A salad mix of chicory, plantain, clover and lucerne has replaced much of the ryegrass monoculture on Mark and Laura Manson’s East Takaka farm in Golden Bay to keep production pumping through summer when the gravel-based soils dry out.
Added to the mix is cocksfoot and tall fescue in a system that milks 360 Friesian cows with little bought-in supplement to achieve a similar profit to the past when it milked up to 540 cows.
Fewer cows, less labour and less stress for similar money is all good by Mark’s reckoning and he’s now concentrating on lifting production per cow without bought-in supplements.
Scatterings of elderly totara trees make East Takaka a photogenic landscape. Mark’s parents, Robin and Betty, farmed pedigree Friesians on a chunk of today’s farm before moving to crossbreds and eventually buying the farm next door.
Mark had been working for the Department of Conservation, but returned home to help out one year and ended up with a 30% sharemilking contract on the farm with his wife Laura. It progressed to 50% and they bought the farm just before the global financial crisis hit in 2007.
At that stage they were milking up to 540 cows on the 170ha milking platform until 24ha on the far side of a stream was set aside for drystock and lucerne. They also had a range of support blocks that were either owned or leased for young stock and wintering. Operating two herds through the 32-bail rotary wasn’t working very well and about the same time they lost their heifer-grazing block, so Mark decided it was time to reduce the herd.
“I worked out that if I brought the heifers and calves back home to the milking platform and other support blocks I’d save about $60,000 a year and if I dropped down to 370 cows I’d be able to drop another staff member and save another $50,000. So that added up to quite a few milksolids I didn’t have to produce. The cows were doing better and producing more, so that kept our profit similar.”
About the same time, Mark started moving away from the predominantly ryegrass pasture which couldn’t handle the summer dry. Good silt loam soils cover the farm, with gravel beneath providing good drainage in winter – and unfortunately good drainage in summer as well. Mark looked at irrigation, but the cost of installing it and then the ongoing costs of employing more staff, carrying more cows and added stress throughout the system just didn’t stack up for him. So he needed to find another solution for the dry when soil temperatures reached 22-23C.
“You’d find that by mid-summer the ryegrass had stopped growing because of the heat and we’d start running out of food and couldn’t cull cows until pregnancy testing in mid-February. So you had all these cows on and couldn’t get rid of any.”
Dropping the stocking rate to about 2.5 cows a hectare – the herd varies between 350 and 380 cows for the season depending on replacements and empties – took the pressure off and changing the pasture mix increased feed for the smaller herd.
The whole farm had been direct-drilled with ryegrass and clover in 2001 after a particularly severe drought and within a few years Mark began resowing with a salad mix of chicory, plantain and clover. He initially cultivated the paddocks, because that was the regime everyone pretty much followed, before moving to direct drilling.
At the same time he took a good look at the soil and became interested in the Albrecht balanced soil concept, beginning with adjusting the pH and adding a range of elements to keep that balance.
“We try to use a lot of lime and use potassium sulphate instead of potassium chloride because it’s more organism-friendly. And we use sulphate of ammonia instead of straight urea, though we still use a bit of urea in spring when you need a quick boost of growth.”
Overall, the farm gets just 66kg nitrogen a hectare a year and it’s not applied at all between mid-December and April. Clover provides nitrogen to keep the grass growing and effluent is rotated around 55ha of the farm by K-line.
“As nitrogen limits start to be imposed it’s nice to know we’re already not using much. And it proves you can drop it.
“We hardly put on superphosphate now because we don’t need it. We’re not doing it to reduce costs because costs are similar and actually straight super would probably be cheaper. But by getting our soil structure right, it holds moisture better. We feel we stay greener when it’s dry and it grows back better once we get moisture, though we have nothing scientific to prove that.”
Mark has sent soil samples to the United States for testing and today does visual soil assessments using a method developed by soil scientist Graham Shepherd that assesses aspects such as compaction, friability, root depth and worms.
“The tested samples were more for peace of mind that I wasn’t doing something wrong. I was told the wheels would fall off, but they haven’t.”
After a few years following the new fertiliser regime he had samples tested by mainstream fertiliser companies here as well and the results were similar to soil tests before the change in fertilisers which meant the “wheels hadn’t fallen off”, but the soil was retaining more moisture and growing more grass.
His father had been wary of the move away from the standard fertiliser mixes of the past and had several of his own test areas around the farm where he applied those mixes.
“He was worried it wasn’t getting enough nutrients, but it was performing just the same.”
