From motorcycle sales rep to insurance advisor, he stepped back into the dairy industry seven years ago, and he and his wife Donna are now Bay of Plenty Share Farmers of the Year.
Glen entered the dairy industry as a teenager. He left school and worked on a farm for four years before he wanted a change of pace and got a job working in town.
Ten years later he was looking for another change in his career and Donna suggested going back farming. He got a job as 2IC and found working with cows was a lot easier than sales, and gave him a lot of job satisfaction.
“Coming back, I knew the basics of farming and I was more focused on progressing and making it work.
“Farming is rewarding on a whole scale of things. When you’re working for yourselves, there is more of a reward for the effort you put in,” he says.
While the basics of farming haven’t changed during his absence, farming has intensified with more regulations to abide by, Glen says.
“Palm kernel wasn’t even in the scope when I was farming before. The fundamental things are all the same, but there are higher stocking rates and more intensification.”
Glen and Donna are in their third season contract milking 350 cows for Craig and Marianne Hammond at Whakatane.
They entered Farm Manager of the Year last year and placed third, and wanted to try to win it this year.
But with the change of criteria in the categories they had to compete for the Share Farmer title instead.
As well as the title, the couple won the Ravensdown Pasture Performance and Westpac Business Performance awards.
Glen is studying a Diploma in Agri Business through Primary ITO, which has helped lift his knowledge for the financial elements of the competition, he says.
Those new skills, along with Donna’s knowledge as a finance administrator at Whakatane District Council, gave them a better understanding of financial reports and budgets.
“It’s given me the knowledge to do our own analysis and apply it to our business and apply it to the awards,” Glen says.
Winning the pasture award was a big pat on the back for Glen, who has increased pasture harvested to 18t DM/ha through increased irrigation area, strategic use of fertiliser and precise pasture management.
The farm has doubled its area under irrigation to 68ha and extended the effluent irrigation to 67ha so every paddock is under irrigation. They will use 279kg N/ha this season, but at low rates, little and often behind the cows.
“I want to maximise every blade of grass grown. We’ve nailed residuals and maintained pasture quality. We do that by using tools like our plate meter, pasture plus and the spring rotation planner.”
Using the tools or lack of them is key to getting the best production on any farm. Glen made a tactical decision this season to only use 30 sets of cups in the 40-aside herringbone because there are no automatic cup removers.
The cows were being over-milked, causing teat damage and pushing up the somatic cell count.
“Record production wasn’t my target this year, I wanted to keep the average somatic cell count under 150,000 and be grade-free.”
It was more of a realistic goal to set at the start of the season with a low payout forecast and El Nino predicted to affect production.
He is on target with the average SCC currently sitting at 124,000, down 29% on last year.
Training the staff has been another key factor to dropping the somatic cell count.
Staff have put more emphasis on teat spraying with good coverage.
Glen is also cutting excessive use of the washdown hose in the farm dairy during milking.
“I like to minimise the use of hosing, I feel it has a potential to spread bacteria on to cows.”
One figure that wasn’t typical this year was the 19% empty rate up from 8% and 11% in the last two years. Glen changed the mating formula this year, doing all artificial breeding (AB) with no bulls for 12 weeks.
He wanted to shorten the calving spread so they wouldn’t have cows still calving when mating starts next season, so he used short-gestation bulls during the last six weeks.
“It’s the one thing I wasn’t looking forward to disclosing in the dairy industry awards, but the calving spread had to be adjusted at some point.”
He also plans to run two herds next season, with the younger and lighter cows in a separate mob because nearly half the empty cows were young cows.
They are the last to be milked and often the last to the paddock, and when they were light on feed last spring they missed out, Glen says.
Half the cows are wintered off-farm. They have a 3.5 cows/ha stocking rate and feed a little bit of palm kernel to help put body condition on the cows.
They don’t often make any grass supplements because they don’t usually have any surplus feed with their current stocking rate and farm system.
“It’s probably running close to the wind, but it helps with pasture management.”
This summer has been even tighter with 7ha taken out by council while they rebuild the stopbank that runs along the farm.
Luckily they have had regular rain from January, helping to maintain their summer growth.
The couple are 38 and 35, and have four children. In the next five years they hope to buy a herd and secure a sharemilking position, and they have financial goals to meet every year to make that happen.
“At our current rate we will probably be a bit short, but I think we need to push ourselves to achieve it sooner rather than later – I’m getting older and don’t want to be in the shed forever.”
Runner-up in the Bay of Plenty Share Farmer competition was 28-year-old Matt Barr, a percentage sharemilker milking 450 cows on his parents’ farm at Whakatane..
