Friday, March 29, 2024

Conversion met succession goal

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For the Hamill family in Southland, dairying was the way to make sure they could pass the farm to their children. They may have been reluctant, but the merit award winners in this year’s Southland Ballance Farm Environment Awards have created a successful business, protected the environment and assured the future of Folly Farm.
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After pushing sheep farming to its limits, Mark and Deborah Hamill decided they needed to convert to dairying.

In 2008, when about 60 farms in Southland were also making the change, they built a rotary dairy and left sheep farming behind.

“We were achieving 162% lambing, running six ewes to the acre, producing 18kg carcaseweight lambs and we couldn’t go forward,” Mark says.

“I didn’t want to be a dairy farmer but I saw no other way to pass the farm on to our children.

“Converting was about succession for us. It gives us and our children a future on the farm.”

And a future is important to them, with sons Blair, 21, and Joshua, 18, studying at Lincoln University and daughter Emily, 15, enjoying the farming life. Folly Farm, near Gorge Road township in Southland, has been owned by the family since 1888.

“My great-great grandfather, who was William John Hamill, had arrived from Ireland and was travelling down the Mataura River to the coast and he passed through here and he liked it so he bought the land to go farming.

“But it was covered in bush and mostly floodable so everyone believed it to be a folly to own such a block. Because of this the farm was named Folly Farm and my grandfather, who was first-born on the farm, was named Folly Hamill.”

Pockets of that bush still remain. Successive generations have fenced it off and protected it along with new plantings. During the dairy conversion, the lanes were built around the trees instead of through them.

‘We want the fertiliser to stay on the paddock and not end up in the river. It costs too much money for that to happen.’

When the Hamills won the PGG Wrightson Land and Life Award, the Waterforce Integrated Management Award and the Donaghys Stewardship Award in the Southland Ballance Farm Environment Awards in April, it wasn’t just Mark and Deborah collecting the trophies, but five generations of Hamills.

The trees are not just to make the farm attractive. With nothing between it and the Southern Ocean but a few kilometres of flat land, and the hills of Stewart Island the closest visible high ground, the southerly compresses against the 30m elevation of the farm, increasing wind speeds.

On the plus side, the farm’s boundary is the world-famous brown trout river, the Mataura, and there are also ducks and rabbits to shoot.

When Mark’s dad, Bob, became terminally ill when Mark was 21, Mark took over the farm.

“I grew up really fast and it was in the 1980s so there was pressure from the bank. I hunkered down and just worked.”

When he was approaching 25 his mum, Irene, and the farm accountant thought it was a good idea for him to see the world and air tickets were booked for Australia and the US. However, the weekend before he was to go he met Deborah, a Dunedin Teachers College student from Invercargill home for the holidays. On the Monday, the person who had been employed to manage the farm while he was away quit, saying it was too big a farm for one person to look after.

“Mark rang me on the Thursday, when he was meant to be in Australia and I thought it must be pretty special that he’s rung me all the way from there, but it wasn’t. He’d never left,” Deborah says.

When she finished teachers college the pair married and Deborah taught at Gorge Road School until their children were born. Mark is still to do his OE.

“It’s why we sent the boys to Lincoln and then hopefully they’ll spend some time away before coming back, if that’s what they want to do,” Mark says.

Converting to dairying was a decision the couple took 18 months to make.

“We normally buy beef steers to fatten and eat any excess grass but instead we bought dairy heifer calves and then the next year we bought late-calving cows out of the Waikato, that were late calving for there but not for here, and so we had a herd without even really trying,” Mark says.

“It made it easier when so many other conversions were going on around us.”

Deborah says: “He’d come in at morning tea during lambing and all he’d talk about was dairying, with our lambing shepherd, an ex-dairy farmer.”

Mark looked at least 15 dairies before deciding what he would build but it was the effluent ponds that worried him the most.

“They were huge and always full to the brim even in summer. I was really unhappy with what I saw.”

So he sat down with Lindsay Lewis from the Invercargill-based Southland Pumps and “worked backwards”.

“We figured out that the evapo-transpiration for Southland was at least half a millimetre a day on the shortest day of the year so if we could put less than that on the paddocks through enough K-lines then we didn’t have to have the storage capacity.”

He built the double-sided, concrete-lined pond, with a weeping wall in the middle, himself. It has enough storage for three to five days. Once the water is passed through the weeping wall, it’s stored in a tank for washing down the dairy’s yard after milking.

