At 24, Jason Macbeth is the oldest of the three-person team on the Murchison farm where he is using strategic mowing to lift production and pack more weight on the cows to condense calving.
This season the herd finished calving in eight weeks with no intervention, and only 16 of the 292 calved after the first six weeks.
Four years ago when he moved to the 91ha farm, the empty rate was 18% from a 14-week mating and much of the improvement since then he attributes to achieving better pasture quality through strategic mowing. Last season he mowed 273ha, averaging three mows a paddock, with most of it pre-mown in front of the cows.
He's now a lower-order sharemilker on the farm with his 20-year-old partner, Beth Phillips, and owners Bruce and Jocelyn Palmer live up the nearby Matiri Valley. The third team member on the farm is 17-year-old Zac Palmer – no relation to the owners. Jason began as manager on the farm four years ago and that role earned him the West Coast-Top of the South Farm Manager of the Year title last year.
Though he grew up on his family's Nelson dairy farm with the Cordor pedigree Jersey stud, dairying was not even on his radar through school until a motorbike accident wrote off his last year of school.
When he recovered he got a job on a nearby dairy farm, and discovered he loved pasture management and working with the cows. When he moved to the Palmers' farm on the outskirts of Murchison, topping the paddocks after the cows had grazed them was a regular practice to control pasture quality. That got him thinking about mowing it before the cows went into the paddock. Lincoln University had results from its mowing trials and FarmWise consultant Brent Boyce was already an advocate, so they looked at how they could use it to increase production.
"It was all a guessing game. We knew that if it was rowed up for them they would eat it up. The cows were a bit hesitant for the first two to three days, though now they bellow if I put them on un-mown paddocks where they have to eat the grass."
He mowed 91ha as a trial during the 2012-13 season, using a mix of pre-mowing and topping after the cows, depending on the surplus, and noticed the cows were more content. That prompted him to begin mowing from the beginning of September last season to help mating performance. He mowed for three weeks, completing a round to get the residuals right and then a second round to keep quality up for mating. The goal was to put weight on to the cows for mating.
‘Half a dozen of those cows I never saw stand for the bull and they calved in the first three weeks.’
"The cows were taking eight hours grazing time to take the paddocks down to 1500 residual whereas with the mower in front they can do it in two to three hours and then relax and not use energy."
Since he began pre-mowing paddocks, production has lifted from about 123,000kg milksolids (MS) on the 91ha milking platform to 136,271kg MS. That's an increase of 13,000kg MS which Jason and Brent calculated as 8000kg MS from extra palm kernel and 5000kg MS from the strategic mowing. In the past the farm has fed out 120 tonnes of palm kernel a season and that is now 200t.
The extra production meant there was a lift from 1340kg MS/ha to 1497kg MS, and 435kg MS/cow to 478kg. This season is on target for 1593kg MS/ha and 509kg MS/cow, depending on what the weather throws at them.
"We've noticed the milk production is more even over the herd and I think it is because they can't go in and pick what they want in the paddock so it's been better for the younger cows. They look like bulls in the front end because they've filled out so much and I think it's because they're getting so much more energy from their feed."
He starts feeding the first calvers palm kernel before they calve so they are used to it by the time they are producing milk, reducing any drop in condition that could affect the vat and getting in-calf again early.
‘Having a good partner and family is really good and having that relationship with the owners where you can talk to them if anything is getting too hard or getting on top of you.’
Being able to condense the calving and getting the cows in-milk earlier has played a big part on production and this year the cows were reaching 2.3kg MS/cow/day just 13 days after the start of calving. In the past they have peaked at 2.1kg MS and not until six to eight weeks after the start of calving.
In September this year, production was up 55kg MS/day compared with last season, adding up to 4000kg MS ahead for the season. Fat to protein ratios are also higher and at mid-October it was 0.82%.
"Some of it's probably conditioning of the cows and some of it is grass quality flowing through the system, because we're not milking any more cows, haven't bought in any more area, and not buying in much more feed."
Getting the weight on the cows for mating has been one part of the equation for a tighter calving spread. But there's been more to it than just that. Pre-mating, the team begins monitoring the herd for daily heats and tail painting this year showed 33% of the cows had cycled in the first seven days. The non-cycling cows are then drafted out before AI starts, metrichecked, and treated if there's any infection. Last year eight of them needed to be metricured.
The first year they began the practice, they drafted out 78 cows as non cyclers and got the empty rate down to 11% with a 12-week mating. Last year it dropped to 58 non cyclers with an empty rate of 11% again from a 9-week mating and all the cows calved within eight weeks. This year Jason hoped there would be less than 30 non cyclers and expected the empty rate to be about 5% after the bulls were removed on December 31.
"I think you have to be ruthless and pull the bulls out. Even a cow that calves on October 5 is going to struggle to get in-calf again because she's only got 20 days to start cycling. Even if she's got everything going for her, she's only got a 30% chance of holding in her first heat and her second heat will be around December 5 and her third heat around December 25, so she's going to calve the same time next season."
