Friday, March 29, 2024

Fast track to success

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Just two years out of Lincoln University and Southland-born Hamish Kilpatrick is on the fast-track in his dairying career.
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The 23-year-old is this year’s Canterbury Farm Manager of the Year and has a firm plan in place to grow his equity so he can return to the 550-cow home farm near Winton, well-heeled and in a position to look at family ventures.

The focused young farmer left nothing to chance when he set out dairying after graduating with a Bachelor of Agricultural Commerce, asking around about known good employers and researching top performers.

That led him to north Canterbury dairy farmers James and Belinda McCone and a job as 2IC working in a family-based equity partnership they’re involved in near Culverden with the view to managing the McCone’s own 367-cow farm from part-way through last season. 

The current downturn has done nothing to dampen his enthusiasm or progression plans.

On the contrary, he sees opportunity and has used the last year as a prime learning experience.

“It’s been a great year to see how to keep costs down and make sure your system is set up to get the best returns.

“James’ openness and transparency around the budgets has meant I’ve really been able to learn a lot about managing the finances. He’s fully involved me in that and I can see how what I’m doing onfarm day-to-day affects it,” Hamish says.

His skills in that area, along with his sound plans for future progression, earned him the Westpac financial planning and management award.

Hamish’s partner, Melissa Mangin, is a teacher at nearby Hanmer Springs, and he says having two incomes combined with a strong savings ethos is a big help when it comes to working towards their goals and being ready to step up to contract milk the McCone’s farm next season.

They’ve also used livestock purchases as a way to boost earnings, locking in a sale price early, before the drop in stock values, for 50 in-calf heifers they’d leased to the McCones this season.

“Stock prices now actually open up some great opportunities for us and having farmed through this last season means we fully understand where our costs have to be and what our budgets have to work at next season as contract milkers. We’ve got a realistic view of it so we’re not in for surprises,” Hamish says.

Their short-term aim is to grow their equity to $300,000 within two years and then look at increasing scale to ramp up growth.

As well as a strong focus on learning financial and business skills Hamish’s attention has also been on doing everything he can to ensure they grow and utilise as much high-quality pasture as possible so he was thrilled to pick up the Fonterra Farm Source feed management award.

“The aim is to make sure cows are fully fed every hour of every day and as much of that feed as possible is high-quality pasture.

“That means the decision-making process on pasture allocation and feeding can also be an hour-by-hour thing. We’re checking cows through the day, we’re looking at the residual closely when we’re getting the cows in and trying to make sure allocation is bang on.

“We’re plating the farm weekly but from the start of November through to the end of January we’re more likely to be plating it twice a week.

“We’re also running fast rounds through that period to keep up quality. A lot of pastures are older – although James has started on an aggressive re-grassing programme – so we don’t want to be going into covers over 2500kg drymatter (DM)/ha.”

While two-thirds of the farm is watered by pivot irrigation the remainder is by sprinkler and managing those areas takes attention to detail.

This season they’re wintering most of the cows at home on fodder beet which is followed by permanent pasture with Italian ryegrass used on other paddocks in the regrassing programme.

A system review on the farm in time for this season meant a cut in stocking rate to 3.07 cows/ha and thanks to tight pasture management, the aggressive start made to regrassing the poorest performing paddocks and an audit of the irrigation system they’ve increased pasture harvested from 12.8 to 13.2t DM/ha.

Hamish says the competition has been a great way to review what he’s learned, and solidify his plans and he’s looking forward to meeting the other regional winners, sharing ideas and making more great networks.

Geraldine farm manager Matthew Parmar was runner-up in the Dairy Manager competition and Dinuka Gamage, from Culverden was third.

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