A Southland equity partnership has plenty of expertise to call on among its shareholding base with award-winning farmers and a successful farm consultant. But it’s the skill of its lower-order sharemilkers that is its main strength. Stu McGarvie and Sarah Huffidine are 24% sharemilkers for Westline Farms near Tapanui.
The 195ha farm is owned by Southland farm consultant Ivan Lines and his wife Vivienne, Riverton dairy farmers Vaughan and Megan Templeton, Winton dairy farmers Owen and Margret Westlake and Bob, Kathlene and Ralph Manning.
Stu’s the key man in the operation, Ivan says.
“He and I have regular meetings to go over the farm plans but he makes the day-to-day decisions so the farm delivers on that plan and contact with the others is pretty much limited to board meetings.”
The line between governance and management is clearly defined and respected.
Ivan prefers a transformational rather than transactional management approach as it empowers people to make their own decisions. It gives them tools to grow their own knowledge and skills while transactional management provides people with tasks and is more focused on procedures and filling in forms.
“There’s a higher level of risk with transformational management in that people are left to their own decision-making but it’s exciting when they take ownership and go beyond simply carrying out tasks,” he says.
Long-term results can be much better for all parties. The approach has allowed Stu to treat the farm like his own and be happy to remain in the job rather than move on.
The equity partnership bought the farm seven years ago and that’s when Stu and Sarah took on the lower order sharemilking contract – their first step up to sharemilking. Stu is originally from Southland and had worked for wages in Southland and across the Tasman in Western Australia before returning to New Zealand and working as a farm manager for a couple of years.
While they’re still in the same job with the equity partnership it’s not to say they’re not progressing thanks to the opportunity to be 50:50 shareholders in the farm’s 260ha runoff, McWest Hills.
“I always wanted to own land but I didn’t really want to go 50:50 sharemilking,” he says.
The support property was bought four years ago and the plan is that over time Stu and Sarah could eventually move to full ownership of the block. It’s rolling country with some steeper slopes but much of it could be milked off so there are plenty of opportunities for the partnership together or for Stu and Sarah further down the line.
In addition to the farm’s own youngstock and cows, 155 rising two-year and 125 rising one-year heifers belonging to another farmer are also grazed on the block bringing in extra income.
They’re wintered on swedes, grass and choumoellier also known as kale. A move to HT swedes has boosted yields in weed-prone paddocks as the cultivar is tolerant to specific herbicides allowing spraying for weeds and better establishment.
Last winter Stu found a 4t drymatter (DM)/ha improvement in favour of the HT swedes when compared with another paddock of a standard swede variety that struggled against weed competition.
“It’s definitely worth using it here. We got 12t DM/ha when we used the HT swedes and 8t on the others,” he says.
The runoff is run as a separate business entity to the dairy farm with all grazing and supplement transactions carried out at market rates.
That means there’s little in it cash-wise for the dairy farm compared with grazing off and buying in supplements but there are other significant benefits, Ivan says.
“We bought well so there’s that but Stu does a great job with the young stock and wintering. The main plus, though, is that it allows Stu to make progress while sticking with us on the dairy farm.”
One of the most significant hurdles the farm faced was a high non-cycling rate in the herd in its first few seasons.
After CIDRing 250 cows in the first season only to have a similar number not cycling at the planned start of mating the next season they took a different tack altogether. They decided to put bulls in with the non-cyclers but also artificially inseminate (AI) cows that had obviously been serviced by the bull.
“It’s not that the bulls bring them into heat, it’s more that they are able to detect those silent heats better than we can and we don’t end up breeding replacements out of those problem cows.” Ivan says.
They’ve also taken a different tack to most when it comes to mating their heifers by using high Breeding Worth (BW) Jersey bulls.
It’s given them the ability to sell extra heifer calves and brought greater returns to the farm from stock sales. They get more saleable heifer calves out of the heifers than they would using a synchrony and AI programme as the BW200+ bulls are used across the whole heifer group throughout mating.
Using AI and a synchrony programme has about a 50% success rate to that AI service leaving the remaining heifers incalf to follow-up service bulls.
“We’ve typically sold around 60-80 heifers a year thanks to this approach,” Ivan says.
About 40% of their replacement heifers are sired by the bulls. But the catch is that very high BW, good quality bulls are a must and they can be pricey.
This last mating they reverted to using AI over the heifers for that reason but the bull mating programme is something they’ll likely look at again.
