Greg Topless knows every one of his cows by name and by their lineage, having spent 10 years working for LIC in New Zealand and offshore. He’s a genetics man through and through.
He knows and loves his cows, but is not sad about seeing them less – adopting a once-a-day (OAD) milking system when they moved to their eastern Taranaki farm has been great for Greg, his wife Hannah and their young family.
OAD milking has opened up a world of more time for the Toplesses and their four children – more time for concentrating on their young stock and sheep on the hill-country block, for maintenance and development jobs on the dairy platform, and more time for their young family and community activities in an area where most of Greg’s extended family live.
“It’s great not to have to worry about rushing home for the afternoon milking from the back of the farm where you are working or from school where you are picking up the kids. We can hang-out with family or at the pool or finish off the jobs on the farm – you seem to have so much more time in the day,” Hannah says.
The Toplesses have spent 14 years onfarm in the dairy industry and for Hannah, a Brit with a degree in museum studies, the years have been full of kids, cows and finding a new “learned passion” – the dairy industry.
“I love the dairy industry and I have become a Fonterra networker because I have become very proud of what we make and produce.”
She is also proud of their success winning the 2010 Taranaki Sharemilker of the Year, and going on to third in the national Dairy Industry Awards competition. Staying involved in the competition and now judging regional categories, they have built up a network of friends and contacts who are invaluable for advice and help.
In the recent June floods those friends and contacts turned out in force to help Greg and Hannah clear their fencelines of silt and debris and help them get the fences back up and secure when the Mangaotuku Stream flooded and dumped silt on many hectares of river flats.
Greg managed to buy and pay-off a house in town while he worked for LIC, and the house was sold to buy their first sharemilking herd. After one year on wages and six years of sharemilking they bought their first farm on the slopes of Mount Taranaki at Mahoe. Just down from the bush line, the farm was very pretty but very cold, Hannah says, with constrained winter grass growth. Despite this it proved the perfect starter farm with a herd of 140 cows, half of which were heifers and the other half the old and rejected females from their larger, dispersed sharemilking herd.
Four years later they were able to sell-up and move on to the Strathmore farm, with a warmer climate and a larger platform. Closer to extended family support, they plunged straight into the OAD system.
Greg says he had been thinking about the system for a while and when he found the new property it really lent itself to that way of farming.
“The terrain is more challenging here and the layout of the farm, with the front milking country and separated from the back flats by a big hill and a kilometre-long walk makes it sensible to just milk once each day.”
The advantage of the farm is the hill country for growing out their own young stock and running 100 ewes for weed control. The major bonus is Greg’s brother Paul is a sheep and beef farmer on their back boundary, so they can open the boundary gate and send the sheep over to Paul for shearing – a job that Greg hates in spite of, or maybe because of his sheep and beef farm upbringing.
While they have taken a drop in production per cow from the old farm, where they were performing at 390kg milksolids (MS)/cow on a System 1 twice-a-day (TAD) milking system, Greg says he can grow last year’s drought-affected performance of 280kg MS/cow this season because of the cow herd maturing and improved pasture management.
The target for this season is to produce 65,000kg MS (325kg MS/cow) from the 200-cow herd. Last season the target was 62,000kg MS, but the drought and forced early dry-off of a quarter of the herd caused a shortfall of 3000kg.
Greg and Hannah are relaxed about the result, saying it’s a good effort for a first-year OAD on a new farm.
“Others have talked about regaining their TAD production after three-to-five years of OAD milking, and we are optimistic we can reach around 350kg MS/cow in that timeframe,” Greg says.
He is excited about the way the herd has adapted to the system, with only three cows culled last season for not fitting in with OAD milking, and he pores over the herd testing results to see what’s happening on a cow-by-cow basis.
The maturing of the young herd will provide a natural lift, Greg says, as will culling any cows who are poorer producers on the system and breeding from the better performers.
The development of LIC’s OAD index will help, he says. There is now increased emphasis on udder scores and capacity, an area they have always been focused on in the past.
One of the breeding cow families that were good TAD cows have proven to be exceptional OAD cows with the mother and three daughters transferring seamlessly from one system to the other.
There are two more related heifers coming into the herd next year and then four-to-five the year after that, “so it won’t take long to build up the good blood lines – we may even find they have the ‘once-a-day’ gene,” Greg says optimistically.
Herd testing four times each year keeps the good information coming through and although it is an area for potential cost cutting, Greg sounds like he’d rather cancel Christmas.
