Friday, March 29, 2024

Getting out of dairy

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A West Coast couple are diversifying their dairy operation by growing hemp crops for seed and to make natural products. In the past three years there have been plenty of highs and lows with this year’s crop written off. Tony Benny reports.
Reading Time: 10 minutes

West Coast farmers Aaron Silcock and Sarah Gibson have enthusiastically embraced hemp as a diversification they hope will eventually allow them to stop milking cows on the family farm near Reefton.

Aaron is the fourth generation to farm the 300ha property at Reefton and milks 280 cows on 120 hectares with the rest of the block still in bush and boggy, infertile, pakihi land. 

When he bought the farm from his grandparents he initially carried on much as they had, milking twice a day, but in 2003 he was one of the first in his district to switch to once-a-day.

“One year we had a lot of lame cows and there was a lady at LIC who said once-a-day was going to be the up-and-coming thing and we decided really early to try it. We didn’t really lose much production,” Aaron says.

“If you tweak your cows and increase your stocking rate you can get similar production to twice-a-day with less costs and better animal health. We’ve got happy cows and good empty rates, around 6%.”

Initially, he increased the herd to 350 but soon realised that was too many in any area subject to high rainfall. They now milk closer to 300 with 280 being milked this year.  

Having fewer cows gives him flexibility if the weather turns bad, which isn’t unusual in this part of the country.  

“When it goes a bit pear-shaped it goes pear-shaped pretty bad,” Aaron says.

“I think not having enough rain is probably worse than too much. You can still grow grass in mud but it’s hard to grow grass without any rain.

“It was good when it was good but when the weather wasn’t so great the pressure would really be on. When you get a shortage of feed you have to buy a lot of feed in and I was a bit sick of doing that.”

The operation is now mostly self-contained and he doesn’t buy in any supplementary feed most years but grows summer turnips to have a bank of feed in case it goes dry. 

The farm is supported by a runoff on rougher ground on the other side of the river that runs through the property, where they make silage and grow some feed and run R2 replacement heifers as well as wintering the milking herd.

He works with one full-time staff member plus relief staff as needed for milking. Production peaked at 1000kg MS/ha but Aaron thinks that has probably slipped a little over the past couple of seasons.  

“We’re doing about 90,000kg MS but I haven’t really worked that out,” he says. 

Calving starts in mid-August and they aim to keep 70 replacement calves.

“Some people round here calve at the beginning of August but if we get really bad weather, which we quite often do, you can get into a real pinch because you’ve got to feed the cows pretty well once they calve and you start milking them.”

Replacement calves are run on the platform.

“It’s just better ground. Some of our ground is rougher and young stock tend to not do that great on that so we nurture them along and they seem to do a bit better.”

He says thanks to OAD milking the Kiwicross herd has good fertility and he does a nine-week, short and sweet mating with three weeks AI then runs Jersey bulls for six weeks.  

With his change to OAD Silcock showed he was willing to try alternatives and he’s made a significant change in his own life too. Six years ago he became a vegan. 

“I looked at plant-based eating for health first and I don’t really want to make money from exploiting animals to be honest. I’d much rather eat a plant than an animal,” he says.

“I definitely don’t hate the cows or anything. In fact I really like cows and that’s one of the reasons I don’t want to keep doing what we’re doing.  You’ve got to be selective with the calves and the ones we don’t keep go for slaughter. It’s pretty rough.”

His partner Sarah Gibson is also vegan and they have a 19-month-old daughter Gracie, who has never eaten animal protein. 

Like other farmers on the West Coast they’ve endured some difficult years as their co-op Westland Dairy struggled to survive and about five years ago they started looking for a way to diversify their farm business.

“Just not having all your eggs in one basket really is the simplest way to explain it,” Sarah says.

“The farm’s a family farm so it wasn’t just, let’s just sell the farm and go off and do something different. It was let’s turn the land into something else and with New Zealand farmers getting hammered for being dirty, hemp’s a really good crop.”

Before covid-19 measures made such events impossible the couple hosted a DairyNZ field day, telling about 25 other West Coast farmers and rural professionals about the highs and lows they’ve experienced in three years of growing hemp.

DairyNZ consulting officer Angela Leslie says farmers often talk to her about diversifying so the time seemed right to get them together.

“I’ve had discussions about hemp, peanuts, you name it. 

“People are thinking about weird and wonderful things they might be able to implement into their farm system,” she says.

