The strength and international competitiveness of farming in New Zealand lies in our ability to produce high-quality animal feed from pasture at a very low cost. We are pastoral farmers – that is our strength and comparative advantage. We can’t hope to compete with industrial farming as practised by first world nations of the northern hemisphere.
Economics and politics determine this. Industry is their strength – growing and utilising pasture is ours and intensification of dairying has taken us away from this.
Under the traditional pasture-based low-cost regime, farming can still be profitable with very low product prices – the trial recently completed at the Stratford Demonstration Farm has clearly shown the intensive high-cost system cannot.
Probably the most significant intensification of dairy farming in NZ began in the 1960s. The key factor was a big increase in stocking rates. To assist with this, very large amounts of fertiliser were applied, often at three or four times the normal rates for the time. A reasonable production per-cow at the time was considered to be about 150kg butterfat, about 260kg milksolids in today’s terms.
The underlying philosophy was that the higher stocking rate would increase pasture utilisation by putting more grazing pressure on cows.
Many farmers were prepared to accept a drop in per-cow production on the assumption that the much greater number of cows would still give an increase in production per acre.
A moment’s reflection should expose the big weakness in this argument. That is, that for every extra cow grazed there is a compulsory commitment of about 2200kg DM to cater for her maintenance and pregnancy requirements. This will be totally unproductive feed, to be written off in terms of producing milk – yet it has to be met before a litre of milk can be produced. Given this handicap it is most unlikely that the conversion of grass to milk would be maximised by grazing larger numbers of cows with a low per-cow production.
The surprising thing is that, on the whole, longer term the system worked and worked well. The reason is not hard to find. Pastures at the time were generally of lower quality, with poorer species such as browntop predominating. Topdressing history in many cases was poor and soil fertility generally was mediocre.
The combination of high fertiliser inputs in tandem with the hard grazing had the remarkable and beneficial effect of quickly transforming poorer pasture into a vigorous ryegrass-white clover dominant sward. This quantum increase in both quantity and quality of pasture production then proved adequate, in the longer term, to support the extra stock introduced at a similar, or frequently better, level of per-cow production.
This then brought about the intensification of the 1960s and early 70s. Its driving force was significantly better pasture production, quality and management.
It is important to note this intensification was achieved at a relatively small cost. Fertiliser inputs would be, in today’s jargon, described as capital fertiliser – they boosted soil nutrient status to optimum levels so the annual topdressing soon reverted to a much lower, maintenance-only requirement. There would have been some smallish increase in operating costs from running the extra cows, as well as a capital cost in providing them. However none of these costs would have been at all demanding and they resulted in a permanent ongoing increase in production and profitability. The really important point is that the intensification came from pasture. We were essentially fine tuning something at which we were already the experts.
This then is the challenge.
A comparison: after winning the Rugby World Cup in 2011 the All Blacks didn’t sit back and relax with the sobriquet that they were the best in the world. They spent the next four years developing refinements and innovations to their already highly successful, best in the world, game plans. They certainly felt no need to go searching overseas for inspiration. The result was an even more comprehensive achievement in 2015.
Producing and utilising pasture highly efficiently is our great strength. Let us put our energies into further improving this. In June, with the aid of more history, I will look at some ways to do this.