“He is so into analysing the figures and planning the next mating,” Hannah says. “I call the LIC bull catalogue his porn.”
Shifting to OAD milking has also stripped a lot of cost from the operation, saving dairy, electricity and chemical costs and cutting the cost of relief milkers, which will prove invaluable in the new season of depressed payout.
Animal health costs have been surprisingly low and Greg and Hannah are pleased with the low somatic cell count and mastitis rate – last year was their lowest rate for years, although they are used to a low cell count and have been grade-free for the past three years.
The hills in the background provide a built-in young stock support unit and run 100 sheep for weed control.
The cows held their condition better last season with less walking to the dairy, and despite a drought Greg says there was very little culling on body condition at the end of the season, so cows were culled on herd test results and production. Rebreeding has also been successful with a compact calving this season from the “cows cycling beautifully last season”.
“We didn’t have to use CIDRs and had a 5.5% empty rate after 10 weeks of mating (six of artificial breeding and four weeks of bulls),” Greg says.
This spring half the herd had calved within 10 days of the planned start of calving date, so production is significantly ahead of last season. Greg says he will not use any bulls this mating season, preferring to tail-up with short-gestation semen because with his LIC background, he does all his own insemination.
The Toplesses were involved in the OAD conference held in Hawera earlier this year and held a farm visit on their property.
“It was great to meet so many other farmers who are successfully milking once-a-day and picking up tips from them.”
Greg and Hannah have always run a lean budget – Hannah says she has learnt a lot from Greg over the years and they are focused on reducing costs and paying down their debt, although with the latest drop in the payout that may not be possible.
Using a budget template from the DairyNZ website, Hannah says she has already tweaked the budget and they have driven the farm working expenses on
their budget down from $2.34/kg MS to $2.23/kg MS.
“We will probably end up in overdraft, but only a wee bit, and we won’t need to defer any payments.”
Crediting the DairyNZ Tactics for Tight Times workshop, a chat with her mother-in-law and experiences following the June floods, Hannah said they managed to save about 33% on their insurance bill by scrutinising their policies and taking on more of the risk themselves, along with increasing their policy excesses.
“It’s a risk, but we decided we can take more risks on the haysheds, as we are not prone to high winds, and the main bridge crossing and a few other sheds and things – we just looked carefully at the risks and said how likely are they really?”
Saving $3800 from about $12,000 of insurance premiums is a help to the budget, and means Hannah can leave something else in the mix. They are loath to skimp on fertiliser, although Olsen P levels are about 40 on the dairy platform from consistent dressings in the past.
Last season’s capital investment was timely and included fencing, doubling the calf pens’ size and installing Protrack, and then they were hit with $6000 worth of flood damage earlier in winter.
Greg is thrilled with the Protrack system he installed at the 26-aside herringbone shed and says it’s more fun to watch than the telly.
“I thought I would be able to set it up to autodraft off cows while I went home to have breakfast – but it’s so cool to watch it work that I can’t tear myself away from the shed,” he laughs. All joking aside, it solved an animal health issue of losing cows in the hilly terrain and not noticing them gone until the next day under the OAD system.
Rearing extra-high breeding index heifer calves is an option to lift their income and Greg is always on the lookout for contract cows with high herd testing results that might have potential for producing AB bulls and so be worth good money to LIC. A few years ago they had success with a bull called Blakelocks Night, helping to bring the LIC account down.
Running a lean operation with low drawings of only $30,000, the couple say they have previously trimmed the fat from their budget but will be keeping a close eye on their spending.
“If we can keep our expenses really low and weather the downturn then we’ll be able to pay off more debt in the better years – that’s our focus.”
Greg and Hannah’s goal all along has been to own their own farm, a farm where they could have hands-on control.
Lessons learned through entering the Dairy Industry Awards made them believe that they could achieve this much earlier than they thought possible.
Focusing on their business and increasing their financial skills during the process has helped them pay down debt and grow their equity and now they are at the perfect size operation for them. Greg loves the hands-on nature of a small herd, being able to run it themselves and get to know and understand the strengths of each cow and family.
Their strong links with family, friends and their church mean they always planned to achieve their career goals of owning their own farm in Taranaki.
Their farm adviser has suggested they need to buy the neighbouring farm next, but Greg just laughed at him and said they will see what happens, because they are quite happy at the moment building a highly productive OAD herd and growing a happy family.