She’s compared NZ dairy farmers to their British counterparts and says while most here focus on producing milk, two-thirds of United Kingdom farms have diversified income streams that contribute an average of 22% of total farm income.

“I looked in DairyBase and diversification accounts for only 1.25% of dairy farm income in NZ so there’s some opportunity for growth there if that’s the way we think we might like to go.”

Aaron was already thinking about hemp before he met Sarah and together they have read everything they can about it as well as talking to other farmers and businesses about their experience. 

They planted their first crop three years ago, growing a cultivar suited to producing seed.

“In our first season we had an amazing crop,” Sarah says, adding they also learnt a lot about what can go wrong.

To start with it was very dry and the crop was slow to take off. They sowed the crop at the end of October/early November and by December 20 it was not much higher than gumboot level when Sarah worriedly called the person who’d sold them the seed.

“He said ‘don’t worry Sarah, it’s a weed, it’ll grow’ and by January 5 although I’m not very tall I had plants up to my waist,” she says.

“By January 15 only 10 days later and after we got a bit of rain I couldn’t reach the top of them. They can grow 11cm a day in perfect conditions.

“We had two 1ha plots and the birds literally tell you when it’s ready so all these birds were flying round and we panicked and got the contractor in and he harvested the first bit a little bit green but then for the second paddock he was away driving a truck down in the Grey Valley and couldn’t get back here so we literally watched the birds decimate the crop.”

Aaron adds “Birds suck. That’s one thing I’ve learned. They say it’s hard to keep birds off and we’ve used cannons, which work for a day or two but the birds just learn and keep coming back.”

Even with birds taking more than their fair share of the first crop there was a mountain of seed that had to be processed quickly because it will deteriorate quickly if not dried correctly. 

“In our first season we had so many people saying they’d come and help with the harvest and nobody turned up come harvest time because they realised what a big job it was,” Sarah says.

“We had the seeds on a tarp and on a concrete floor and we were just rotating them. We had leaf blowers, we had fans, you name it, we had everything.

“So we had this wonderful crop but no processing gear. I was six months pregnant sieving seeds through a 20 litre bucket with holes drilled in it just to get them clean and dry.”

This season is their third and they are focusing on a small research block where they’re trialling techniques and looking for high-producing plants from which to breed.  

“With our research block we hang the plants upside down and have a tarp and the seeds drop out pretty much at that perfect moisture content without all the leaf and flower,” she says.

That gave them an idea for how to harvest their main crop and they bought a second-hand grape harvester.

“The idea is the grape harvester would shake the seeds off when they’re ripe instead of mowing the whole crop like a combine harvester but that’s a work in progress.”

There’s limited infrastructure on the West Coast to support crop growing so they face plenty of challenges turning hemp into a viable diversification.  

Getting the seed dried promptly is vital to turning out a good product so they’ve had a silo built along with a loading conveyor but months later they’re still waiting for the heating unit.

The dryer was meant to be in action for this year’s harvest but, frustratingly, there’ve been successive hold-ups by the engineering company and it’s still not going. As it’s turned out though that’s not really an issue because this year’s crop has been a failure, again because of factors outside the couple’s control.

“Our big crop is sadly a write-off this year. We grow it organically so we had the ground worked, put the clover cover crop in, rang the contractor and said we are ready and need you now. He said, ‘yeah, yeah I’m coming’ and he didn’t,” she says.   

“You only need the weeds to get a tiny bit up and the seedlings can’t compete. We’ve got some plants that are taller than me but the docks are just about up there as well.”

Ideally, hemp should be planted at the end of October or early November but it wasn’t until mid December this season’s seed finally went into the ground. The reason planting was delayed this was a plague of rats had exploded on the Coast.

“We were putting bucket-loads of bait around the paddock and it was disappearing. It was all we could do because rodents will go for hemp seed before they’ll go for anything else – they just decimate it,” he says.

“In our glasshouse when I was trying to get the research and breeding going I planted 168 pottles with five seeds in each but only one or two came up. The rats were tipping over the pottles, digging them out of the ground. They were just so hungry for it.

“I pretty much had to build a damn fortress to keep the rats out. I had an electric fence unit with a wire on the ground, I put cayenne pepper round the outside and had some food wrap around this thing I’d made and it worked eventually.”

Though they’ve had more than their share of things going wrong they remain committed to diversifying into hemp and say there’s more to it than just diversifying their income.

“There’s also the fact we like to help people. I honestly believe that hemp is the plant that could save the planet,” Sarah says.

