He points to Ireland’s government-driven Food Wise 2025 strategy, which strives to harness the collective experience and knowledge of each industry to set the course for smarter and more sustainable growth to increase the value of primary production.
“All the primary industries in Ireland are brought together, with a plan within each sector while working together as sectors. So they’re all on the same page,” he says.
Each sector has targets for 2025, with plans in place to ensure cross-sector collaboration. Bede says Irish dairy farmers believe the strategy is working well.
The catalyst for Ireland’s collaborative plan was the collapse of its economy, prompting its initial strategy – Food Harvest 2020 – which was later fine-tuned into Food Wise 2025. Bede says the logic of the collaborative approach is a no-brainer for NZ primary industries.
“We must work on more cross-primary sector collaboration and not in the form of window dressing, but real strategies. It’s given Irish farmers a vision and they’ve been able to make their own decisions onfarm knowing that vision.”
It’s been a year of travel for the scholar, who farms with his partner Angela Leslie at the entrance to the Buller Gorge, just a few kilometres from Westport. Bede bought the family farm in 2011 and now milks 330 cows on 155 effective hectares for a production of 132,500kg milksolids (MS) last season, as well as wintering the cows on crops on the farm.
Angela also works on the farm as well as being Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC) farm solutions manager for the Buller-Murchison area.
Both relish leadership roles and being able to use their skills in the community.
Angela has been selected for the Agri-Women’s Development Trust’s Escalator Programme, while a leadership and governance course with Development West Coast prompted Bede to apply for the Nuffield Scholarship. It followed a natural progression from the various roles he has taken up in the farming sector.
Today he is an elected director of Westland Milk Products’ board, deputy chairman of the West Coast TBfree committee, and a member of the West Coast Rural Support Trust and the West Coast Focus Farm Trust. This year he was also a regional judge for the Dairy Industry Awards Trainee of the Year Award. Angela has her fair share of roles as a director of Cranley Farms, part of the West Coast Focus Farm Trust and team leader for the West Coast-Top of the South Dairy Trainee of The Year.
These roles are about giving back to the community and the more skills gained, the more inclined they are to put them to good use. They do take up a bit of time and on average Bede is off the farm a day and a half a week, which is one of the reasons he has two full-time staff living on the farm.
For the past year, farming and leadership roles have been interrupted by overseas excursions to gain an insight into agriculture in other countries such as Ireland. The Irish dairy industry is forging ahead, with high-value product mixes and consumer branding adding to the price of their milk in some European Union countries. Bede predicts Ireland will be producing 10 billion litres of milk by 2021, compared with 5b litres before quotas were lifted. That’s based on data about heifer numbers and land that could yet be converted to dairying. Most Irish farmers operate with low debt on family farms, which enables expansion.
He visited Irish dairy farms before and after quota removal and uses one in County Kildare as an example of the changes. The farm milked 100 cows on 53ha while major regrassing was done in preparation for the removal of quotas. Production per-cow was 330kg MS with once-a-day milkings at the beginning and end of the season to cater for production restrictions. This season the farmer is milking 135 cows for an expected 400kg MS/cow, with meal feeders installed in the dairy to feed the cows more during spring and late lactation. In future, the farmer will lease a 17ha neighbouring block and milk 200 cows at 400kg MS/cow, with support blocks totalling 44ha for dairying that were previously beef. Several other farms Bede visited were considering leasing neighbouring beef farms to add to their milking platform and recent data showed milk production in Ireland was up 32% in February compared with the previous year when farmers restricted cow production because of quotas.
Dairy farmers in the Netherlands also aim to lift milk production, but it is the high fixed costs of their industry that drives them to produce an extra 20%, Bede says.
The Dutch dairy sector showed an increase of 18% for February this year compared with a year ago, and Bede says it might not be a long-term average, but the increase is significant. New phosphate regulations being introduced will supposedly restrict production, but farmers in the Netherlands were confident they would be able to work within the regulations to maintain production levels.
“The Dutch farm has always been innovative and they seem confident that they will overcome any rules applied.”
In the short term, increasing milk production in countries such as the Netherlands and Ireland might not be positive news for NZ, but Bede’s view is their production growth will slow substantially in the next five years when the marginal cost of producing that extra litre is greater than what they are paid for it.
Meanwhile, his Nuffield travels continue with more study trips planned to Europe, Asia and America. The scholarship is awarded to a handful of emerging leaders each year and gives them the opportunity for four to six months of overseas travel, study of the latest developments in a number of leading agricultural countries and an introduction to leaders and decision-makers. The NZ scholars mix with scholars from around the world through conferences and programmes in various countries, so they’re not just learning about agriculture in the countries they visit, but also learning from fellow scholars and expanding their network of agricultural leaders.
