Friday, March 29, 2024

Milking on swedes

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A challenging climate and soils mean dairying on the West Coast can be difficult. Whataroa farmer Dale Bowater told Anne Hardie thinking outside the square has been essential in finding ways to improve production.
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Whataroa is close to glacier country on the West Coast, where rain is measured in metres and pasture growth can be just 11 tonnes of drymatter a year, so Dale Bowater is now growing swedes on 18% – 60ha – of his milking platform and feeding them to the milking herd through autumn.

He is one of many dairy farmers around the Whataroa area pushing the boundaries in what he describes as dairying’s “last frontier” by searching for their own solutions to lift milk production in the challenging climate.

Dale and his wife Stephanie farm 630ha just east of the tiny township, with 350ha effective while they continue to develop chunks of gorse and flax-covered terrain. Their farm sits about seven kilometres from the coast and about 12km from the Southern Alps. While they get 3.5m of rain, other farms just five minutes toward the Southern Alps get an extra metre of rain and by the time they sit right under the Alps you can add another couple of metres.

It’s not raining all the time, but when it does it deluges. Fortunately the farm, though flat, has enough fall to drain flooding promptly. And there’s compensation for living in this high rainfall area. On a good day, Dale works with a picture-postcard view of Mt Cook and the Southern Alps and he admits he sometimes just about pinches himself to make sure he isn’t dreaming.

Winter isn’t so bad, it’s usually spring, especially September, when the rain hammers the farm with several inches a day for days on end and the grass struggles to get going, which is why he is trying to keep the swedes going into the beginning of the milking season.

It’s been a process of trial and error as they look for ways to lift production that has been ongoing since they bought and converted the farm 13 years ago. The former sharemilkers from mid Canterbury initially bought the Whataroa farm in an equity partnership and later bought their partner out.

“The price of land was a lot cheaper and I saw a lot of potential here and probably never fully appreciated the level of work to develop it. I’m a skilled digger driver now and never thought I’d be doing that.”

Early on the Bowaters milked up to 850 cows, but time and experience have taught them they can’t push numbers in southern Westland’s climate.

Using strategic culling, they discovered less is actually more.

“We couldn’t comprehend why we couldn’t achieve more and all I can say is that the weather just pulled us into line. It really didn’t matter how arrogant you were; you had to toe the line eventually.”

They struggled to get production up to 400kg milksolids (MS) per cow and so steadily dropped cow numbers over the years, improved grass species and increased milk production. Today they milk 640 crossbred cows at just two cows per hectare and have production up to 430kg MS per cow.

Another part of the equation to achieve that is 600kg/cow of bought-in feed including palm kernel, wheat and some blended feeds which are used to top up the cows’ diet during the tougher parts of the season when pasture production struggles to fully feed them.

Putting together a production-feed budget in this part of the world was pretty much done “by the seat of your pants” because of the variable and hard-to-predict growth through the season, so the bought-in feed plays an important role.

“There were other spinoffs from dropping numbers like getting cows in-calf and days in milk, and being more satisfied with your herd and environment.”

Soils vary from stony riverbed to river silts, with the latter compacting and becoming quite impermeable to water and prone to pugging, so a large standoff pad with feed troughs caters for the 640-cow herd. Cows are calved on the pad which sits next to the 60-bail dairy and sheds, so calves can be gathered up quickly and put in the shed out of the rain and cold which can be a killer for them.

Humping and hollowing has also helped the drainage problem on the silt soils, with about 20% of the farm completed and potentially 50% when funds allow. It’s an expensive exercise that takes a long time to see a return on their investment and not just due to the earthworks, but the slow process and enormous amount of fertiliser to get it growing good pasture.

Many farms on the West Coast have used flipping to help drainage, but heavy silt soils like those on the Bowaters’ farm don’t have the gravel to bring to the surface.

Any further humping and hollowing will be on hold because of the lower payout and instead the Bowaters are cutting costs. Their farm working expenses typically sit about $3.85/kg MS and this year they’ve managed to reduce it to $3.65 with slightly less fertiliser, retaining most of the young stock at home and relying on lower repairs and maintenance. They’ve also dropped a full-time staff member and now employ two. Staff get every second weekend off and during spring the two employees alternate a three-day weekend every second week.

Cutting costs won’t ease their high debt loading from buying, converting and developing the farm though.

“Everything has been well-maintained so you hope you can slide through without problems and going forward, that cost structure has to be reviewed and we have to try to drive the way we operate lower. That may mean less cows or milking them for more days. Each individual farm has to understand their assets and look outside the square.”

Looking outside the square brings him to milking cows on swedes. The farm only grows about 11 tonnes DM/ha of pasture, yet produces 18-20t DM/ha from brassica crops at a cost of about 7.5 cents/kg. Even in a dry year – and the Coast can dry out – the swede crop reached 15t DM/ha.

“In high rainfall you have lower drymatter in your grass, so your cows are consuming more liquid without getting more energy out of it. Even during autumn, the energy level in the grass doesn’t meet cow requirements. That’s why we’re milking cows on swedes.

“Brassicas are something we’ve been involved with in the last five years and learning as we go. Textbook growing of brassicas doesn’t apply to our environment so we’ve had to develop our own methods and we’ve come up with some pretty solid techniques and methods to achieve tonnages. Brassicas are definitely coming into vogue again as the farming community strives to grow more to enhance better farming practice and better utilisation of your farming asset.”

Silage isn’t a cost-effective option because the farm and others in the area struggle to grow the surplus grass at the right time of year for it, while trucking it from Canterbury is a significant cost.

Brassicas proved a cost-effective way to lift per-hectare performance and days in milk, and improve cow condition.