Another change in pasture management has been lifting residuals slightly to between 1600 and 1700kg DM/ha to retain more cover through the dry period.
“If you graze the pasture lower, it opens the cover up and the ground gets hotter, so about 1700(kg DM) protects it more in summer without irrigation.”
Scatterings of totara on Mark Manson’s East Takaka farm.
Now through summer, the cows get a salad mix that is still green and growing in the heat without irrigation. In the past he has planted 14ha each year in chicory, plantain and clover at a rate of about 2kg/ha of each species.
“Chicory and plantain are both deep-rooted. We graze it off like a crop and as long as you don’t damage it, it comes back. The chicory doesn’t like to be grazed hard in the wet because it damages its crown and it can peter out quite quickly.”
Weeds have been a problem in the chicory paddocks because chicory is “sensitive to nearly everything” as a seedling, so they have the option of spraying later or living with a few thistles in the hope they will get crowded out of the pasture.
Californian thistles have been the biggest problem and after attempting various control methods over the years, they’re now following a programme using MCPA to spray in summer, autumn and again in spring.
“You have to spray just as they’re crowning and then they send up all these suckers and you spray them again just before frosts, and then again in spring to get the new suckers.”
By summer they should be able to judge the success of the spray programme. When autumn arrives, the chicory-blend crop is direct drilled with ryegrass. The chicory lasts for another year and by then the ryegrass-plantain mix is dominated by clover for a couple of years.
This year the 14ha of chicory, plantain and clover was halved to 7ha with the other 7ha planted in lucerne as another summer option. He’s also got 30ha planted with a mix of cocksfoot and tall fescue which hangs on through the dry, though Mark says it really slows down during winter and needs to be kept short or it loses palatability.
Paddocks of ryegrass and clover that perform well enough are left untouched and are needed for wintering most of the herd. About 100 late calvers are taken off the milking platform from mid-July and return mid-August when grass growth kicks in, while the rest are carried through winter. The chicory-blend paddocks are still grazed through winter, but Mark says they have to be careful not to damage them and affect future growth.
The only supplement bought-in for the herd is a bit of hay for winter, so 7ha of maize is grown on the milking platform to make into pit silage, 11ha of lucerne on a support block is turned into balage, and grass silage is made to feed whenever it’s needed.
In the past they’ve used a little palm kernel through spring and a little molasses in the dairy which has been dropped this year with the low payout.
“We consider we’re a really low-cost operation with farm working expenses around $2.90 a kilogram so there’s not a lot of costs we can cut out.”
Another food they’ve used in the past, but not for a while, is summer turnips. But Mark says the crop never grew well in a dry year and they didn’t need it in a wet year so it seemed a bit pointless, whereas the salad mix in the pasture has been working well for some years now.
Last year the farm produced 145,000kg milksolids (MS) with supplements made on the farm, though Mark is focusing on production per cow and per hectare rather than total production. The goal is lifting cow production from 420-440kg MS/cow to 500kg, and to improve on the current 1000kg MS/ha.
The herd has become largely Friesian again. When Mark and Laura began sharemilking on the farm, they added Jersey cows to the crossbred herd, but found they were too small in the rotary dairy. They began crossbreeding them with Friesians and even Swedish Reds at one stage to build condition and now use solely Friesian genetics.
“We’re going for production per cow and Friesians produce more and we’ve got fairly hard ground that can handle them.”
Lifting production per cow and per hectare figures will be done mainly through better grazing management and the lift from lucerne which will come on stream this year.
“This year will be the first time lucerne has been part of the system and it will be good high-protein feed through summer.”
Grazing management is a key strength of his contract milkers Jeremy and Olivia Ricketts who they took on this season after family health issues prompted Mark to step back from the helm. It frees up his time for family, while still being involved with the farm’s direction and day-to-day jobs.
Even with different pastures and a stocking rate of 2.5 cows/ha, they still need to drop to once-a-day milking from mid-January most years through to the end of May, yet still maintain good production per cow through the season.
Overall, Mark says fewer cows and more feed options through summer have added more resilience into the system to get through the summer dry and that’s taken the pressure off the herd and the people.
Farm facts
- Location: Takaka, Golden Bay
- Owners: Mark and Laura Manson
- Area: 145ha milking platform
- Herd: 360 Friesian cows
- Production: 145,000kg MS
- Grasses and crops: chicory, plantain, clover, lucerne, ryegrass, tall fescue, cocksfoot, maize
- Farm working expenses: About $2.90/kg MS
