Though still in its infancy, the research programme will focus on helping to find both competitive and responsible solutions for dairy farmers, integrating a variety of disciplines including precision agriculture, dairy production science, and pasture and soil science.
Massey University assistant vice-chancellor operations, Stuart Morriss, said the project aims to develop and showcase profitable and responsible dairy farming.
“With help from the industry we are identifying management systems and technologies that are both competitive and environmentally responsible, with a view to implementing them on the farm.”
Nestled against the Manawatu River, the 120ha effective (145ha total) farm is located along the main corridor between Palmerston North city and the university campus. It is made up of two free-draining alluvial terraces, although the lower terrace, close to the river, is prone to flooding.
The dairy is a simple, older-style 24-aside herringbone dairy with few bells and whistles other than yield meters and walkover weighing.
For research leader Danny Donaghy, DairyNZ professor of dairy production systems at Massey, keeping the technology and systems that will be integrated into the farm accessible to farmers is a key aim of the project.
“Any farmer coming out to interact with us would say oh, yeah, good for you guys but I don’t really have the money for that $2.5 million one-off robotic milking system,” he said.
The farm will operate on a commercial basis so the expectation is that the farming system needs to be profitable.
Another element Donaghy views as crucial to the project is industry involvement.
“We know that innovation doesn’t just come from research projects and laboratories, there’s an enormous amount of it out on the farm and we want to put forward a controlled environment to try and test some of those things.”
The project is viewed as a field laboratory rather than a demonstration farm.
“We want to sit in that middle ground of strong, clear, good research guidelines, good research technique and at the same time keep that constant engagement going with farmers, with consultants, with field officers, factory officers, sales people, right across the industry spectrum, and also the wider community.”
No. 1 Dairy’s close proximity to an urban population centre is regarded as an opportunity to allow people who might not normally be exposed to dairy farming to see where their food comes from and to increase their insight into farming.
The first stage of the research initiative is under way, involving a major adjustment of farm policy with the milking platform reduced and a switch to once a day (OAD) milking.
The milking platform has been almost halved to 64ha, with the balance earmarked for a variety of uses – lucerne crops, stands of plantain and chicory, and some additional riparian planting. The forage crops will be harvested through cut-and-carry or on-off grazing.
Until this project started No. 1 Dairy had operated as a split-calving herd with half of the 280-300 mostly Friesian herd calving in the autumn and half in the spring, and milked twice a day. From August 1, the farm milked OAD transitioning to a spring-calving herd.
The herd size has dropped to 235 cows but with the reduced milking platform, the overall stocking rate increases.
The Jersey New Zealand Association has contributed some cows to the herd with herd composition split into three categories – Friesian, Jersey, crossbred – to allow data to be collected across breeds.
Information around milk yield, liveweight, body condition and locomotion scores is being collected throughout this transition phase.
The land-use change and switch to OAD milking are just two elements being evaluated by the team as they search for a sustainable and profitable farm system.
They are looking to the industry to suggest what some of the next steps in that direction might be.
