The 30-year-old winner of the 2016 Manawatu Dairy Awards Share Farmer of the Year has been milking 420 cows on his parents’ coastal Foxton farm for seven years.
By taking the farm from a System 3 to a System 5 operation and lifting production from 160,000kg milksolids (MS) to 238,000kg MS he has managed to drop farm working expenses from $4.70/kg MS to $4.14/kg MS.
“We are prone to summer drought every year on these sandy soils and no matter what happens we always had to fill a feed hole with grass silage, but putting more feed in both before and after summer has worked to lift milksolids and spread the costs across higher production.”
The actual amount of feed has not increased much but Stephen has added palm kernel blends with tapioca pellets and dried distillers grain for the summer to hold the protein level as it drops in the grass.
Waste beetroot from the Watties factory has also proved very popular with the cows when Stephen can source it.
Until Christmas only 4kg supplement per cow is fed and after that the level increases as it needs to as grass growth falls, to target a total intake of 23kg/cow from calving until January and 20kg/cow until drying off at the end of May.
The poorer-performing paddocks are cropped with 25ha of chicory, which Stephen says comes on board when the pastures are getting dry and increases the protein level.
The coastal climate is hard on pasture persistence with the family renewing 15% each year and oversowing 40ha with a variety of grasses to try to promote better growth on the summer dry, winter wet soils.
Stephen trained in property management and valuation but came home to the farm in 2009 when the manager left.
He jumped straight in to the management role, working for and learning from his parents and “all went well” as he progressed to doing his own thing.
Now in his second year of contract milking, he and his wife Vera, who is an ICU nurse at Palmerston North Hospital, entered the awards for the first time and were pleased to win the Westpac Business Management Award because budgeting and forecasting is a real strength of Stephen’s.
“Vera teases me about wearing out the buttons on the calculator,” he laughs.
After attending a DairyNZ budgeting course in 2009 Stephen took over the budgeting for the farm and now also runs budgets for their contract milking business and their personal accounts.
“I am quite calculated in everything I do. I do little budgets for everything, whether its growing chicory or rearing extra bull calves for some added income.”
“There is no point in doing what we are doing if the numbers don’t work.”
Stephen says they’re lucky to be in a contract milking position where they can set goals and stick to their savings plan.
Handling the lower payout has meant more exercise for Stephen’s calculator, doing extra budgets for staying at System 5 or dropping back to a three.
He has managed to limit the cost of silage by $57,000 and moved to buying palm kernel as needed and says they were lucky to grow more grass than usual in January.
Maintenance fertiliser was also reduced for 2015-16.
For next season he has reduced cow numbers from 420 to 390 and will sow more brassica crops such as kale to reduce bought-in supplement.
“We have decided against changing the system and still targeting 570kg MS/cow and plan to reduce the farm working expenses to $3.70k/kg MS by dropping out the 30 poorest performers.”
The farm also runs drystock on the adjacent runoff and has a small contracting business run by Wayne, Stephen’s father. His brother Michael works on the farm as 2IC and is keen to progress in the industry.
Farming on sensitive coastal country has meant particular attention to nitrogen management, particularly because the farm drains into a large shallow coastal lagoon which is popular with bird watchers.
The judges were obviously impressed by their environmental awareness and initiatives and awarded them the Meridian Energy Farm Environment Award.
“We are in the One Plan catchment area and our nitrogen management plan means no nitrogen use in winter when the soils are wettest, so we use gibberellic acid instead, and we have fenced off all the waterways and use a large effluent storage area to defer irrigation of effluent for up to 90 days.”
Their nitrogen conversion efficiency of 36% and low nitrogen leaching risk outperforms the district average and by using the mitigations they have managed to drop the nitrogen loss level from 21kg N/ha to 19kg N/ha to farm within the limits imposed in the sensitive catchment area under the One Plan.
“Everyone has been a bit worried about farming under the One Plan but once you get into it, it’s quite realistic.
“How we treat the land is pretty important to us so as to not compromise the water quality in the lagoon.”
While Stephen hesitates to call himself self-taught, he says he reads widely and does a lot of research both online and by talking and sharing information with friends and relatives in the industry along with attending field days.
Stephen and Vera’s goal is farm ownership, although not necessarily in the dairy industry; they want to own some land and run a profitable agricultural business.
Their 10-year plan is broken down into lots of steps and at the top of the to-do list is investigating progressing on to another larger job next season, either contract or share milking, or leasing a property if possible.
Stephen has kept them on track saving towards those goals and although he says sometimes they feel like they miss out, they have a great lifestyle living so close to the coast and the river.
They go water skiing on the Manawatu River, and fishing at Foxton Beach provides seafood to complement the game meat Stephen provides from his other hobby of hunting in the Ruahine Ranges.
“We enjoy being as self sufficient as possible.”
“We have some pretty ambitious goals and we know we are not going to get there by mucking around.”
Palmerston North contract milkers Jarrod and Nikki Greenwood were second in the Share Farmer competition, and Kairanga equity farmers Mark and Naomi Mossop were placed third.
