“It was meant to be one long weeping wall but he was worried about the pressure in the middle so he made two smaller ones with a gap in the middle, which also made it easier for the digger to clean out,” David says.
And it worked. Effluent is gravity-fed to the clay-lined pond from the dairy and the vertical-slatted weeping wall keeps the solids out. Gravels build up away from the weeping wall because of the slope of the first pond.
“We clean it out twice a year and it goes on the summer turnip paddock usually. The liquid is pumped to 40ha which we have set up for K-lines on a pulse system.
“The K-lines are moved every day and we’re careful using them when soil conditions are wet.
“Under most of the farm are tile drains and the catchment goes into the Pomahaka River which has problems. I know where most of the outlets of the tile drains are and we check them regularly.
“The K-lines have low-flow nozzles and they’ll go for so many minutes then stop, depending on how we’ve got it set up.
“We have it running a lot of the time at night because we get cheaper power from 11pm to 7am. There’s an automatic shutdown system if a pipe blows so it’s pretty safe.”
The system impressed the judges of the 2016 Otago Ballance Farm Environment Awards and was one of the reasons why David and his wife Robyn won the LIC Dairy Farm Award in the competition.
The family have owned what was a 133ha sheep and beef farm since 1969, with David and Robyn taking over from David’s father in 1981.
In the early 80s they thought about converting to dairy, even going as far as getting quotes but instead “struggled on with sheep”, both working off-farm until they finally leased out the land in 2003 for dairy grazing and David drove trucks full-time.
It was a daughter, who was working on a dairy farm, who got them thinking again about converting.
“The farm was too small for sheep and we didn’t want to sell it and we weren’t happy watching someone else farm it so we made the decision,” Robyn says.
They started milking 200 Jersey cows, which a farmer in the area no longer wanted in his Friesian herd, in February 2009. That spring they increased to 330. A 174ha hill block 4km away came up for sale and also 50ha on their boundary, allowing them to increase the herd to 485 cows.
“We never could have bought those when we were sheep farming. We’ve been able to grow our business because we’re dairying.”
The decision to convert is not one they regret, even with the downturn.
“The bank is content to let us continue so that’s what we’re doing.”
They have farm working expenses at $3.93/kg milksolids (MS) and will drop it further next season, cutting out 70 tonnes of palm kernel.
“Interest rates at the moment are very helpful and we are naturally conservative people. We only bought our very first brand-new tractor last year,” Robyn says.
“We needed to. We were hauling silage wagons on hills, and as the runoff is steep we’re able to do most of the cultivation with the new tractor,” David says.
And although they’re not so keen on the tie of twice-a-day milking and daily shifts on crop in winter, they’re enjoying dairying.
“Cows are physically easier than sheep,” David says. “You’re not crutching all the time and you see your stock twice a day so you pick up problems a lot quicker.”
The couple love Jersey cows, especially for their ease of calving and their lighter bodyweight on the at-times wet soils, but have started crossing them with Friesian genetics.
“There is no market down here for Jersey heifers so we’ve been missing out on that income stream, so we have to change,” David says.
They did the conversion as cheaply as possible, using rock from their own quarry on the farm and opting for a 40-aside herringbone with automatic cup removers instead of a rotary.
Wood chip bedding for a pad for the springers and for the calf sheds comes from their own trees, planted in the 1990s as part of their retirement fund and chipped on the farm for $5/cubic metre.
Water was a concern because they knew the neighbours had trouble putting down bores. Instead they joined the Clutha River scheme and are on 35,000 litres a day with holding tanks at the dairy and a storage pond. Looking back, they wished they had renewed the old sheep pastures sooner but 10ha of summer turnips and 2ha of fodder beet on the platform has helped get them through.
When David first took Robyn to see the runoff he wanted to buy she was horrified.
“It was steep and covered in gorse and I said no way.”
But they needed to stop wintering off-farm so they sprayed the gorse and planted trees in the gullies and where it was too steep for the tractor to mow. The trees were planted for free through the Government’s Afforestation Grant Scheme.
Fodder beet for the cows and kale for the young stock are grown on the runoff for two years before the paddock is put in permanent pasture, although gorse is still a worry afterwards.
Fertility is also a problem with the block needing large amounts of fertiliser, and crop tonnages haven’t been what they should be.
“Fodder beet is expensive to grow, as we’re not getting the tonnages, but some of the paddocks are too steep to grow kale because you have to drive the bike through to put the fence breaks up and it can get a bit dangerous.”
But it’s an easy hour walk for the cows to the block for the winter and they walk back as springers in groups of 30 or 40 to the bark pad behind the house for calving.
“They get fit too on the hills, which I think is good for them,” David says. “We have very few calving problems.”
The young stock are also grazed on the runoff and all the silage and balage made there as well, making the farm a self-contained system two operation.
Although one of the reasons for converting was to let their children take part in the farming business, all three have decided milking cows is not for them at the moment.
Their daughter Megan is an early childhood teacher living in Balclutha with her partner Jason, who teaches at the high school, and their nine-month-old daughter Esme.
Laura has worked on the farm but is busy now with children Juno, 3, and Freddy, 1, and her husband James flies ag planes. Their son Scott, who returned home from his OE last year and has spent a season on the farm, is going back to working as a plumber.
“It means we’ll eventually look at having a contract milker, so we can retire,” David says.
They want to encourage other dairy farmers to enter the Ballance Farm Environment Awards, even though times are tough.
“We learnt a lot from the judges, they gave us lots to think about and we met some amazing people,” Robyn says.
“It got us off-farm and we got to learn about other types of farms in Otago, even a winery.
“For a while after converting I was scared to tell people we were dairy farmers, because dairying had such a bad name, but now we’re really proud of what we’ve achieved.”
Farm facts
Springpark Farms
Owners: David and Robyn Balchin
Location: Clinton, south Otago
Area: 361ha (183ha milking platform)
Herd: 485 Jersey, crossbred
Production: 192,892kg MS 2014-15