The high BW yearling bulls used over the heifers had then carried through to be used as follow-up bulls for the mixed-age cows.
That means that identifying bull-sired heifer calves from mixed-age cows can be tricky so they’ve used LIC’s GeneMark DNA progeny testing to avoid that. To counteract too much of a swing to Jersey they’ve used a crossbreeding type AI programme putting Jerseys to Friesians and vice versa with crossbreed to crossbreed.
Recently they’ve used more crossbreed semen over Friesian type animals and left Jerseys going to Friesian.
Their mating approach has proved successful over the years along with strict culling and they can now boast:
• a three week submission rate of 92%,
• a non-return rate of 72.8%,
• and an empty rate of 6-7% after 11 weeks mating, all with no intervention.
Last season stock sales accounted for 73c/kg milksolids (MS) with most of this coming from heifer sales as they don’t sell budget cows. Westline, along with two other farms the equity partners
are involved in, has developed a strong relationship with meat processor Alliance.
They give the company a plan of the likely numbers of animals that will be put up for killing, and when, so between the three farms they have fortnightly killing space booked from December to May.
“It means the agent rings us and says there are 20 cows booked in and we go through and select them rather than us ringing up and trying to get them in when everyone else is trying to do the same thing,” Ivan says.
Culling early helps cut costs without having a major impact on production as the higher BW, more feed-efficient animals then have access to more feed inputs.
Profitability is the name of the game on Westline and the farm churns out a good profit annually thanks to a tight reign on costs.
Their policy is to pay out half the profit as dividend and retain half to repay debt and/or plough back into the property in capital improvements.
The equity partnership has a cost structure of $3.07/kg MS excluding management wages and depreciation. Return on total assets for the equity partnership is also good at 7.36% last year, partially influenced, though, by land values in the area.
A low somatic cell count of about 112,000 cells/ml helped keep animal health bills to 12c/kg MS last season. They use short-acting, dry-cow therapy and teat seal the whole herd. Milking gloves are also a must in the farm dairy.
Stu’s a fastidious pasture manager and walks the farm weekly measuring covers with a platemeter.
“I did it by eye at first because that’s how I’d done it elsewhere but I found milk production would go up and down because it wasn’t that accurate. When I used the platemeter it levelled out and it made it easier to keep to the average pasture covers in the feed plan,” he says.
He’s shifted from using a spreadsheet to track covers and create a feed wedge to using Minda’s Land and Feed programme.
Silage and palm kernel are the supplements of choice when the round needs to be managed although the farm dairy is equipped with meal-feeding facilities.
Cost and cost effectiveness based on good sound reasoning and science are a strong focus. That’s why the results of Ivan’s son’s year 12 school science fair project were of such interest.
He soil tested the front, middle and back of each paddock to look at variations in fertility and found the front third to have twice the potassium levels as the back two thirds, likely to be because cows congregate there, increasing the amount of dung and urine deposited in the area creating fertility transfer. The farm’s made use of the information and adjusted potash fertiliser applications accordingly, saving one-third of the potash bill. But then it’s no surprise that data and monitoring are so important on the farm given its shareholders.
Turnips and swedes as part of regrassing
Summer turnips have yielded well this year and although so far this season a summer dry hasn’t really eventuated, cooler weather did slow growth rates considerably over Christmas.
Stu does all the cultivation and tractor work on the farm and this season, rather than direct drilling, as they’ve mostly done in the past, he cultivated and then drilled.
It’s given an improved yield of about 10t DM/ha. The turnips help manage the grazing round as well as help give good establishment of new grass paddocks in the regrassing programme. The property has averaged 10% regrassing over the seven years.
Swedes are also grown on the milk platform for cows to return to after wintering.
Weekly platemeter records are used to identify which paddocks need regrassing.
The Pomahaka River makes the farm prone to flooding and while it brings silt adding to the fertile Waikoikoi and Ardlussa silt loam soils it can make for trying times when it comes to managing pastures over a flood event.
Key points
Location: Tapanui, Southland
Owners: Westline Farms equity partnership
Lower-order sharemilkers: Stewart McGarvie and Sarah Huffidine
Area: 195ha effective
Cows: 600
Production: 260,000kg milksolids (MS)
Supplement: 663kg drymatter (DM)/cow total about 50:50 silage and palm kernel
Farm dairy: 50-bail rotary with automatic cup removers.