“You name it, hemp can do it, from clothing to fuel, from health products to building products.”

They’ve developed 13 of their own products marketed under the brand Larrys Gold. One of their most popular offerings is their EPIK Daily Drops.

“We’ve trialled them out and have just been getting results that are a constant driver. People ring us up all the time to say thank you, which makes you feel good. And making it affordable for people, that’s our main driver,” she says.

“We can’t make claims but our customers can, that it can actually help people. You can’t make any claims about any natural product and even if you had an apple tree that made you healthy and said that they’d come and cut your tree down.”

Regulation of the embryonic hemp industry is in the hands of the Ministry of Health and growers have to satisfy strict conditions to get a licence.

“You can’t grow it beside the road, you’ve got to be 5km from a school, have no convictions. You’ve got to have been a good boy or girl,” she says.

A few weeks befoe harvest the crop is tested for THC levels with results sent to the ministry to prove it is industrial hemp rather than intoxicating marijuana, its identical-looking high-THC cousin. The test costs $1000, which was one of the reasons the couple decided it wasn’t worth harvesting this year’s poor crop.

“High THC cannabis growers nowadays claim 20% to 30% THC. Hemp has to test below 0.35%” she says. 

The couple have transferred the skills they already had to their hemp operation. Aaron is used to growing grass and feed crops and is quickly learning how best to grow hemp on the West Coast.

“It’s like any plant, the more fertile you are the more you’ll grow. It doesn’t need big inputs but if you want to put those in you’ll get big plants and big yields. Each year we’re picking one more thing that’s going to help us,” he says.

Sarah is in charge of product development and negotiating the maze of paperwork and regulations.

“All my previous jobs have involved a lot of talking so I’m usually the phone-call person, reading all the regulations and working with the ministry.

“I keep telling Aaron if someone knocks at the door and asks you what’s in the regulations and you give them a blank look it doesn’t look good – we’ll work on that,” she laughs.

With a toddler to look after she often finds herself working at night either answering emails or working in the certified kitchen they have on the farm developing new products.

“Sometimes I go down there and Aaron’s on Daddy-day-care. He comes in off the farm and we kind of balance everything.”

They admit that without the income from the dairy farm they’d struggle to make hemp pay at this stage but with each year they overcome another hurdle and develop the skills they believe will bring success.

There’s strong domestic demand for their hemp products, so much so they have to buy in de-hulled hemp seeds, known as hemp hearts, from overseas. The high-protein hearts are a popular food with superfood status. 

While from farm to plate and NZ-grown is their ultimate goal, organically grown is a priority. The couple soil test before and after growing and to date haven’t been able to find a grower in NZ  with organic status who can meet their demand.

“Hemp is a remedial crop so if you spray the paddock out before planting then grow organically or spray-free after that you cannot claim organic or spray-free status because those toxins in the soil will be up taken by the plant,” she says. 

Their hemp hearts sell for $55/kg but it takes about 3kg of seed to make 1kg of hearts and costs include planting and harvesting the crop and drying the seed as well the THC testing.

“If you start having to send your product over to Canterbury or to the North Island to be processed that’s when it gets costly,” she says.

They are now concentrating on getting better at growing hemp and hope other West Coast farmers will follow their lead.

“We’re trying to keep that grassroots feel, even the idea of a co-op. I know that doesn’t always work but we don’t want to see a monopoly. 

“The Hempire is so big that everyone can have a slice of the pie. 

“One farmer could be making hemp toilet paper, another could be doing hemp clothing, there’s just so much.”

For now they’ll continue to milk cows but with a goal of one day becoming hemp farmers, not dairy farmers.

“We wanted to do something that ticks all the boxes – a healthy product, no need to exploit animals and environmentally sustainable. 

“Hemp ticks all those boxes and is a plant that we are both extremely passionate about,” Sarah says.

“We’re making it happen and I guess the time will come when we’ll have to reduce the number of cows that we milk. In fact we are already doing that slowly. 

“We don’t just want to say, ‘that’s it, the cows are gone’. Our goal is to grow the hemp alongside our cows and eventually turn the farm into a sanctuary where the cows will happily live out their days on the farm.”

Farm Facts

Owners: Aaron Silcock and Sarah Gibson

Location: Reefton, West Coast

Farm Size: 300ha, 120ha effective

Cows: 280 Kiwicross

Production: 2018-19 90,000kg MS   

Target: 2019-20 90,000kg MS

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