Even more upsetting for fans of “The Archers”, a BBC radio drama, Ruth Archer, the mother and wife at the centre of the rural story, had gone to New Zealand just before Christmas.
The January 1 episode, which marked the 65th anniversary of the world’s longest-running soap opera, accordingly featured a lengthy discussion of the effect on milk yield and profit levels of different methods of dairy farming in NZ, Ireland and the fictitious Brookfield farm.
The scriptwriters were milking things, too, for the show’s five million listeners.
Ruth’s move to NZ wasn’t as permanent as it had seemed in mid-December. She has already returned to Brookfield with fresh plans for survival requiring the purchase of a new, smaller herd.
The Guardian tartly commented:
“Actors Timothy Bentinck and Felicity Finch gamely played probably the only scene in the history of drama in which the punchline was ‘low-cost pasture-based farming’.”
Dairy Markets, a British publication that covers the global dairy industry, got into the spirit of things and talked with Waikato University agribusiness professor Jacqueline Rowarth about the big adjustments Ruth Archer would have to make if she stayed in this country and became a Kiwi dairy farmer (as seemed likely at the time).
Rowarth was well-placed to give advice to Ruth. Her first farming experience after leaving school aged 18 in the 1970s was on an organic farm in Shropshire. It was a mixed farm of some 250 hectares with two completely separate herds of 125 cows, 100 breeding sows (“where the manure came from”), wheat, oats and barley.
‘So Ruth will come out and be hit by this extraordinary pressure and workload of how you manage a calving herd, and she will need to get them back in-calf quickly.’
Now she is an investor in a Waikato dairy farm and a Fonterra shareholder.
She arrived in NZ in 1976 and milked cows on a farm in the Taumarunui area during the 1977-78 summer while studying at Massey University.
“The big things that impacted on me still exist,” she recalled.
Fundamentally, they stem from her introduction to all-grass farming and to seasonal calving.
She was used to cows calving throughout the year and to a bigger staff: in Shropshire there had been the herd man, the calf man, the pig man, the tractor drivers and mechanic (“but that might have changed”).
The cows were housed in a barn from mid-autumn through to spring, calved in stalls and were checked in the stalls through the night.
“It wasn’t like here,” she said.
“The avalanche of calves I could hardly believe. It was quite a shock – and the checking was occurring in the paddocks.
“So Ruth will come out and be hit by this extraordinary pressure and workload of how you manage a calving herd, and she will need to get them back in-calf quickly. We are trying to have peak lactation and peak grass growth.”
But the shock for Ruth Archer and the differences in farm management would be less extreme if she went to Southland, Rowarth supposed – feeding fodder beet was part of the system, though in the UK, hand-picking was one of the student jobs.
In Waikato, on the other hand, “she will be wondrously amazed by the remarkable efficiencies and if she went up to Northland she would be tested by trying to feed them kikuyu and coping with the floods and drought.”
Industry statistics illustrate some of the big differences between dairying in England and NZ.
In 2013-14 NZ had 4,922,806 cows with an average herd size of 413. England and Wales in 2013 had 1.782 million cows and an average herd of 123.
“That’s below economies of scale,” Rowarth says.
But government subsidies account for a significant portion of UK dairy incomes.
“Subsidies reduce pressures to change,” Rowarth said.
“One of the big things about NZ is with no subsidies we have very innovative farmers.”
Another big difference: the milk supply in Britain is not seasonal and farmers are milking all the time.
Because the cows are at different stages of lactation, Rowarth recalled, the cow man would decide how much feed each was given.
In this country the cows are supposed to be roughly similar with their lactation although the herd might be split into early and late calvers; individual feeding occurs with some of the high-tech systems here, but is not the norm, yet.
Rowarth’s memory was that in the UK (“but it might have changed”) the cows were gathered at 6am, “then we had a cup of tea and then we milked them, and there were two of us for 125 cows, and another two people for the other herd in a different milking parlour.
“Well, I had more than that when I was doing my relief milking as a student in a 17-a-side herringbone in Taumarunui.”
“And remember they are still not making great use of electric fences over there.”
So pasture management – deciding stock numbers and how much supplementary feeding will be needed – would be different for Ruth Archer.
One consequence of barn-raising was a higher incidence of mastitis and of interceptive births than Rowarth encountered in NZ.
She checked the latest data and found mastitis is still a bigger concern in the British herd: NZ has about 20 cases every 100 cows; in the UK it is 45.
Oh, and talk of barns reminded Rowarth of another difference. Ruth Archer would have to get used to calling the barn a shed.
“I still find it difficult there are so many sheds in New Zealand,” Rowarth said.
“There’s the animal shed, the tractor shed, the pump shed, the dairy shed.”
She said she missed talking about a pump house, a barn for the animals and a milking parlour where the cows were taken to be milked.
On this matter, at least, Rowarth obviously thinks British is better.
“No, let us have a pump house, and a barn for the animals, and a milking parlour which is where the cows come to be milked. Then we know what we are talking about.
“I love the concept of a milking parlour, but at the farm with which I am involved – which now has a 40-a-side herringbone – they fall about laughing when I call it the parlour.”