Dale has planted turnips in the past for summer and kale for winter as well as swedes, discovering the bulb of the latter had more durability in wet weather compared with kale which usually broke and disappeared into the mud. Compared with swedes at 18-20t DM/ha, kale was reaching only 11-12t DM/ha and the wastage was high.

The challenge is getting the timing right at planting because the window of opportunity can be hard to capture.

“You don’t want to be in a hurry to get it in the ground and around here mid to late December is ideal. Earlier than that we can have severe issues getting them established and the plants stay dormant until the weather warms up. But if you get your plant density right, it will grow well through autumn.

“This year we’re trialling the continuous addition of a little fertiliser through to May. We normally stop in March, but we still grow grass at that time, so why would the swedes stop growing?”

Growing swedes on 18% of the milking platform – 60ha – does put pressure on the system through January and February, so he needs to buy in supplements to top-up the cows’ diet by 10-15%. At the beginning of April last year the cows were still on twice-a-day milking and began grazing the swede crop during the day feed, then moving to a grass paddock for the night feed. To date, the herd has had no problems with toxicity from the swedes.

Once on the swedes, the cows’ condition improved, per-cow milk production increased and the herd ended up with more days in milk, with the season going from mid-August to June 10. In the past he has dried off sometime in May and sometimes as early as the end of April.

“If you compromise a little cow production earlier on, you benefit from more days in milk.”

He estimates the swedes added another 15,000kg MS into the vat last year, though admits one good year does not mean every year will achieve similar results.

As far as he can tell, the swedes didn’t seem to alter the smell or taste of the milk and he’s had no issue with muddy udders, probably because they’re feeding on the crop during the day and don’t usually lie down during wet weather, he says.

“It’s certainly a lot easier to feed than fodder beet because you don’t need to be nearly as pedantic and the wastage compared with kale is minimal.”

As if feeding swedes to his milking herd toward the end of the season wasn’t enough, this year Dale intends grazing milking cows on the crop through winter as he steps into winter milking.

The idea is to use winter milking to retain good empty cows which will probably be 10-15% of the herd. Poor spring growth through September and often early October combined with persistent rain takes its toll on cow health and mating success. Added to that is the later start to calving in mid-August because of the climate and it could be a recipe for a long drawn-out calving. Dale compensates by being ruthless and limiting mating to eight weeks and the result so far is a high empty rate.

“But we’re quite passionate about having a compact calving. If we look at winter milking, we’re only culling our poor performers and not those that are just empty. We’ll milk through to the beginning of August with the empties and they’ll be dried off or culled if their production isn’t suitable. Those we keep should be very fat and receptive to get in-calf early.”

Westland Milk Products won’t be paying a premium for the winter milk, but Dale says it is considering a small margin and ultimately they will need incentives to encourage farmers to make changes that distribute milk production more evenly through the year. In the meantime, the winter milk will provide cashflow and let them preserve the better empty cows.

“Productivity is part of it, but to be paid additional reward would be helpful.

“It’s very left field and experimental,” he admits. “A lot of what we’re doing is still evolving and the gains are still reasonably significant here.”

Since swedes are becoming an increasing part of the herd’s diet, Dale has introduced the R1 heifers to the crop so they know they are edible by the time they enter the herd. It takes a couple of weeks of sitting on the bulbs before they realise they are food, he says.

Now he wants to find a way of prolonging the life of the swedes as a feed crop into August to help out through the period of slow grass growth. Last year he tried with little success, but is willing to trial it again.

“Swedes are going into their reproductive phase then, so the plant is going stalky, the bulb becomes floury and the structure of the plant probably doesn’t have the same energy. So we’re going to try and stop it in its tracks.”

That means he has to stop it flowering and going to seed and he admits he’s winging it with ideas he will trial.

DIY cropping

By this year, the entire milking platform will have been cropped at some stage and Dale admits it’s an exhausting job with minimal labour. He has his own machinery for cropping because he’s learnt over the years that a high-rainfall area restricts contractors to small windows of opportunity when several farmers want them.

“When silage needs to be made or crops put in, we’re all railroaded to the same fine days. So for timing’s sake you need to do a lot of things yourself. You have to have the equipment and keep it maintained, but hopefully the spinoffs in yields and maintaining the pasture species at a relatively high level are worth it.”

After crops, paddocks are resown in a perennial ryegrass-clover mix, steering clear of tetraploids, which “die pretty quickly here”. Their main pasture problems are poa annua which is an edible species but yields poorly, and willow weed which loves the wet.

Another 60ha of land has been developed and will be brought into the system this year for young stock to graze and eventually the milking herd. It’s just been planted in grass this season and Dale says it’s a slow process getting it up to speed. Over three years, 60 to 70 units of phosphate are applied annually to kickstart the soil.

“It’s very raw and for the first 12 months at least has a seemingly enormous amount of fertiliser going on for little response.

“Fertility is very low because it’s leached out, so we need to use the philosophy of a little bit of everything often.”

For that reason, blended fertilisers have become common practice on the West Coast, Dale says. Urea is also applied little and often, usually after the cows have grazed the paddocks

Until now, they have grazed young stock near the top of the South Island with a good grazier, but the poor payout has prompted them to bring them home to put on the newly developed ground.

Farm facts

Owners: Dale and Stephanie Bowater
Location: Whataroa, West Coast
Rainfall: 3.5m
Area: 630ha, 350ha effective
Cows: 640 crossbred cows at two cows/ha
Production: 430kg MS/cow
FWE: $3.65/kg MS

Read about the community forage research in Whataroa in Dairy Exporter June 2016.

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