Friday, March 29, 2024

Time to horse around

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Bruce Wallace jokes that he knows how to make a dollar when it comes to farming but it’s his wife Maree who knows how to keep it in the bank.
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“If we need something I always get two quotes, and yes it does surprise me just how much they can vary,” Maree says.

In fact both Maree and Bruce are experts at finding a cheaper option without compromising outcomes but Bruce impishly refers to Maree as “Brains”.

It’s Maree he credits with the scheme that gave their finances a solid boost and allowed them to step up from sharemilking to farm ownership.

Maree returned from the first South Island Dairy Event telling Bruce this was the year to rear as many heifers as they could.

They were working on a farm owned by Allan Hubbard and he ok’d the scheme, providing no milk came out of the vat, and the calves were gone as soon as possible and well before weaning.

‘We’ve got to cover every base this year to give them the best chance of getting back in-calf.’

They’d leased nearby land to rear the heifers and when it came time to sell, stock prices were at a high. It allowed them to sell 250 in-calf heifers and their herd, which was 420 cows by that stage, and realise their dream of buying their own farm.

Bruce had been a farrier and Maree was a vet nurse and vet practice manager – with a horse, Bruce adds – but they turned to dairying as a means to achieve their goal.

“I’m one of eight kids so I knew I wasn’t going to get the family farm,” Bruce says.

Strict saving, hard graft and strategising got them to their goal and a farm that initially didn’t involve milking cows.

They were happy to run drystock on the rolling 162ha Waikaka block, and enjoy their two children and their shared love of horses but six years ago they found themselves, almost accidentally, back considering dairying.

They’d been buying beef calves and were using cull dairy cows as nurse cows.

“Then we thought ‘we could milk these’ so we put a wee milking plant in,” Bruce says.

And that was it – they decided to convert the farm, put in a 31-aside herringbone dairy and use 90ha of the flatter land as milking platform and 25ha of the hills as the runoff.

“But we weren’t going to go back milking twice-a-day. We had the kids and horses and we wanted to be able to do other things. When you’re a sharemilker you’re just focused on getting milk in the vat. When we converted we wanted something different,” Bruce says.

“Production doesn’t mean a bloody thing at the end of the day. For us it was profit but most importantly lifestyle.”

They don’t employ any full-time staff but do have a reliable relief milker.

While they’d sold stock when prices were at a high to get into the farm, they bought back in when prices were in a bit of a slump.

They bought a line of 200 unrecorded in-calf heifers at the Balclutha sale for $570 delivered, and 90 adult cows for $1200.

“So the herd cost us an average $800 a cow,” Maree says.

In their first two seasons the culling rate was high because cows unsuited to once-a-day (OAD) milking literally dried themselves off by February or had problems with their udders.

Bruce has no regrets about buying a budget herd.

“We could have paid top prices and then still had to cull 50 cows in February.”

They sold unsuitable OAD cows to a nearby twice-a-day milking farmer and did the same thing the next year until the herd settled into a more status quo OAD system.

Bruce and Maree Wallace – the wintering barn was originally a haybarn.

About 8ha of swedes and 8ha of whole crop barley, which yields about 12t DM/ha, have been grown on the milking platform in the past three years as part of the regrassing programme.

About 110 mixed-age cows winter on swedes which this past winter included HT Swedes.

While Bruce and Maree acknowledge no definite link has been proved between cow health problems and the swede variety, they’ve been concerned about the rapid deterioration in condition of the animals they had grazing on it. Ten of them have died.

The in-calf heifers returned from grazing to the variety and went downhill rapidly.

It’s upsetting for the couple to see so many of their cows in a poorer condition than they’re used to. They take pride in their usually shiny, well-conditioned herd and in early October were still concerned about their long-term health prospects.

It’s meant they’ve put a lot more effort into pre-mating heat detection and metrichecking.

“We’ve got to cover every base this year to give them the best chance of getting back in-calf,” Bruce says. About 90 cows wintered in a converted hay barn Bruce and Maree modified eight years ago as a wintering shed when rearing beef cattle.

But some of those cows also grazed the swede variety late in the winter and haven’t completely escaped problems.

The wintering barn cost about $100,000 to convert and has a concrete slatted floor with manure collected underneath. Two sides are open, giving good ventilation, with a rail on one side and a concrete apron running along the outside creating a feedlane where the wholecrop barley silage and grass silage can be fed to reduce waste.

Bruce said they’d found the wholecrop silage had been much better for putting weight on beef cattle over the winter so they’d continued the practice for their dairy herd.

‘Production doesn’t mean a bloody thing at the end of the day. For us it was profit but most importantly lifestyle.’

In line with their true low cost mindset the seed is purchased from a local grain farmer.

The manure from the wintering shed is spread on cropping land, reducing the farm’s fertiliser requirements.

Effluent from the farm dairy is stored in a 90-day pond with storage size calculated on a 400-cow herd to future-proof the farm.

It can be applied to half the milking platform with K-line pods and a timer set-up allowing effluent to be applied for 10 minutes every hour to give a low application rate.

Like many farmers last season the couple took advantage of the record payout to do more development and have brought another 10ha into the milking platform.

They’ve lifted cow numbers slightly but they’re still not keen to push the stocking rate too far.

Having time and head space to breed winners for the race track and have a life outside just milking cows is living the dream and that’s where they want to be.

Key points

Owners: Bruce and Maree Wallace
Total area: 162ha
Milking platform: 90ha last season 100ha this season
Runoff: 25ha within total area
Cows: 255 crossbred
Empty rate: 5% empty after 11 weeks mating
Farm working expenses: $3.50/kg MS 2013-14
DairyBase operating costs: $4.63/kg MS 2012-13
Production: 97,000kg MS 2013-14
Supplement: 280kg DM/cow

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