 0.79.

This number is the most important for your whole business. It is a very handy measure of the metabolic state of your herd. The rule is not black and white but in most cases it rings true.

Let’s explain this ratio.

The first thing to remember is every farm tends to have a slightly different tipping point. The tipping point is the number that demonstrates the point at which cows go from stripping back fat into the milk thus losing weight to not holding or gaining weight.

A typical number for black and white herds is about 0.8, for Jerseys it is much lower but generally in the range of 0.75-0.78 because of their propensity for producing fat.

The best time to find the tipping point is to look at your milk docket during a good autumn when you can guarantee animals are fully fed and gaining weight, especially while on a predominately grass diet. Take an average over at least a month.

Once you know your tipping point you can start to use the ratio.

Post-calving the number will be low but hopefully not too low. But you will notice your herd starts to trend back to its ideal number as the spring continues and cows stop losing body condition score postcalving. The secret to getting cows back in calf is getting that number back to normal by mating and you have taken energy deficit issues out of play.

60

PROTEIN TO FAT RATIO

Protein/fat ratio

0.9 0.85 0.8 0.75 0.7 0.65 0.6 5/30

7/19

9/7

10/27

It is not simply a case of feeding more.

It is how you feed from the start of lactation.

Shoulder feeding, typically with palm kernel or maize silage, in early spring has caused cows to rapidly increase milk production, resulting in a much higher peak milk production.

That is great news for the cow and the industry but not if you couple it with the “I’m a grass only farmer and DairyNZ says not to feed during a surplus” mentality.

What shoulder feeding in August does is artificially boost peak, often to a level that cannot be sustained by a grass-only diet. When do you switch back to grass only? At the start of mating.

The graph above is a data set kindly donated by a farmer who has now seen the error of this system, probably the most common in NZ. It is from a crossbred herd.

From August to October the ratio is trending up nicely.

At the end of October he was having one of his best seasons ever so went grass-only. The ratio crashes, cows have peaked higher than ever before and cannot maintain enough energy from an extremely wet grass diet with an excess of crude protein, potassium and the associated diuretic effects.

Then, being a Manawatu farm it runs into a summer drought period where large amounts of palm kernel are dumped into the diet because of lack of pasture. Note the rise in the ratio as milk production drops.

12/16

2/4

3/26

5/15

7/4

All hell breaks loose from there.

You will notice finally in April they finally get back to 0.8.

What a ride.

Needless to say, fertility did not improve from the 17% empty rate even though milk fever and associated postcalving diseases were eliminated. In our models about 65kg of MS a cow was also missing.

The solution to this was simple. Keep some feed in the diet, in this case 2kg of palm kernel would be sufficient, and manage grass quality with silage during that great spring.

That would have meant come the summer drought lots of silage is in stock and very productive pregnant cows would have been the outcome.

If you think feeding cows during peak spring growth is crazy, fine, but don’t target body weight milk production. Stick to NZ average and the Dairy NZ advice works well.

If you want a return on your capital or the bank wants a return on its capital and you decide to go for cows producing their own bodyweight you need to consider this ratio.

You will often hear the Sollus team talking about fully fed cows or physically full, metabolically hungry. The best guide to this is the milk protein to fat ratio and it is delivered to you for free – every day. n Dr Joe McGrath is the head nutritionist for Sollus, a New Zealand company providing nutritional solutions for dairy farmers.

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

ANIMAL HEALTH & NUTRITION

Nutrition supports cow health Magnesium supplementation before calving helps dramatically reduce the incidence of milk fever.

W

ITH the start of calving just over a month away farmers are preparing for an incredibly busy period and many dairy farmers will be considering what strategies to implement in the pre-calving period to ensure the season gets off to a good start.

Setting cows up for a good lactation starts before drying off when condition score is assessed and strategies are implemented to ensure cows calve as close to condition score 5 as possible.

Magnesium supplementation before calving is another strategy used on many farms with New Zealand data showing that helps to dramatically reduce the incidence of milk fever.

