The 355 hectare property is set to milk about 550 cows next season with 190ha to be converted to dairy as part of the establishment of a new research and development station.
A 140ha irrigated dairy unit would be set up alongside a 50ha dryland milking platform with 450 and 106 cows run on each block respectively.
All cows would be milked through a 54-bail rotary farm dairy equipped with commercially available automation such as milk metering and auto drafting so milk production information could be collected from the various research herds.
Lincoln University professor of dairy production Grant Edwards said the research would look at the effects various levels of intensification and different management practices had on milk production, animal health, profit and environmental outcomes – in particular nitrate leaching.
Fodder beet, maize silage and lucerne would be home-grown and used on each unit at varying levels.
It was proposed three herds would be run on the irrigated block – one operating at a typical Canterbury stocking rate and level of intensification, with the other herds compared against it.
Off-paddock feeding and stand-off facilities would be constructed and incorporated into the studies.
They were likely to include a range of materials such as wood chip, pea gravel or synthetic materials and, while none would include a roof at this stage, some would be built so they could be covered later. Edwards said the aim was to have both the dryland and irrigated units operating at very low nitrate leaching levels for the light, free-draining soils at Ashley Dene.
“The new facility will give us the opportunity to carry out studies on feeding practices, duration controlled grazing and some of the emerging technologies that are coming out of research, such as those coming from the Pastoral 21 studies,” he said.
University researchers and DairyNZ scientists have been carrying out Pastoral 21 studies at the university’s existing 55ha research dairy farm for the past four years.
The larger Ashley Dene research unit will enable studies to be carried out at more of a farm-scale level.
“The Ashley Dene facility will also be a key resource for other Lincoln Hub partners so we’ll be able to run multiple studies at the same time on the dairy units with scientists from Landcare Research, Plant and Food, AgResearch and DairyNZ,” Edwards said.
Crops were already in the ground and sophisticated environmental monitoring equipment was being installed.
Landcare Research would have instruments for measuring the net exchange of water, carbon dioxide and nitrous gases.
Thanks to funding from the New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Centre it also planned to install large lysimeters to measure any nitrogen or carbon lost through leaching.
It was also developing new research projects for the site using novel isotope technology to help determine whether the different dairy systems running at Ashley Dene were likely to be accumulating or losing soil carbon.
AgResearch would join Lincoln scientists in looking at the standoff facilities, some of which might be located right in the forage crop paddocks.
The units were self-contained, apart from rearing young stock, so all cows would be wintered within their assigned units.
Edwards said fodder beet would be used for wintering while lucerne would be both cut for silage and grazed.
The maize crops would be cut for silage and managed in a maize-annual ryegrass cropping rotation.
The irrigated block would be the first to start milking in spring, with the dryland block run as an autumn-calving unit, not typical in Canterbury.
The first calving on the dryland block would be autumn 2017, with cows run at a low stocking rate of 2.5 cows/ha with lucerne, dryland pasture mixes and fodder beet as the forage base with some bought-in feed fed on a feedpad.
