Friday, March 29, 2024

Taking a chance

Avatar photo
 
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Jack talks with staff member Scott Johnson.

Motivation is definitely needed for the studying when coping with long hours on the dairy farm. At one stage Jack was managing an hour of study a day after work and trying to keep a balance with family as well. He now has a two-year-old daughter and seven-year-old stepson with partner, Charlotte, and plans down the track for a Vegas wedding which is about as far removed from a dairy farm at Cape Foulwind as you can get.

“It’s really hard to maintain that life balance through spring. Staff have families too, so you have to be efficient on the farm to get a work-life balance.”

It’s just one of the reasons the farm now works on a roster of five-and-a-half days on, two days off, similar to the other Landcorp dairy farms in the area. Jack is a strong advocate of the shorter roster which is aimed at reducing health and safety risks as well as boosting team morale.

“I think the quality of work you’re getting out of your workers pays for the hours they get off,” he says.

“You have to put people first or you always lose. You have to have good staff backing you, so you want to keep everyone playing as a team and keep staff morale high. So you tell people when they do a good job and keep everyone in the loop of what is going on with the farm and in the company. You always explain what you’re doing and why.”

Working as a team enabled the 467 hectare farm to produce 385,000kg milksolids last season and Jack is planning on achieving similar production this year with fewer inputs.

“The aim of the game this year is the same production for less inputs by utilising pasture better and topping earlier. This season we’re looking at 200 tonnes of palm kernel compared with 283t last season.”

Like other Landcorp dairy farms in the area, the farm has been completely flipped in the past to turn poor-draining soils in the 3.5m rainfall into firm dairy country. For that reason, they can now winter most of the cows on the farm and this year plan to make about 1000 bales of balage for next winter.

To achieve the goals for the farm, Jack has become a technology whizz since he was promoted to the manager’s role at the end of last season. The farm uses MilkHub, a dairy automation solution that tracks the cows individually on a daily basis to monitor aspects of production and herd health. There’s also a Smart Farm effluent irrigation system and Minda software for recording and analysing information.

“My IT skills were shocking before I became manager and now I’m doing things I never thought I’d be doing on a computer. If we didn’t have the technology, it would be really difficult. And I love using MilkHub. It tracks the cows individually daily by reading their tags and gives milk weight, somatic cell count and milk yield.”

Somatic cell count is something Jack and his team take pride in. The farm achieved the best results of all Landcorp dairy farms last year and by mid-October this year the somatic cell count was just 60,000 cells/ml over 1050 cows. 

MilkHub has made culling more accurate and easier and is preferable to “putting food down their throat” if they really should be out of the herd, Jack says.

The Smart Farm effluent irrigation system sends a text message if there’s a problem and puts irrigation on hold until it’s sorted out.

“If it stops moving it will turn itself off and send a text to my phone with a rough reason why. Landcorp supplies us with smartphones so it’s easy to be able to keep up with the apps of new systems. There’s still a lot to come and to move forward we need the smartphones to get the apps to use the software. Work is going on in the innovation space and it’s working toward spending less time in the office.”

It only takes him about 15 minutes a day to do the administration work for the technology on the farm, which includes triple entering information for Milkhub, and Landcorp’s own software – Farm Management Systems and Dairy Production Records. It’s a matter of putting the time aside each day so the administration side doesn’t build up, he says.

He uses some of Minda’s software, including the calving app, but sticks with Landcorp’s software for mating and pasture because it’s a system he knows well.

It’s Jack’s first season as farm manager on the Bassetts dairy farm and it was in good heart when he took it over, but it was still no mean feat to get the farm into Landcorp’s top 10 dairy farms during his first spring.

The ranking measures 15 different parameters including health and safety, people, environment, animals, total kilograms milksolids and milksolids per cow as well as per hectare, earnings before interest and tax per hectare, somatic cell count, operating expenses and operating return on assets.

Adding to Landcorp’s recognition, the Bassetts dairy farm won Westland Milk Products’ environmental award for its riparian fencing along 27km of drains and waterways. 

For Jack, the next step on the career ladder could be business manager, overseeing Landcorp dairy farms. One day he’d like to put a manager in charge of his own cows on his own farm, while he continues his own management career.

“I want to stay attached to Landcorp because it’s got the opportunities. The sky is the limit.”

Total
0
Shares
People are also reading