However, even with the use of these common strategies, which help reduce the risk of milk fever, more recent data shows 3% to 5% of dairy cows are still affected by clinical milk fever.

Managing these cows is both timeconsuming and frustrating and even farmers whose herds have a low incidence of clinical cases find dealing with the cases adds an unwanted job to an already busy day.

Canterbury farmer Gary Michaels said “Having to deal with downer cows is discouraging, especially when you lose one, and those cows which do recover never seem to reach their production potential.”

Research data backs up what he already

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

knows. Clinically hypocalcaemic cows produce about 14% less milk than their normocalcaemic herd mates. They are also more susceptible to other diseases like ketosis, mastitis, metritis and fatty liver syndrome.

The data has also shown sub-clinical hypocalcaemic cows, those that don’t go down or exhibit the dramatic clinical signs of milk fever but whose blood calcium levels drop below a critical point, are also more susceptible to other metabolic diseases in early lactation and produce about 7% less milk than their normocalcaemic herd mates.

“These cows are almost impossible for us to identify,” Michaels says.

“Experienced stockmen can tell you that a certain cow just doesn’t look right or her eyes are dull and it’s possible she has milk fever but without a blood test we can’t know that for certain.”

Independent nutritionist Howard de Klerk has been working with Michaels for six years. He says the unrealised value from milk production lost by subclinical hypocalcaemia is substantial.

“We have put in place a range of strategies to help manage the risk of milk fever but under our NZ pasture production systems it has been challenging to fully acidify cows on high potassium pastures and still maintain feed intake,” Michaels said.

“That’s why in 2019 we took the opportunity to try a new product only recently introduced to NZ and we have been very pleased with the results.

“Historically, we have treated around 40-odd cows for milk fever.

“But with the introduction of Animate we had only 11 cases but the best outcome for us was the improved milk production we saw throughout the 2019 season despite challenging weather at the start of the season.”

His results reflect those obtained in comprehensive university research, field trials and commercial application around the world and on more than 40 farms in NZ during the 2019 season.

“It’s been particularly rewarding to work with farmers like Gary and see the positive benefits of Animate in getting cows off to a good start,” Natalie Chrystal, a nutritionist who has worked with Phibro NZ providing technical advice and support for farmers looking to use the Animate feeding programme on farm, says.

“Every farm has different risks and challenges.

“My job is to help identify then manage those risks with the unique constraints of each individual situation and in a way which will help add value to the bottom line.

“Proper feeding and management of dry cows is an essential management tool that helps minimise the risk of metabolic disease at calving.

“Given the dramatic impact both clinical and sub-clinical hypocalcaemia can have on profitability, management and nutrition of springers, in particular, is an investment in the future performance of the herd.” n

61

BREEDING

Dairy beef solutions Farmers looking for beef bulls to use over their dairy herd have a varied choice from Samen New Zealand’s bull team.

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Hereford

Ardo Ajax 5014 is another one of the dairy-beef solutions bulls that has ranked in the top five for the Beef + Lamb dairy-beef trial. This bull is definitely a star for those wanting to tap into the high-price Hereford calf market.

62

Black Hereford

Black calves with a white face traditionally fetch a premium in the market and a large portion of the NZ dairy herd carries the red gene.

To combat that the Black Herefords are homozygous black, homozygous polled with great calving ease and short gestation.

Simmental

Glenside Crumpy is an incredible Simmental that has ranked as the top Simmental in the Beef + Lamb dairybeef trial. With balanced gestation and calving ease for dairy farmers and growth rates for beef farmers he produces those grey diluted SimentalFriesian calves that so often top the calf sales.

Miomax Angus

This son of leading marbling Angus sire Temania Berkley has increased yield and feed efficiency that comes with the double-muscling gene with breed-leading gestation and calving ease. This bull really is the secret to superior high-marbling and highyielding dairy-beef premiums.

