Friday, March 29, 2024

Learning from a legend

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Argentinean couple Carlos and Gisela Cuadrado have adopted New Zealand pasture management techniques with exacting efficiency. Anne Lee finds out how that’s helped them create profitable farm systems and progress to farm ownership.
Reading Time: 6 minutes

Carlos Cuadrado’s first lessons in pasture management came from a Kiwi pasture legend. 

The advice was in a book his father, also a dairy farmer, owned – a book by the late C P McMeekan which had been translated into Spanish.

Carlos still cites the Ruakura scientist, World Bank senior agriculturalist and grass guru when he talks about managing pastures, growing the highest quality feed and using cows to efficiently harvest it and convert it to milksolids.

His work is the foundation of Carlos’ approach to dairying.

Both Carlos and his wife Gisela have agriculture degrees. They came to New Zealand in 2002 after Carlos was motivated by opportunities he’d seen on a previous visit. The couple arrived from Argentina with just their suitcases and owing money to family for their plane tickets, Gisela recalls.

Before a brief stint back in Argentina they worked for Canterbury couple David and Michelle Procter and it was their 900-cow farm they returned to in 2008. 

They were determined to come to grips with Kiwi farming structures and progression pathways. 

In a short time they found an opportunity to buy a property and establish an equity partnership in a 560-cow farm where Carlos and Gisela’s company, Canterbury Pampas, holds a 25% equity share.

They stayed working for the Procters but stepped up to variable-order sharemilking and used the equity from rearing calves and leasing cows to add the equity partnership, Wingers Farm, to their business.

Carlos is the managing director and chairman of the four-person production advisory committee (PAC) while Gisela manages the accounts.

‘You have to be fLexible but you have to make changes for the right reasons and know what you’re going to do to manage that variation away from the plan.’

Carlos is a spreadsheet maestro and fills out a weekly report that’s sent to the PAC.

It includes information on production, animal health, supplements used or cut, pasture covers and grazing rounds and is combined with the farm’s feed wedge.

The farm is run with very few feed inputs, with a strong focus on pasture management.

“We’re pretty frugal and think about everything we spend and that’s the same for both farms. They have to be pasture-focused and low-cost – that’s the advantage in this country. Being pasture-focused is how your business growth is driven,” he says.

Carlos pays close attention to Lincoln University Dairy Farm (LUDF) and developed his feed wedge spreadsheet to emulate what they were doing.

Initially it showed current pasture covers with a demand line overlaid to indicate potential surpluses or deficits, but other cells have been added and additional graphics used to show what’s happening with feed and cows onfarm. One graph plots pasture demand and pasture production, with a bar graph to show what supplements have been fed when and how much.

That monitoring discipline provides timely information that’s critical when it comes to optimising performance.

To make good decisions you need good information, Carlos says.

Much of the information is measured and includes factors like soil temperature, soil moisture, forecast overnight minimum temperatures and measured pasture covers for each paddock. 

But there’s no getting away from the need for stockmanship and observation.

Carlos and Gisela take a 360-degree view when it comes to pasture management.

“You have to look at where the cows have been, what the residuals are like, how the cows are behaving now and what pasture covers are doing and then you have to look forward – what is the feed wedge telling you and what does the weather forecast look like?” Carlos says.

“Every day you can see what’s going into the vat, every time you move the cows you can see what they’re leaving behind. So every 12 hours you get an update. You just have to look, observe and then be ready to adjust,” he says.

Those adjustments and observations are part of an overall pasture management process that includes a weekly farm ride to note pasture covers in every paddock and generate current and predictive feed wedges.

On the Pendarves farm Carlos is in every paddock at least once a week. He frequently checks residuals and pre-grazing covers, and he’s watching the vat. He also talks to staff and involves them in the critical feed budgeting and allocation decisions. They’re the ones shifting the cows and can make adjustments to ensure feed management is not just good but also precise.

Achieving even, consistent residuals is a big focus. They aim to leave the paddocks with no clumps and a cover of between 1450 and 1600kg drymatter (DM)/ha. The target is always 1500kg DM/ha.

The Pendarves farm is irrigated with Rotorainers that require daily shifting so some staff get a close look at the whole farm in just four days.