Six weeks was spent with a mix of Nuffield scholars on a tour examining agriculture practice and policies in a range of countries. Another three weeks was spent on an advanced farm management course at Cirencester University in the United Kingdom with 18 of its country’s leading farmers who belonged to the Worshipful Company of Farmers. He visited Ireland’s Moorepark, one of the world’s leading dairy research centres that specialises in pasture-based milk production systems. In the mix was a Nuffield conference in France and another in Ireland, with visits to dairy farms around the globe.
Each scholar also has an individual study programme with a research report due at the end of their travels. Bede chose Understanding the potential future growth of internal dairy production in China. In May he headed off on his second trip to China to look at more dairy farms and get a better understanding of how its dairy
industry is operating with low returns.
“Although their government talks about expanding dairy production in China, there are certain barriers and limitations like feed quality and labour and the price they’re getting paid.
“In many cases, what they were feeding the cows we would regard as poor quality silage and wouldn’t be feeding to cows. Others buy huge tonnages of alfalfa from the United States, so it’s high-cost dairying.
“The cost of labour in total is similar to NZ. And if you’re housing cattle inside it’s always going to be intensive and high-cost, meaning there’s no guaranteed return.”
Without the ability to own the land they farm, Bede says Chinese farmers face the risk of their land being rezoned, which means they are inevitably driven by short-term gain. And he says they now face more costs around environmental issues. When he visited China this year, environmental issues were noticeably being discussed in the dairy industry, whereas they weren’t mentioned last year.
“In some cases they have built sheds close to populated areas and as the population spreads, people aren’t so happy about the rural environment encroaching on urban expansion. So it’s making it harder to build more sheds because they need the environmental plans before they can go ahead and build.
“The word environment was talked about by everyone we spoke to whereas it wasn’t in their vocabulary last year.”
The issues faced by Chinese dairy farmers bring Angela to the issue of corporate social responsibility as a way of cementing key international relationships that secure NZ’s future in agriculture in China. Angela says it has been proven that corporate responsibility, where knowledge is passed on, makes more profit for the stakeholder.
“And there are limited known NZ examples happening in China,” she says after joining Bede on his travels last year and this year.
“They need people who are going to work at developing skill sets and participate in their industry. By facilitating that pathway of knowledge through collaboration, NZ will be best placed to do business there successfully.”
Prime Minister John Key’s visit to China in April showed the success of governments talking to each other, with NZ chilled meat now on the cards for China. Both Angela and Bede agree that more work at corporate level could lead to more benefits.
“In China we need to help them because the end result is going to be positive,” she says.
“It may seem counterintuitive, but it’s not. It makes sense having seen the knowledge gaps first-hand.”
On Bede’s final trip as a Nuffield scholar he’ll team up with Australian, Irish and English scholars for six weeks through the Philippines, China, US, Canada and the UK.
Involved and connected
At the end of the programme, Bede hopes he will have more to contribute to his dairy farming community with the various roles he has taken on. His involvement with the TBfree committee was an easy decision because the family farm had more than 1200 reactors between the 1960s and early 1980s.
“It was pretty good motivation.”
Since control measures were introduced the farm has become TB-free and has had a C10 status for many years. The committee’s role is to ensure a good understanding of why the programme is run, and connect farmers with OSPRI.
Likewise, being involved with the West Coast Rural Support is a positive role in the community, especially when farmers are struggling financially as many are now, he says. It’s about making contact with farmers and letting them know where and how to seek help if it is needed.
Pride can be a barrier for people seeking help and Bede says they often need other family members, friends or neighbours to seek help for them, which might simply mean rural support calling in for a chat.
“All we can hope is they do seek some support and we can arrange that support for them. By being the face at events, people know who they can ring and it’s all done confidentially. That’s the key to people being able to contact rural support. Where there is a need arising, we facilitate the right people to assist.
“There are farmers doing really good work here and running good systems, but still struggling. And it worries me some of those people think they’re not doing a good job when they actually are.
“But we’ve been in a scenario where we have been able to feed our cows very well. In future, if you run short of feed, you may have to cull cows instead of buying in feed. And that’s hard.
“It’s more than just a system change; it’s a mentality change,” he says.
“After travelling around the world, I think we still can produce milk the cheapest – we just have to remember how to do it.”