Blonde d’Aquitaine

Gexan is yet another shining star in the specialist Dairy-Beef Solutions team from Europe. This Blonde d’Aquitaine boasts calving ease, great muscling and yet another colour marking option. The calves are sure to make an impression.

Correction: In the May issue of Dairy Farmer we inadvertently printed the wrong photo for the Blonde d’Aquitaine bull. The error is regretted.

DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

2480RE86X210

ADVICE

Support staff to keep milk safe

Y

OU might have new sharemilkers or employees on board following this year’s farm changeover day.

Rural insurer FMG suggests now’s a good time to go over with them how your milking shed works and what systems you have in place to avoid milk contamination.

FMG strategy and advice head Jason Rolfe said it received 1125 milk claims amounting to $4.5 million last year.

“Around 34% of our claims received last year were for antibiotic contamination.

Other claims were for foreign objects ending up in the milk as well as colostrum and wash water both getting in the vat.

“I know from my own experience the hassle of having to dump milk,” Rolfe, who grew up on a Taranaki dairy farm, says.

Almost 90% of milk contamination and spoilage claims are caused by:

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• • • • •

Antibiotic contamination; Chiller/plant failure; Chiller/vat not being turned on; Power failure or; Wash water and detergent contamination.

Here are some tips to help bring new sharemilkers or staff up to speed with your milk shed’s systems and processes: • Make sure your milk shed’s systems and processes are documented and kept in the shed so that if you or their manager isn’t around they can refer to them.

• When explaining how your milk shed operates be aware of different learning styles – some people might prefer visual charts to written policies and some might learn best by you running through the system and having refresher sessions. It pays to take the time to have a few versions prepared.

Winter is a good time to look at how a shed is working and what systems are in place to avoid milk contamination.

When it comes to milk contamination the important things to make your employees aware of include: • What the withholding period of each antibiotic product is; • How you identify those cows that are under treatment; • What the milking process is for these animals (for example, are they run in a separate mob milked at a different time or run in the herd and milked on a bucket) and; • It’s also important to have the same measures in place for your postmilking washdown process because a lot of claims are for cleaning chemicals and wash water contaminating milk. n

MORE:

Tips and advice on how to avoid milk contamination are atfmg.co.nz/advice/milkcontamination/

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One last word …

A

ND just like that the new season begins.

It has been a busy month with lots happening on farms with farmers grappling with the ongoing effects of drought and lack of feed going into winter, sharemilkers packing up and hitting the road as they moved to new jobs.

With covid-19 restrictions still in place many events had to move online.

The Dairy Women’s Network held its conference online last month and, by all accounts, it was such a success it is now looking at digital options for future events.

June is usually the time when farmers make their annual pilgrimage to Mystery Creek for the National Agricultural Fieldays. The event usually attract more than 100,000 visitors and more than 1000 exhibitors.

Last year it generated an impressive $549 million in sales revenue for New Zealand firms with $183m going into the Waikato region alone.

The Fieldays site will remain devoid 66

of marquees this year as the event moves online and will run from July 13-26. Organisers, who say this is the most challenging Fieldays in the event’s history, expect there will be fewer than half the exhibitors.

May and June are usually awards months when the Dairy Industry Awards and Dairy Business of the Year winners are announced.

The 33 finalists from 11 regions in the Dairy Industry Awards are competing for the honour of winning the Share Farmer, Manager or Trainee of the Year titles.

Finalists were asked to submit their presentations for judging digitally and speak to the judges online rather than face-to-face. National winners will be announced on a yet-to-be-announced date.

The Dairy Business of the Year entrants are being judged this month.

They will receive their farm performance reports at the end of June and winners will be announced at a future date.

Organisers are still to determine whether it will be an online event.

In April Dairy Farmer was named as

a finalist in the best trade/specialist publication category at the 2020 Voyager Media Awards. It wasn’t our night to be in the winner’s circle but being named as a finalist is an honour because it signals a small, privately owned company’s publication is up there with the big guns.