While he monitors and plans, Carlos isn’t one for a hard-and-fast recipe because there are too many variables. Climate, soil and air temperature, rainfall, sunshine hours all vary.

“You could have a cold spring like this year or you could have a warm one. So you can’t say on this date this is what we’ll be doing, this will be the cover or even that this will be our exact round length,” he says.

This season there’s the low payout to deal with but they’ve also had to cope with a cold, slow spring meeting a higher early feed demand because they used short-gestation bulls and some cows calved earlier than predicted.

“Sure we have a target cover we’re aiming for at calving but we have to be prepared and have options in case that’s not achieved,” he says.

The aim is for an average pasture cover at calving of 2500kg DM/ha and in a typical year they’d feed about 50kg DM/cow of supplement through spring. This year they’ve had to adjust their spring rotation planner slightly from the 20m2/dry cow and 80m2/calved cow and add in more supplements.

Carlos puts the grazing allocation calculation on the whiteboard in the farm dairy office so staff can be involved in how the grazing plan is set. It becomes a discussion point with staff and shows the theory and reasoning behind the day-to-day movement of cows.

Through spring they run two herds and the calculation shows:

What each herd needs to consume,

The feed in the paddock,

The residual required and therefore what’s available,

The area they want to graze to achieve the round length they’re targeting, and

The amount of supplement that will be required.

At a stocking rate of between 3.65 and 3.73 cows/ha Carlos says they’re where they want to be if they want to keep bought-in supplements to a minimum and limit surpluses.

They’ve cut cow numbers by about 20 to reduce demand and keep farm working expenses down to $3.45/kg milksolids (MS).

“Sometimes it’s easier to manage pasture quality when you’re running close to demand rather than having to deal with a lot of surpluses,” Carlos says.

The rate of pasture renewal was stepped up five years ago and has helped improve pasture quality and quantity of feed grown.

It’s included more winter-active varieties which have been welcome this season but Carlos says they have to be managed carefully during the second round because they can be earlier flowering.

Growth rates in late spring and early summer can take off and they have been known to get round lengths to fewer than 18 days. Pastures have to be monitored closely then and the feed wedge can be reviewed more frequently and allocations re-done.

“The feed wedge has to be a guide but in some cases when we’re allocating a paddock we’ll have to skip over the next highest cover. It might be wet and we know that paddock is heavier soils, for instance. You have to be flexible but you have to make changes for the right reasons and know what you’re going to do to manage that variation away from the plan.”

They take genuine surpluses early and seldom have to get the mower out.

Carlos says he’s no fan of mowing ahead of cows but they watch what LUDF is doing and applaud the farm for its strategy to cut inputs and stocking rate to reduce environmental impact and maintain or improve profitability.

“We have an open mind and watch what they’re doing. It means they are taking all the risk for us and doing all the analysis so we have very strong information to base our decisions on.” 

From September to February the round length generally sits between 18 and 21 days, but from January on Carlos and Gisela are preparing for the next season and use a number of tools other than buying supplement to extend the round and build cover.

Culls are sent off early and cows put on once-a-day milking if necessary, then dried off based on production, calving date and condition score to match demand with feed supply. The round is extended to about 24 days through February and about 35-40 days by the end of April.

Nitrogen is a tool too and over the season they use about 230kg N/ha with the first application this year as ammonium sulphate because of the cold winter and spring. By mid-September they would normally have started applying nitrogen as urea but low soil temperatures meant that didn’t happen until the end of September. 

Carlos and Gisela have 10 years of feed wedge and growth rate data on the Pendarves farm because their systems were maintained during the time they were in Argentina.

“We know from looking back at cold springs previously that we’ll get a 5-10% better response rate to urea if we wait until the soil temperatures are consistently up above 8C. We might get a 10:1 response rate at a lower temperature but if we wait 10 days we’ll get a 12-15:1 response.”

Urea is applied about every 20-25 days to maximise the response.  

In the end the best pasture management is all about monitoring and observation, careful analysis and reviewing – what went right and what didn’t and then acting on it.

That’s a daily occurrence – not just a seasonal one.

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