Southland dairy farmer Audrey Stevenson, who says championing a breed is about more than entering cattle in a show ring, has organised for the past four years Ayrshire seminars for new and younger members of the breed society to teach them the basics of good farming.
The four-day seminars, held so far in Southland, Northland, and most recently in Canterbury in April, teach small groups of 18- to 40-year-olds everything from breeding and animal health to financial management.
“The dairy industry needs young people and the breed societies especially do,” Audrey says.
“I think a few other societies are starting to look at what we’re doing and thinking they should be doing the same.”
The work has earned Audrey the Ayrshire New Zealand Kiteroa Trophy for 2012-13.
The trophy is awarded to the person who has contributed the most to the breed each year.
“It’s been because of a very supportive youth committee that it has happened,” she says.
“I couldn’t have done it without them.”
At all three seminars has been her son Craig, who manages one of the Stevensons’ two herds at Isla Bank. He and his wife Ruth, who have three children, and their 18-month-old son Toby are the next generations of Stevensons excited about the breed.
“People think Ayrshires don’t produce but I like to prove them wrong,” Craig says.
Audrey grew up on a dairy farm at Ross on the West Coast but her parents were no longer dairying when she met Rex, an agricultural contractor at Darfield in Canterbury.
Although her parents had milked Jerseys, it was their first job together that got them hooked on Ayrshires.
“We went contract milking at Whataroa for Lands and Survey and they gave us a herd of 180 two-year-olds to milk in our first year. There were about a dozen Ayrshires and when the rest of the cows were at the gate moaning because of the bad weather, the Ayrshires were still fossicking in the paddock for more to eat,” Audrey says.
“And they milked really well and were just really, really nice to work with.”
Showing
They got to know Ayrshire breeders and soon were showing Ayrshire cattle on the West Coast, at one time producing a South Island champion.
They went 50:50 sharemilking near Westport. It was the first time they had borrowed money and the interest rate was 18.4%.
“We started off with nothing. We inherited no money from either of our families, and if you can pay off a loan at that high an interest rate when the payout wasn’t good, anyone can do it now,” Rex says.
In 1996 they won the West Coast Sharemilker of the Year title, the same year their contract at Taramakau ended.
“We decided it was about return on investment and we weren’t doing the production on the West Coast that we needed to be doing. The grass quality just wasn’t good enough so we decided to look elsewhere,” Rex says.
They moved to a new dairy conversion at Clydevale and employed the farm owner, Gary Stirling, for the first year.
“He wanted to learn more about dairy farming. It wasn’t about us and them, it was about all of us together,” Rex says.
“If you start thinking about us and them, then that’s when things fall apart in sharemilking.”
The move worked and with 100 fewer cows they were doing the same production in Clydevale as they had been on the Coast.
They made another shift, this time to Castle Rock in northern Southland, increased their cow numbers to 1400 and for the first time they had the ability to buy a farm.
They found one at Isla Bank but buying the 142ha milking 380 cows meant selling their herd and starting their Ayrshire bloodlines again.
“We split our herd into Friesian and Ayrshire for sale. The Ayrshires got us the most money,” Rex says.
Today they estimate 90% of the cows in one of their Ayrshire herds have some Ayrshire in them and 75% look like Ayrshires.
“The black and white coat colour is one of the last traits to go,” he says. “You can put Ayrshire over a Friesian herd and no one will know looking at them. It just makes the black even blacker.”
They use Semayr Breeding Services, which is part of Ayrshire New Zealand, with an LIC technician doing the work at mating.
AI is for six weeks. They also do sire proving and Audrey is a traits-other-than-production inspector for the breed and is a former senior judge in the show ring.
A year after buying Isla Bank they decided not to put up with the farm’s herringbone dairy any longer and replaced it with at 50-bail rotary. The second rotary, 54 bails, was built after they bought the neighbouring sheep farm.
“We had to buy it in three lots. The bank wouldn’t allow us to buy it in one hit but we got all of it in the end,” Rex says.
“A lot of people were surprised when we built the second rotary but it was about looking after the staff. Happy staff, happy cows, happy farm.”
The cows are run in two herds, one for each dairy, with Craig as operations manager and manager of one herd and Filipino Lyle Soriano managing the other.
Their farm working expenses might be high but the Stevensons believe in feeding their cows properly. Mixes of distillers’ grain, palm kernel, molasses, silage, and straw are fed on pads by each dairy allowing cows to be milked until June 15. The whole-crop silage, undersown with grass, and all the grass silage is made onfarm.
“You have to feed them whether they are milking or not, so you might as well be milking them,” Rex says.
In early September this year, production was already 2.2kg milksolids (MS)/cow/day and last year peaked at 2.6kg MS/cow/day.
Rex and Audrey’s other child, Michael, is a sports conditioning coach at Lincoln University and his wife Heather also works at the university. However, Craig wanted to grow into the family farm, so five years ago Rex and Audrey bought 273ha at Te Anau, an hour-and-a-half away from Isla Bank, and moved there. Rex likes fishing, although he prefers catching blue cod to waiting hours for a trout to find his hook, and both enjoy the mountain atmosphere of the area.
“It’s winter dry but it’s not summer safe,” Rex says.
They winter all the farm’s dairy cows there on kale, swedes, and fodder beet, plus whole crop, lucerne, and grass balage and have the young stock from about three weeks, using milk powder to feed them.
Rex AIs all the yearlings, about 200, with Ayrshire Semayr Breeding Services’ sire proving straws.
“It would be criminal not to inseminate them. That’s where your biggest gain is,” he says.
It’s hardly the semi-retirement they had hoped for but Audrey especially is enjoying staying in one place.
“It’s the first house we have lived in for more than four years,” she says.
“Last June we didn’t have to pack up and shift. It was great.”
Key points
Location: Isla Bank, Southland
Owners: Rex and Audrey Stevenson
Area: 312ha (298ha effective)
Dairy: 50- and 54-bail rotaries with automatic cup removers, Protrack and automatic teat spraying
Runoff: 273ha at Te Anau
Herd: 880 cows calving, Ayrshire herd Breeding Worth (BW) 84, Production Worth (PW) 136, Friesian herd, BW 45, PW 71
Production: 400,000kg milksolids (MS) budget for 2013-2014 season
Farm working expenses: $4.50/kg MS.