It also means that Dairy Farmer and the stories we tell are just as important as ever.

Voyager chief executive Seeby Woodhouse said the nominees represent the highest standard in NZ journalism and finalists should feel proud to be selected.

Thanks to Jono and Shay Smits for the stunning picture this month. Shay snapped it during morning milking on their Christchurch farm recently. What a great way to start the farming day.

Sonita Like us: farmersweekly.co.nz Follow us: @DairyFarmer15 Read us anywhere: farmersweekly.co.nz DAIRY FARMER

June 2020

Dairy Diary

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June 5 – Dairy Women’s Network Taupo coffee catch-up on the first Friday each month 10am-noon.

Info at www.dwn.co.nz/events June 5 – Dairy Women’s Network Webinar: Raising Resilient Children. The way to build emotional resilience is to ensure we have multiple moments of tolerable stress in the presence of an attuned relationship. Info at www. dwn.co.nz/events June 9 – DairyNZ New people, new team, right start – getting to know your team session one. Two sessions via zoom to set up an effective team over the next 90 days. Session two on June 10.

Info at www.dairyevents.co.nz June 9 – DairyNZ Calving Smart webinar - colostrum. Giving calves a great start to life. Hear the latest research and have questions answered by vets Emma Cuttance and Winston Mason.

Info at www.dairyevents.co.nz June 11 - SMASH Smash winter series online- Secrets of an Expert Calf Rearer Join us to find out how Jonathan and Joanne Leigh have set their calf rearing business up to deliver consistently good results and learn tips and tricks that you can apply to your own system.

Info at www.smallerherds.co.nz June 12 – Dairy Women’s Network Webinar: Energise – sleep and fatigue workshop.

Info at www.dwn.co.nz/events

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June 2020 June 3 – DairyNZ What to do about a sub-$6 payout online event. Strategies from both higher and lower input farmers and overall business resilience strategies. Info at www.dairyevents.co.nz

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June 18 – Dairy Women’s Network Webinar: The world needs dyslexics now more than ever. A snapshot of The Anatomy of Dyslexia. Claire Ashmore is a Davis facilitator providing programmes for people with Dyslexia, ADD/ ADHD, confusion around maths concepts and for those with focus and co-ordination issues. Info at www.dwn.co.nz/events June 24 – Owl Farm Owl Farm online focus day. A live-streamed event on YouTube but might become an on-farm event depending on health guidelines.

Topics include review of the 2019-20 season, plans for the seasons ahead, planning for volatility and contributing to the Co-operative Difference. Info at www.owlfarm.nz/ Rural Support drought webinars June 10 – Filling your Bucket.

Guest speakers clinical psychologist and Wairarapa farmer Sarah Donaldson and Rural Women president Fiona Gower.

June 17 – Building your Team Doug Avery and Ken Bartlett look at why, as leaders at the forefront of your business, it is so important to have a team.

June 24 – Animal Movements and Sales What you need to know. Ospri programme extension officer Katrina Daysh and Carrfields national livestock commercial manager Donald Baines answer questions on using virtual saleyards and legal obligations for animal records.

June 12 – DairyNZ Calving Smart Webinar – lameness. Journey to the centre of the hoof. Hear Latest research and questions answered by vets Emma Cuttance and Winston Mason. Info at www.dairyevents.co.nz

These are short sessions so send drought recovery management questions before event to events@ruralsupport.org.nz. Please use the webinar title in the email heading.

Info at www.dairyevents.co.nz

June 17 – DairyNZ Pre-calving refresher online event. Nutrition of the transition cow and all things practical for calving. Vet to answer calving questions and DairyNZ senior scientist Jane Key to talk about transition cow nutrition.

Info at www.dairyevents.co.nz

Note from the editor: Because of covid-19 and alert levels restricting the number of people who can gather events on the dairy farming calendar have been cancelled or postponed or are being held online. Please refer to the individual websites of industry organisations for further information and updates. Take care and stay safe.

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