But while they missed out on that one, they ended up winning the Federated Farmers’ Leadership Award, Ravensdown Pasture Performance Award and the big one – the Auckland-Hauraki Share Farmer of the Year Award.
While Brad, 35, grew up on a dairy farm he trained as a journalist and from 2001 to 2014 worked in radio and television both here and in Australia. In Orange, New South Wales, he met Matt, 25, who worked in advertising, then as an adviser to a federal member of Parliament. While Matt wasn’t born on a farm both sets of grandparents were beef and cropping farmers, converting from dairying when he was young.
Two years ago Brad’s brother Lee was looking for a contract milker for his dairy farm at Pepepe, west of Huntly, so they made the trans-Tasman move.
“We wanted better progression opportunities and we both loved animals,” Brad says.
Matt worked part-time off-farm until last September to bring in extra income.
“We’re not afraid of hard work,” he says.
“The dairy industry needs young, enthusiastic people.”
They’ve both found the transition exciting, with Brad picking up skills such as tractor driving and pasture metering.
“We got involved in everything we could,” Matt says.
“That’s one of the great things about dairying – there’s so much sharing of knowledge.”
They are both keen social media users, saying it’s a great way to share ideas as well as keep in touch with other farmers.
Both are enrolled in Primary ITO courses with Brad travelling to Morrinsville to complete his Level 5 Diploma in Agribusiness Management, while Matt is studying Level 4 courses at Ngatea, a lengthy
drive for both of them. They also made an effort to get to all the DairyNZ events they could. They had a free feed review done on the farm last August as a way of both benchmarking and fine-tuning their system.
Brad’s first challenge was getting herd records up to date.
“There were 80 cows which needed to be tagged or retagged and another 50 had to have their records updated in MINDA because they were incomplete or inaccurate,” he said.
“That had to happen before the first herd test in August. We needed to know who the cows were to track their production and somatic cell counts (SCC).”
This was another major focus and the results are obvious with a drop from an average bulk SCC of 270,000 in the 2013-14 season, before they started, to 241,000 last season. By February this year the average was 156,000, down 38% on when they arrived on the farm. Dry cows were targeted for treatment and Matt had the idea of putting pink leg bands on slow milkers to make sure they were milked out properly.
“We teat-spray every teat on every cow every day and make up new batches every couple of days so it’s fresh,” Brad said.
Last season the herd produced 93,000kg milksolids (MS) from 240 cows and this season with 20 extra cows they are 13% ahead to date and on track to get more than 100,000kg MS.
Achieving more days in-milk was a big focus when it came to key performance indicators with the autumn-calving herd only having 60-day dry period and a body condition score 5 or 5.5 in December.
They did 16-hour milkings for a second time this summer.
Palm kernel was fed through an in-dairy feeding system until January and will restart in April. A covered feedpad was built two years ago to make supplements on the DairyNZ System 4 farm go further and cut wastage. It’s used for feeding maize silage. Last season 5.5ha was grown onfarm, with the rest bought-in. Grass silage was made on 8.5ha on the farm as well as on the runoff and stacked rather than baled to bring down costs. Two paddocks of chicory, about 5.5ha, were grown this season and have been fed since early February.
As well as having an effluent area of 16ha covered by a travelling irrigator, feedpad effluent goes into a concrete bunker from where it is loaded into a slurry spreader.
No AB is used on the farm with a mix of Friesian and Hereford bulls put over the spring herd. They’re very stringent about recording all heats and matings, with Brad, who said he can’t remember phone numbers, being able to easily identify most cows from a distance. Their spring-calving herd which has a 12-week mating period has a 77% six-week in-calf rate. The farm’s empty rate is 6.5%. They bring 30 to 45 replacements into the herd every year and last year reared 50 whiteface calves, mothering some on to empty cows, to bring in extra income. Hereford bulls are put to the autumn herd for eight weeks, with cows not in-calf being taken through to calve in spring.
Both describe themselves as “savvy savers” and to help they’ve modified DairyNZ’s budget templates so they more accurately reflect contract milkers’ expenses such as detergent, rubberware, filter socks and rubber gloves.
In June Brad and Matt will start a new contract milking job on Andrew and Vanessa Dwyer’s 380-cow farm at Kaponga in Taranaki. It will be very different to the system they run at present with spring calving, a new rotary dairy and 24-hour grazing.
“Neither of us had been to Taranaki before and when we drove down just before Christmas the grass was still lush like it was spring,” Brad said.
“There were dairy farms as far as the eye can see but here, apart from the 1000-cow dairy farm next door, it’s all sheep and beef.”
Second place went to Te Kauwhata sharemilkers, Daryl and Christien Breen and third was taken out by Andrew and Nicola Satherley, also sharemilkers at Te Kauwhata.
