“Last year we had half of them at home for the winter and this year it was only going to be 150 going off but we stopped that in February when things unravelled.”
Making the decision was hard but ringing up the grazier, who he had used for a few years and had done a great job, was even harder.
He had no written agreement but he still didn’t want to do it.
“I told him as soon as I could but I still feel bad because those guys need to live too.”
To make it work Park, who farms 284ha (250ha effective) at Greenfield near Balclutha, has dropped cow numbers by about a hundred to 470, giving him a stocking rate of 2.4 cows/hectare.
The culls went to the works in April, two weeks earlier than usual, and half the lease cows are also going.
“Any cow that is going to cost us extra money to milk will be gone,” he said.
“We’re culling earlier to both build grass covers and reduce the demand on the smaller area of fodder beet now available to be milked off.”
He also plans to milk, weather permitting, to the last seasonal pickup by Fonterra, finishing the season at 180,000kg milksolids (MS) and hopes to do the same next season. At peak, the farm has produced 205,000kg MS.
The fodder beet, which was planted in November for milking on in autumn and spring, will now be used mainly for wintering.
“Because we thought the payout wasn’t going to get better we planted 27ha of fodder beet, instead of the usual 6ha.
“The original plan was that 15ha would be used to winter 350 cows and 12ha would be milked off in the autumn and spring.
“To have all the cows at home we are using 8ha for milking and 19ha for winter.
“It had to be a compromise between feeding the cows in-milk and wintering all the cows at home this year.
“I know fodder beet can be more expensive to grow than chou moellier but if we can get our crop yields up to 25 tonnes drymatter (DM) then it’s cheaper to grow than chou. And we are finding on our country that the earlier the sowing date the higher the yield.
“Also fodder beet is more versatile. With chou, if you don’t have it all eaten by August and it starts flowering then you’ve got a problem. With fodder beet, we started eating it in March this year and we can still milk off it in the spring if we have any left.”
It cost him $1800/ha to grow the 22t DM/ha crop, doing most of the tractor work himself, and there’s another 22ha of oats he’s made into balage.
Wintering off-farm, including transport, used to cost him about $340/per cow for 10 weeks.
Although he knows the workload is going to be greater, and doing anything in the cold takes twice as long, at least the farm has natural gravels and holds up, even in a wet year.
“Having wintered 1200 cows in the years before we converted I know 500 isn’t a daunting task and I have a great team of staff which certainly made the decision easier.
Park used to rear 150 calves but this spring that will drop to 120.
Yearlings are still grazed off but if the payout stays low they will be coming home as well.
The 140t of either wheat or dried distillers grain he used to buy is not going to happen either. The silos by the rotary dairy are staying empty.
“We’ve ring-fenced the farm and said this is it – we only eat what we can grow and we stock the farm accordingly.
“We’ve just got to go back to basics and produce the milk from our own milking platform and not buy it in as we have in the past.
“Sounds simple but it’s bloody challenging at times.
“There comes a tipping point where the changes you make means the milk production drops too much but I don’t think we’re there yet.
“Some days it feels like it would be easier just to walk away but I want to keep farming for the future and we have to be very, very careful not to risk that.”
He’s thought about diversifying but whatever he did would need a cash injection – cash he just doesn’t have.
“We’re going to AI this year so we get the maximum number of beef calves and we’ve been looking out of the box as much as we can.”
And when the payout lifts, he’s not going back to how he used to dairy farm.
“If this works, then we’re going to stick with it – we’re going to be lean and productive.”
With no irrigation, the farm also has 13ha of lucerne and Park says the upside of wintering at home is regrassing after the winter crop is eaten. Cropping is in his background. The family farm used to be sheep, beef and pigs with all the grain for the pigs grown on farm.
About 1500 baconers were produced annually, giving cashflow every two weeks, but in 1998 Canadian pork flooded the market.
“The pigs used to be very profitable but then all that stopped. We thought about getting bigger, to producing 5000 or 8000 pigs a year but instead went dairying.”
It’s not a decision he or his parents regret, although the possibility of losing the farm worries him.
The farm has been in the family for 96 years and Park hopes to make that 100 years and hand it on one day to his two children Megan, 9, and Cameron, 8.
“They love farming, they’re real animal people. I’m a true caretaker of this land for them.
“I might be laughing and joking about our situation but we are deeply concerned that if we have another two years like this one then we won’t be able to stay.”
His parents, who are in their late 70s, have seen tough times before but think what is happening now is equal to the 1980s when interest rates were in the high 20s and SMPs (Supplementary Minimum Prices) had just come off.
“They worry about good, talented people leaving the industry and not coming back, which is what happened back then, and they don’t understand why the government is ignoring it. These people are the future of a very important export industry.
“I believe the face of dairying will be changed forever as a result of this cycle but we have to stay positive to survive.
“We must learn to produce milk at a lower cost and I’m sure we can.”
Farm facts:
Owner: Gavin Park
Area: 284ha, 250ha effective
Herd: 470
Staff: three
Crops: fodder beet, lucerne and oats (made into balage)
Milking: three times in two days from mid-December