The non-cyclers are put on once-a-day milking and run with the lame cows to be milked in the afternoon, with a trailer of palm kernel in the paddock. If they cycle and improve condition they go back with the main herd on twice-a-day, while the remainder which was 25 last year, are run with bulls.
"A lot of them aren't really non-cyclers, but you can't pick it up. There's probably cows I've never seen on heat because they have light heats and they're missing out on that first round. But the bulls are picking their heats better than we can. They turned up in-calf and I didn't even know some of them were in heat. Half a dozen of those cows I never saw stand for the bull and they calved in the first three weeks."
Paddocks were mown up to three times in front of the cows last season.
He leases DNA-tested Jersey bulls from his parents' stud, so there's no chance of mis-mothering or problems with identifying replacements. Similar bulls are used over the yearling replacements which are forming the basis of Jason and Beth's own herd as part of the sharemilking agreement. All the calves are DNA-tested to identify which of the four bulls has fathered the offspring. Alternatively, Hereford bulls could be used over non-cycling cows to distinguish them at calving time, he points out.
The bulk of the herd was up for artificial insemination (AI) in the first three weeks of mating last year and Jason says most of them were in their third heat by then, with 73% getting in-calf. Replacements are only kept from those earlier-cycling AI cows.
Meanwhile, the OAD non-cycling cows return to twice-a-day milking after the rest of the herd has completed AI mating. Even though the non cyclers were on OAD through mating, Jason says the farm still achieved its best production ever and it didn't increase the workload because they were only being milked OAD for about five weeks.
The entire herd drops to 16-hour milkings in early January on the non-irrigated farm, with turnips, and more lately chicory, keeping them going through the hot months. Murchison sits in a valley surrounded by steep hills and mountains to the rear, so it bakes in summer with temperatures reaching more than 35C which takes its toll on the pasture.
To counter it, Jason has been growing 6ha of turnips – 4ha this year – which have achieved 15t drymatter (DM)/ha and last year put in 2ha of chicory that grew 18t DM/ha in six months with effluent irrigated on to the paddocks. This year he has drilled red clover into the chicory crop to bulk it up for a second season and by mid-October already had 6t DM/ha off it. He's planted another 8ha of chicory to take over from the mowing during summer and autumn and by mid-April the cows go on to once-a-day until the end of the season.
‘The cows were a bit hesitant for the first two to three days, though now they bellow if I put them on un-mown paddocks where they have to eat the grass.’
The bulk of his mowing is carried out between the beginning of September and end of December to cover the mating period and grass quality. He mows a maximum of 4ha a day, with the night paddocks mown two to three hours before the cows go into them to take out excess moisture and make the cut grass more palatable. The day paddocks are mown during the afternoon milking, ready for the cows to go on in the morning.
"That's only when we've got a massive amount of surplus in front of us. My rule is to never make the cows graze more than 1600 residual. On the mower I'll take it to 1500 residuals because it seems to work well for us and it gets rid of that stalky feed the cows find hard to break off.
"I've had ideas of cranking the mowing up in autumn, but haven't had enough feed going into autumn."
The higher production and condensed calving has more than compensated for the $13,500 cost of mowing and the additional $26,400 for the extra palm kernel. The net margin profit above these expenses was $33,000 last year and is expected to be more than $88,000 this year, budgeted at a $5.30 payout. At $7.50 payout, the net margins would have been $64,000 and $138,000 respectively.
However, Jason is considering cutting mowing back to two rounds because the costs fall on them as lower-order sharemilkers.
"The costs aren't huge though because all we're doing is going out there and mowing grass and feeding 1-2kg of palm kernel through the season."
He's also thinking about next season and hoping the payout will lift by then, so mowing would help feed the cows well to make the most of any lift. And mowing might mean he can winter cows off the milking platform. Their practice is to carry about 100 cows on the platform through winter, with the remainder grazed at a runoff and leased block nearby.
Youth no barrier
Supportive farm owners have made it possible for Jason to try out new ideas despite a young team in charge.
"I've had the full run of the farm for the last three years and they've let me put my stamp on it with input from both them on the big financial decisions."
The young team of three have three to four meetings a year with the farm owners and farm consultant, Brent Boyce, to brainstorm and air any concerns. A crucial aspect has been getting support from them through stressful periods while they are still gaining experience.
"The stress can get on top of you without the knowledge and experience to handle that stress. And you just work, work, work and don't know how to handle it.
"Having a good partner and family is really good and having that relationship with the owners where you can talk to them if anything is getting too hard or getting on top of you."
Seventeen-year-old Zac lives in another house on the farm, but heads to Jason and Beth's for lunch every day and dinner whenever he wants because as Jason points out, it can be a lonely existence for young workers on dairy farms after work. He also makes sure the young employee gets to discussion groups and field days when possible to gain more knowledge and get the chance to socialise with others in the industry.
