Feeding fewer cows reduces their environmental footprint and doesn’t need to mean a loss of milk production, Bryan and Tesha Gibson say.
The Reporoa couple are participants in a ‘more profit, less risk’ project, milking 400 cows this season on 170ha effective of easy hill country flanked by the Waikato River at Mihi. They’re part of the ‘Tomorrow’s Farms Today’ project that’s seen a correlation between higher profit, low stocking rate and low nitrogen leaching.
“Theoretically the perfect system is one cow for all your milk production. It eats 3.2 tonnes of feed for maintenance and every other blade of grass goes into milk production,” Bryan says of the link between higher profit and lower stocking rate.
“No cow can produce that much but why have a cow milking 300kg milksolids (MS) when you can have the same maintenance requirement of feed for a cow milking 400kg?”
The project calculates production efficiency in terms of a return per kg liveweight of cows rather than simply the number of cows a hectare. On the Gibson farm the crossbred cows are producing 93% of their liveweight in MS in an average year.
Most herds in the region produce only 70-80% of their bodyweight in milk.
The Gibson farm had been milking 440 cows and the decision to take 40 cows out of the herd for this current season was reached after careful consideration of the numbers. But it’s paying off.
While the stocking rate is now down to 2.35 cows a hectare – half a cow a hectare below the South Waikato average – the Gibson herd’s production this season looks set to equal their bumper season of 2011-12.
“We have fewer cows but we are on track to produce 170,000-180,000kg MS this season. We produced 180,000 in 2011-12 and if we can get there again with 400 cows it will be fantastic,” Bryan says.
It would equate to a herd average of 450kg MS/cow compared with 410kg MS/cow in the 2011-12 season.
Bryan is a former milking machinery engineer who, with Tesha, switched to a career in farming 13 years ago. A former accountant, Tesha says it was a “do it now or we never will” decision to apply for a position for farm assistants and rent out their house in Hamilton. They turned down pay rises to stay in their town jobs and accepted a 50% cut to their household income for two years. But after a few years of upward progress on different farms they were at last ready to sell their house and raise money for a herd.
They accepted a sharemilking contract that would build to a 50:50 contract on their current farm, owned by Bryan’s parents, Paul and Christine Gibson.
“After selling the house we had $15,000. That was it. And we borrowed $200,000, which seemed a massive amount at the time,” Tesha says.
The motivation was the strong cashflow of a sharemilking business and the desire to prosper in a rural family lifestyle far removed from the stress Bryan was under when having to repair dairy platforms into the early hours.
Moving to the farm he jettisoned his cellphone and attached earpiece and for five years stuck to a resolve not to own or carry one.
“When we first came here six years ago the advice was to carry 3.1 cows/ha which would have grown the herd to 510 or 530 cows, so today we are effectively milking 20% fewer cows than what we could potentially carry,” he says.
Fortunately the Gibsons and other farmers participating in the ‘Tomorrow’s Farms Today’ project have been able to study and discuss an annual profit analysis for each farm and put real figures around options such as milking more cows. They decided the farm would be more efficient, more profitable and more manageable with fewer cows.
“From the point of view of profit it’s more efficient when you are using less feed to produce the same amount of milk. From the environmental point of view a higher stocking rate pushes up the leaching rates,” Tesha says.
“The extra stock also becomes a social issue on the farm because it’s harder work for everyone and the milkings are longer. So there’s a three-fold impact – profit, environment and social.”
Bryan still buys in plenty of feed to get the cows through droughts and other setbacks “to maximise what you can get out of a cow”.
The couple won the 2008 Central Plateau Sharemilker of the Year Award at the start of their second year of sharemilking; the year a drought took hold and global financial markets crashed and put desperate pressure on lenders and borrowers. Until the slump banks had been extending offers of generous loans to invest in land.
“The comment was that capital gain makes you rich but we weren’t farming for capital gain. Sharemilking has a good cashflow and pays off debt and we didn’t want to get stuck with a land investment,” Bryan says.
It was only at the start of last season that they bought into the family farm with an initial purchase of 25% and leasing the rest, which reduced their net cashflow and then the drought took hold. Bryan made a bit of extra cash by selling 25 mobile feeder troughs that he designed and built with his engineering skills.
Describing herself as a data hound, Tesha takes the guesswork out of their decision-making with actual numbers, such as a monthly rainfall comparison (it’s measured daily) and a spreadsheet of annual net returns on equity and assets since 2004 under varying sharemilk contracts.
Pasture walks with a platemeter are every 10 days during the season and Bryan has calculated the extra feed required if they were to run an extra half cow a hectare across the farm – an extra 250 tonnes of feed would be required to maintain body condition and 200t to fuel the extra milk production.
They have looked at the numbers generated by the Headlands consultancy that facilitates their farm group discussions and noted that six of the seven farms that leach the least amount of nitrogen, less than 30kg N/ha/year, are among the eight most profitable farms in the group.
“We originally wanted to know how to get the best from both worlds of more profit and less leaching and it turns out we already have that system,” Bryan says. He would consider destocking further if the numbers stacked up.
He believes there is a real motivation within the group to better manage the farm environment.
“People are starting to look at this and think ‘I want my kids to be able to enjoy the river and farm here in 25 years’ time, so do I want to be involved in a system that pollutes it?’. We certainly don’t.”
One of the farmers in the group had a high input feeding system and has since decided to change to a reduced nitrogen system.
The Gibsons’ farm practices have changed, such as the preferred use of dicalcic phosphate after a two-year trial on the farm, a new effluent pond with up to 30 days storage and an effluent spreading area extended to 32ha using two travelling irrigators.
The ground for rape crops is planted with chicory and plantain for extended value and prepared with a single pass of square tynes to avoid creating a subsoil pan.
“Our next focus is on cutting water use so a water meter has been installed on each of the two bores,” he says.
“A third meter will measure the water used for the yard washdown by hose or flood wash.”
Sixty tonnes of palm kernel is on a concrete pad under a roof and this spring there’s been a double amount of grass silage cut from a total of 68ha as a buffer against whatever the season brings.
The goal, Bryan says, is to continue improving the farm’s environmental performance without reducing profitability, to have good feed reserves, healthy cows and good holiday breaks.
• The Tomorrow’s Farms Today group of 25 farmers at Reporoa has a final meeting on February 26, restricted to group members. Headlands farm consultant Rachel Mudge said the group will discuss their third and final year’s farm results and listen to speakers explaining the likely impact of regional council policy changes on farm systems.
“Within this group there is certainly an increased awareness of the need for a balanced approach to matching stocking rate to pasture harvest.”
A public meeting of the group is planned for March but time and place have yet to be decided. Keep an eye on Dairy Diary for details.
Key points
Location: Mihi, Reporoa
Owners: Paul and Christine Gibson
50:50 Sharemilkers and 25% owners: Bryan and Tesha Gibson
Farm area: 170ha effective
Herd: 440 Jersey/Friesian cross cows
Production: 180,000kg milksolids (MS)
Supplements: 330 tonnes palm kernel, 120t grass silage, 11.4t hay.
