Emphatic winners on the night, they took home $8500 in prizes and now have the honour of representing Northland in the national contest in early May.
First-time entrants for any farm-related competition, Brad and Lesley are 25% sharemilkers for Brad’s parents, Lloyd and Kaye at Riponui, west of Hikurangi.
It is their third season sharemilking the 875-cow herd, 220 of them autumn calvers and the rest calving in spring.
The autumn calving component also brought challenges for the winter months to avoid pugging and keep the pasture utilisation up, Brad says.
The feed pad is used for maize silage and palm kernel and two woodchip-covered stand-off pads are handy to the farm dairy.
“The dry cows calve down on those overnight,” Brad explains.
He has been feeding springer meal that’s substantially lowered the rate of metabolic problems in younger cows.
Lameness is an issue through the winter milking, with cows having to walk up to 2.6km to the furthest paddocks.
All maize is grown onfarm along with some chicory and turnips, leading to a need for 50ha of regrassing annually.
Grass silage production of up to 200t DM a year is very weather dependent because the spring climate is unpredictable. About 600t DM of maize silage is the budget, off 30ha at a 20t DM/ ha yield. Everything is bunkered near the feedpad and distributed with a silage wagon. Both grass and maize silage are made for a cost of about 17c/kg of drymatter.
Brad and Lesley have a consultant to help with cow diets and feed purchasing decisions, being new to high-input farming. The couple have installed DAL milk sensors on every second bail to get one reading from every cow once a day, which then flows on to the automated meal feeding system.
When the EID tags are recognised the higher-producing cows get more meal and vice versa.
“Our farming philosophy is to continually work towards the most efficient cows, being more kilograms of milksolids for the pasture and supplementary feed inputs,” Brad says.
The herd is in the top 10% in the North Island for operating profit and the top 25% for milksolids production. It has a Production Worth (PW) of 140 and Breeding Worth (BW) of 110.
The replacement rate is 25% annually and Brad says now that the herd size had stabilised more culling decisions should lift the PW-BW numbers. The milk metering would be of great assistance for that decision making, he says.
Runners’up in the Northland Sharemilker/Equity Farmer of the Year contest were Okaihau equity sharemilkers Grant and Danielle Petterd.
