The 29-year-old was brought up in Wanganui and although there were no farmers in her family, she rode horses from a young age and milked cows after school to support her habit.
Swinging from dairy farm jobs to a year in rural supplies and two years in a horse agistment yard then back to farming in Taranaki and Tararua, Renae met her contracting partner Brayden and was offered the junior farm manager’s role on his 250-cow family dairy farm at Linton so has now settled in Manawatu. Renae won 2016 Manawatu Farm Manager of the Year, after months of work preparing her entry, alongside her friend and co-entrant Hayley Hoogendyk, who came a close second.
Working closely with Brayden’s father Peter Bills, Renae managed to increase production in the 2014-15 season from 370kg milksolids (MS)/cow to 430 kg MS/cow.
This season she moved to the farm manager role and is targeting 400kg MS/cow and 100,000kg MS for the farm. She puts the increase in production down to improving pasture management through trialing the Dairy NZ Pasture Sense Block System.
Supplements of 50 tonnes of homegrown barley and 63t balage are fed out through a feed wagon and 100t of palm kernel is fed through the in-dairy feeding system.
“I was over the moon with the increase in production just through improved pastures – it’s a really good system.”
As farm manager this year Renae is loving the role. She says Peter comes to help if she needs a hand, and is usually around over spring and mating, but she handles all the other jobs. Peter runs the bull block at the back of the farm and the heifers are grown out on an 80ha runoff at Bainesse.
“I love it – I wouldn’t change a thing and I would like to step up to contract milking here if I can.”
Renae picked up an array of merit awards and was pleased with the Westpac Financial Planning Award because it was an area of weakness for her. An ANZ banker helped her with the farm financials and to build budgets to compare contract milking and 50:50 sharemilking jobs as well as establishing personal budgets.
Enrolling in the Primary ITO Diploma of Agribusiness Management this year will continue her upskilling in the business skills area. Winning the DeLaval Livestock Management Award was also pleasing because she and Peter do all the animal work with very little outside help. Somatic cell counts have reduced under her watch from 300,000 to 80,000 by fitting a new receiving can to even out the pulsations, changing teat spray, dry cow therapy with long acting actives and culling out old high cell count cows.
The Primary ITO Power Play Award was her favourite win, outlining the work she and the family have been doing on the farm environment, including fencing and planting riparian strips with trees that Kim Bills propagated in her nursery. Renae even took along water samples from the waterways which run off the Tararua Ranges behind the farm to demonstrate the water quality.
Renae is targeting increasing cow numbers to 300 once regrassing work is completed on the bull block at the back of the farm to bring more land into the milking platform, and she hopes to grow milk production to 450kg MS/cow with increasing pasture production and quality.
Brayden does the tractor work and is building a contracting business, and they hope to end up on the family farm in the long term. However, depending on the payout they might have to move to another farm to contract or sharemilk to grow their equity.
“It’s a handy partnership for us – I like the cow side and he likes the tractor side.”
And it means Renae can keep her horse in the back paddock and ride whenever she gets a chance.
Third placed was Feilding herd manager Lachlan Fee.