‘When we finish milking for the season there’s usually a list of jobs to do which take about a week and then everyone goes on holiday.’

“We had Food Safety New Zealand and Fonterra and AssureQuality doing spot checks for the first year and there were no problems, as long as we don’t use the green water to wash inside the dairy. We were the first certified farm in New Zealand to do it.”

Finding a good source of water was important because water already used on the farm had high iron content. Family knowledge helped and a new bore was found, but was only just enough to meet demand.

“We’ve had to ration water right from the word go, which is why using the green water is so important to us. When it gets dry we save water wherever we can. With rationing we can achieve half of Southland’s cow water take, only using 55 litres/cow/day which includes trough and cooling water.”

They employed Zimbabwean Marc Makoni as their herd manager in the first year and the following year he became a contract milker and 21% lower order sharemilker. He is still with them.

Molasses, a “cow magnet”, is fed on the rotary platform as well as palm kernel when there are feed deficits.

Young stock are grazed on a 174ha runoff 20 minutes away, where the Hamills also graze other farmers’ calves and yearlings, and the cows go to winter grazing near Mataura. A crop of swedes is ready for them when they come back in spring.

“When we finish milking for the season there’s usually a list of jobs to do which take about a week and then everyone goes on holiday. Marc goes home to Zimbabwe to see his family. Having the cows away gives us all a break.”

With their original herd of 520 cows a mix of Friesian, Jersey and Ayrshire, after six years it is looking decidedly black.

“We cross the Friesians with Jersey and the Jerseys with Friesian and anything crossbred we use KiwiCross except for the lighter-framed ones and then we use Friesian. We want the hybrid vigour and we don’t want our cows getting too big. We’re achieving a kilogram of milksolids a kilogram of liveweight.

Deborah says: “Last year our empty rate was 5.7%, our wastage 7.4%, and the conception rate for the first six weeks was 77%.”

Although the Mataura River borders the farm, flood protection work means the land is flood-proof but there is ponding on the lower flats after heavy rain.

With the river so close, fertiliser applications are split and nutrient budgets carefully adhered to.

“We want the fertiliser to stay on the paddock and not end up in the river. It costs too much money for that to happen.

“My granddad remembers the Mataura River being chocolate brown all the time because there was a gold dredge upstream and then the freezing works and the paper mill at Mataura, and the towns all used to dump their sewage into it. Everyone says they want the rivers back the way they were in the1970s but they don’t understand.

“Ten years ago, for the very first time, I could see the bottom of the river when I was fishing and you still can. There may be more nutrient leaching from farms than there was before, but at least the water is clear.”

When winning is a habit

The supreme winners of the 2014 Southland Ballance Farm Environment Awards were Andrew and Heather Tripp, of Nithdale Station near Gore.

They also won the Ballance Agri-Nutrients Soil Management Award, the Massey University Innovation Award, the LIC Dairy Farm Award, and the Alliance Quality Livestock Award.

Nithdale Station is 1635ha with dairy, sheep, beef, and forestry as well as a farmstay business. The family bought the property in 1924 and in 2008 they converted 275ha to dairying, now milking 834 cows.

The farm was the supreme winner in the inaugural Southland Ballance Awards in 2002.

Benchmarking

Farm adviser Ivan Lines has been with the Hamills for 21 years and is the only member of their team who stayed with them through the conversion.

Last year he found them a new accountant, Charmaine O’Shea, who looks at what they are doing from her office in Whangarei. In March she was named the Dairy Women’s Network Dairy Woman of the Year.

“We put everything on DairyBase so we are benchmarking what we do all the time,” Deborah says.

Mark said “The first year our accountant rang us up and told us we’d made a loss.

“We didn’t budget on retention payments and our animal health bill had blown out to twice what we had expected. We made a vow then we wouldn’t make a loss ever again, we wouldn’t borrow any more money, and any expansion would come out of profit. So far we’ve kept to it.”

Folly Farm
Location: Gorge Road, coastal Southland
Area: 301ha (241ha milking platform, 15ha winter crop, 30ha wetland and bush fenced off)
Dairy: 54-bail Dairy Master rotary with Milk Hub
Herd: 803 at peak, Friesian, Jersey, Ayrshire and crossbred, Breeding Worth 87
Production: 2013-14 season on target for 350,000kg milksolids (MS)
Production: 1450kg MS/ha
Planned start of calving: August 10
Farm working expenses: $3.51/kg MS 2012-13 season
Rainfall: 1200mm
Elevation: Up to 30m above sea level.

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