This time last year Northland’s dairy farmers struggled with drought, in company with most other dairying regions around the country.
This year only the Dargaville-Pouto Peninsula district, with a small number of dairy farms, is affected. The west coast of Northland faces its third major drought in five years, calling for more reserves of resilience and a renewed search for sustainability.
At the beginning of January Te Kopuru farmer Terry Brenstrum believed he was fractionally worse off than at the same time last year.
“Drought is perhaps two weeks earlier. Because of the last drought, followed by a very mild and dry winter and spring, the soil moisture levels didn’t recharge and we haven’t had any good rain since November.
“Pasture surpluses looked likely early in spring, but we had to meter it out and feed it and we haven’t seen any surpluses since.
“Arguably we were better off this time last year because the soils had moisture, but now they are empty.
“We can’t farm to a recipe here – Northland dairying is bloody hard work and we have to be super-adaptable,” he says. His and wife Heather’s 150ha home farm is on the eastern side of the Pouto Peninsula, running down to the Kaipara harbour below Dargaville. It’s on marine clay soils, which hang on to moisture longer than the sandy western hills.
“My neighbours are worse off, being further into drought and little prospects of pasture for their next rounds.”
With 30 years of dairying at Te Kopuru the Brenstrums have seen many changes in farm management, of which the latest have been a massive feedpad and effluent pond extension, supplementary feeding with maize silage, green feed maize and palm kernel and a full farm effluent irrigation system.
Terry says the conventional approach in the 1980s was to graze all pasture until it was gone, keep milking with any supplements and dry off when that was exhausted, hoping that cow condition would recover before calving.
“We used turnips and sorghum until maize came along for us in 1999, and proved to be much more reliable.
“Now the feedpad (built in 2010) allows us to confidently calf early and minimise soil damage on these winter-wet clays.
“Supplementary feeding is now progressive – we started maize silage 10 days before mating and haven’t stopped, and now moved on to grass silage, while green feed maize will begin in late January.
“Palm kernel was new to me in the 2009-10 drought but now it is an essential part of the tool kit for looking after cow and pasture condition.
“We are geared up for it now with the feedpad and make sure we contract for it early at good prices.”
Silage and palm kernel is mixed on the silage bunker concrete floor with a frontend loader before being loaded into the feed-out wagon and driven to the feedpad. Terry installed older concrete troughs down the middle of the 110m-long pad, but put concrete blocks under them to raise their rims to about 650mm. This advice from a visiting Irish dairy farmer helps prevent cows climbing into the bins or being nudged and toppling into them.
The feed-out wagon is a Giltrap MSX100 sidelift ezi-weigh, which means the feedout height can be higher than normal.
Green feed distribution in the paddocks is now a thing of past, considerably reducing wastage.
The load cells in the wagon make feed budgeting more accurate which has enabled Pioneer representative Ian Williams to calculate in October that cows were getting 79% of intake from pasture and that pasture production has fallen as a result of droughts to about 11,500kg/ha drymatter annually.
Terry knew that pasture production had fallen despite all his efforts and costs with re-grassing, which in recent years have covered 90% of the home farm, and most of the owned and leased runoffs.
He grows 6-7ha of maize every year at home and some on Pouto support blocks, but this summer all support blocks were ryegrass renovated to restore drought damage.
He has leased land further away, some of it hopefully in different rainfall zones, to carry the replacements and some dairy beef cattle and make about 17ha of maize silage.
All maize crops were standing up well in mid-January although yields could tend towards last year’s 12 tonne/ha on peat and 20-25t/ha on clays, Terry thinks. The cropping land is restored to pasture with Italian shorter rotation ryegrasses, while kikuyu-dominant paddocks go through crops and to the best of the perennial ryegrasses available. Renovation of droughty paddocks is done “like with like” with perennial ryegrasses such as Bealey and Matrix.
After the 2012-13 drought the Brenstrums used more than two tonnes of ryegrass seed to fill in the gaps and renovate pastures. About 300kg was the new Agriseeds hybrid Shogun, supposed to persist longer than the Italians or annuals, and Terry has favourably compared its spring growth with that of Tabu.
He and his neighbours collect information and compare grass varieties, what works and what doesn’t, because Northland conditions are so different to the rest of the country.
About 35% of the dairy platform remains kikuyu-dominant, which suits Terry because of kikuyu’s autumn growth and quick response to any rain that falls. All paddocks to be sown must be done by April 1 to kick-start the winter.
Planned start of calving is July 6 after mating begins around October 1.
“That early calving is really only achievable because of our sand-base runoffs and the feedpad.”
Key points
Owners: Terry and Heather Brenstrum
Herd managers: Jeff and Lyn Bishop
Location: Te Kopuru, Northland
Total area: 150ha dairy platform, 110ha runoffs, 50ha leased grazing land
Cows: 400 KiwiCross
Production: Target 145,000kg milksolids (MS), 2012-13 152,000kg MS (408 cows).
