Friday, March 29, 2024

Soil flipping lessons learned

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After 15 years flipping land on the West Coast, Dave and John Milne have learnt that getting it right means flipping 100% of the area and using a bigger digger for more efficiency. They’ve flipped a fair chunk of land in those 15 years, including a good percentage of two dairy farms and the entire 65ha support block that was waterlogged bog when they bought it. Back then it was covered with gorse and stunted manuka that was “starving 12 animals”, but the family was confident it could be flipped to good grazing land. “We went around with a steel probe before we bought it to see how far we would have to dig and were hitting the iron pan about 1.5 metres, so we knew we would have to dig 2.5m to 3m over the whole block,” Dave says.
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“It’s a healthy bit of dirt now,” that grazes young stock for both his son, John, who has a flipped farm just out of Westport, and daughter Cheryl on the other side of the town, who has lifted production by more than 30% since flipping areas of her farm. Parts of her farm had been covered in gorse, scrub and even 2m deep sphagnum moss. Flipping broke up the hard pan and brought river shingles and silts to the surface to form a highly productive chunk of her farm.

By flipping much of the farms and the support block, they now carry more cows on the milking platforms, produce their own supplements instead of relying on bought-in supplements from Canterbury, and look after their own young stock.

Drainage problems on the West Coast have been due to pakihi soils or impervious clay pan that lie in a layer beneath the surface, trapping the copious amount of rain that falls on the area and turning it into bog. 

Dave Milne stands at the boundary between waterlogged bog on the left and the flipped land on the right.

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