Friday, March 29, 2024

Fully compliant and grade free

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Otane dairy farmers Bruce and Sheree Jones have consistently achieved full compliance with their resource consents for the last five years, enough to win them a gold dairy consent award from the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council.
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The awards, a first for New Zealand, recognised the 20% of the area’s dairy farmers who reached this level. There were 9% at the silver award stage, which shows compliance for four years, with even fewer, 8%, receiving a bronze award for compliance for three years.

But for Bruce and Sheree, the award is “quite a neat compliment” for the way they farm, as in their 31 years farming they’ve always been grade free.

They’re proactive in watching things, and have a low threshold for responding if anything unusual happens.

“It’s always been a personal goal to go to the vat and drink your own milk.”

They are in the top 6% for low somatic cell counts (SCC), and have a gold grade free certificate of excellence from Fonterra. Their average SCC is about 95,000.

“I think the reason we have been able to achieve it is the fact we have a good system in place,” Bruce said.

“We set goals and our staff have been able to achieve them with us. We can’t do it on our own.”

Kerry Drummond works full-time for the Joneses and his partner relief milks. Bruce and Sheree’s goals have become Kerry’s goals too.

“People don’t work for us, they work with us.”

The farm has been in the family since 1954, and is now a milking platform of 100ha with 60ha for their bull unit. Sheree raises 130 calves a year, and also relief milks.

Seven years ago, just before the 2007 drought, the couple changed over from town milk supply to seasonal supply.

Bruce said his father used to hawk milk around Otane village on a pushbike with a can on the front, later progressing to a Standard 8 car with a trailer on the back.

They run a herd of 186 mainly pedigree Friesians bred in their Homebrook stud and milked through an 11-aside herringbone dairy.

Bruce said all the former town milk supply farms in Hawke’s Bay are fully compliant.

“In lots of respects we are only caretakers of the land when we are here, and we are all trying to do our bit.

“Trying to be clean and green comes with effort and a capital cost.”

They don’t irrigate, but because they farm in a summer dry area, climate has a huge bearing on their business.

“We do the very best we can, and feed the cows well. We don’t buy in much supplement at all, except for 100 tonnes of maize silage a year. We will continue to dairy farm without huge amounts of capital being injected into the farm.”

The water they do access is from the local town supply, which costs them an expensive $2/m3.

The only consent they have is for effluent disposal. They have also fenced their creeks, which are tributaries of the Papanui which flows into the Waipawa River.

“We have goals for animal welfare and compliance. We don’t just want to be compliant, we want to be fully compliant.”

Regional council chairman Fenton Wilson said he hoped the award scheme would bring a sharper focus on improving environmental outcomes and help overcome a level of inconsistency where some farms achieve compliance one year but not the next.

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