The leased farm at Wallacetown near Invercargill has been returned to the owners, abruptly ending nine years of demonstrating best practice in the south.
Chairman of the Southern Dairy Development Trust, Matthew Richards, said continuing for another year as had been planned could have put the Southern Dairy Hub at risk.
“With another possible year of a low payout, we could have lost equity and we don’t want to do that,” Richards said.
“We have our eyes firmly on the prize and that is the Southern Dairy Hub.”
Land for the hub is under conditional purchase and the intention is to start milking 800 cows there in spring 2017.
It is being funded by AgResearch, DairyNZ, contributions from southern farmers and profits from the demonstration farm.
“There is a lot of work involved in setting up the hub and it is pretty hard to do two things well so we decided to stop the demonstration farm.
“It was a prudent governance decision.”
He said most of the demonstration farm’s staff had been taken on by the Wallacetown farm owners and the cows, which had been mostly leased, had been returned.
“We’ve parked the machinery up in the shed.”
Although focus days would no longer be held, the hub would run events with DairyNZ for southern farmers throughout the next 12 months.
“It’s going to be a tough year coming up for farmers in the south and we will keep putting our messages out there about how to farm successfully,” Richards said.
During its nine years the demonstration farm has researched the value of new pasture species, the implications and opportunities of wintering-on, the use of fodder and Suga beet, staff work hours, management, and health and safety initiatives, and presented the findings at four focus days each year.
For the 2015-16 season, production had been revised down from 340,000kg milksolids (MS) to 315,000kg MS as cow condition and pasture covers were put ahead of milksolids leaving the farm in the tanker. Of the 700 cows, 110 were sent to the works in March, gaining $100/head on what they would have got with the schedule dropping at the end of May, the demonstration farm’s business manager Stacy McNaught said at the farm’s focus day.
“Given the milk price and the slender margins available when feeding supplements, we needed to ensure that all feed supplied, pasture or purchased feed, was going to the appropriate animals for the best return,” he said.
“With not enough pasture growth due to the poor growing season in late summer, using purchased feed to retain identified culls onfarm was not seen as profitable.
“It’s also allowed us to push the rounds out to 40 days and push covers ahead of us.
“We didn’t have to lift the Suga beet early so it stayed in the ground until the start of May so we would have got a higher yield from it than if we had started lifting it early.”
With almost a third of the herd at a condition score less than 4.5 at the end of April, the lighter cows were also dried off early.
After finishing the season with farm working expenses at $3.65/kg MS, a budget for next season of $3.20 was presented.
“With 50 less cows than the year before we should be better able to meet pasture supply and stop the need for purchased supplement allowing us to have a lower budget,” McNaught said.
