A little competition goes a long way for north Waikato sharemilkers Bryce and Rosemarie Costar. For the past six years they and full-time milker Vera Vuglar, who lives just down the road, have each picked the two heifers, before their first herd test that they believe will perform the best for the season.
“We have a system where we give points for protein and fat, but points off for high cell counts or for calving late,” Rosemarie says.
“The winner gets to be smug all that year, and it’s a great way to have a bit of fun in the workplace.”
While Bryce used to be the regular winner Rosemarie took out the title last time round, as is clearly shown on the score sheet pinned up in their dairy.
The Costars are well-known for the care and attention they pay to their young stock.
“Young stock coming through are the future of the herd,” Bryce says.
And they reason that if you’re going to do a job at all you need to make sure you do it really well.
Bryce grew up on the Onewhero farm his parents bought in 1961, which at that stage was 35 hectares. Along the way neighbouring blocks were added and developed to make up the present 160ha property. About 115ha are on the flats with the remaining 45ha steeper hills where their young stock are grazed, along with retired bush areas where further planting has been done.
Bryce, who has sharemilked on the farm for the past 29 years, bought a 40ha adjacent block 19 years ago, which he has since leased back to his father. In the decade since he and Rosemarie married they’ve bought 42ha at Buckland, 16km away on the road to Pukekohe, a handy stopping-off point for supplies and supplements. Rosemarie was marketing manager for an equestrian company, and last year was elected to Waikato District Council.
Bill, now retired to Pukekohe but still tending a large vegetable garden on the farm, started off with Jerseys that were part of sire-proving. The switch to Friesians came about with purchase of a neighbouring block and a move into running beef calves.
In order to boost drymatter production this year the Costars have sprayed off 8ha, sowing an annual for winter then chicory for next spring. Another 4ha has gone into Ceres One50 high-performing permanent pasture. A regular renovation programme is now on the cards because they have a towable CDax pasture meter and so will be able to easily make comparisons between the drymatter levels of old and new swards.
They don’t grow any crops onfarm but buy in 200 tonnes of maize silage from their neighbour as well as about 60t of palm kernel annually. There’s 80-160t of grass silage made onfarm and baleage made on their runoff, depending on surpluses.
Effluent is applied by travelling irrigator to 20ha with pumps recently upgraded so the system is future-proofed and could be extended to a further 8ha. They don’t apply any fertiliser to the effluent block unless soil tests, done every two years, indicate it’s required. Very little nitrogen is currently applied, with about 30 units going on, but a plan is now in place to use it more strategically at optimum growing times.
The Costars hope to produce 110,000kg milksolids (MS) from their 300-peak milked herd this season “if we hold our breath”. After a good spring in 2013 last year’s wasn’t so kind and dry weather through summer hasn’t helped.
They have been supplying milk to their neighbour, Mercer Cheese’s Albert Alferink, for the past 21 years, with that amount gradually growing to 15,000kg MS this season. Fonterra receives the rest.
Mating for heifers begins on September 27 then the main herd mating begins on October 5, with short gestation semen used for the last three weeks. Artificial breeding is used for the entire mating period for the herd and Jersey bulls are used over the heifers after three weeks of AB.
Heifers calve from the beginning of July with cows from July 12, making a 10-week calving period in total, with bull and heifer calves treated just the same. All bull calves go to a local beef farmer as four-day-olds. Heifers earmarked for Fonterra’s Genes on Legs Programme to supply young stock to its Chinese dairy farms are collected weekly. To produce some of the 40 calves the Costars contracted to supply in their first year in the programme, sexed semen was used on four cows a day for the first four weeks of mating.
They’ve also exported heifers to China for the last four years, starting small and building up to 80 animals this year. They like to identify suitable calves early on and say it’s easily achievable with their herd’s 530kg liveweight to get animals to the 210kg weight required at almost a year old. They know from experience there needs to be a cutoff date to get to the targets required while grazing the heifers on their runoff.
“After four years of exporting calves we have a good system in place. Each year we just fine-tune it a bit,” Rosemarie says.
“Export calves need five white points but with a straight Friesian herd that isn’t a problem for us,” Bryce says.
For genetic gain in the rest of their herd they look to LIC’s Customate, with Bryce’s priorities being fertility, protein and capacity, closely followed by udder conformation. “Well-uddered cows are easier to milk and they last far longer,” he says.
“If you’re going to milk cows you might as well have well performing ones. We use Customate on the top 20% of the herd and the top 50% of our heifers where we can maximise genetic gain.”
Embryos from their three best cows were transplanted last year. The resulting calves will come into the herd as replacements. If bulls are the result an LIC contract will come into play.
Rosemarie’s in charge of rearing 200 calves a year, tubing all newborns, feeding them two litres of day-one colostrum as soon as they enter the shed. All calves consume a minimum of five days of good quality colostrum. All cows receive a rotovirus vaccination pre-calving.
The calves have been kept in their calf shed for 10 days before being moved to larger accommodation in the past, but that will all change this year as the Costars are planning to install a relocatable plastic house for this purpose after checking out the options at National Fieldays.
As well as solving any overcrowding problems the new housing will be warmer and drier for the calves.
Bryce and Rosemarie Costar with their children Jack, 8, and Isabelle, 6.
“And being long with a gate at the front of each pen it will be much easier to unload the calves.”
The Costars use a Milkbar Calfeteria which they won as part of their prize package for taking out the Auckland-Hauraki Sharemilker-Equity Farmer of the Year last year (Dairy Exporter, April 2014, page 87), which changed their feeding regime.
“They would drink their milk then just go and lie down. I also noticed they didn’t suck everything in sight once they had finished like they used to do,” Rosemarie says.
The calves are cut back to once-a-day feeding after three weeks. Previously they were getting five litres of milk a day but with the new feeder they don’t drink it all. As an experiment she cut the daily ration back to four litres a calf, finding the animals maintained exactly the same growth rates.
“We weighed them a few times over a couple of weeks to make sure,” she says.
Any calf with scours is isolated immediately and fed electrolytes. In the four years since they’ve been vaccinating for rotovirus cases of scours have fallen to just a couple a year.
For the next stage of their calves’ growth the couple are fans of Fiskens calf meal, which is made in Pukekohe.
“The calves love it,” Rosemarie says.
“We’ve been using it for over 10 years now. It’s a quality feed, it’s always fresh and is competitively priced. Using high-quality colostrum, milk and meal is vital to good calf rearing.”
The calves are fed ad-lib meal each day from troughs she tows into their paddocks behind their farmbike until they’re consuming up to 1.5kg/day.
The replacement calves go off the dairy platform to the hillier country as soon as they’re weaned, with the Costars keeping a rigorous eye on their weight gain.
“We treat every calf as though they’re born on July 12 and follow all the in-calf targets,” Rosemarie says.
“About seven years ago we recognised that we weren’t growing our heifers well and they were having reproductive problems.”
Jason Fayers from Franklin Vets introduced the Costars to the DairyNZ Incalf programme. Part of this requires more regular weighing of their stock and Jason nudges them along if they are late entering these details into MINDA Weights.
“Jason’s knowledge and advice has had a huge impact on our calf rearing and animal health practices,” Bryce says.
“It’s put us in a position to be proactive, not reactive.
“We had been weaning by weight and then hoping for the best. And another advantage is that coming into the dairy they’re much quieter because they’ve been regularly handled.”
Testament to this thorough approach is a well-worn copy of DairyNZ’s Incalf handbook which the Costars rely on when checking that their calves reach a liveweight breeding value of 30% of their mature weight by six months. Targets from there are 60% of this weight by 15 months and 90% by 22 months.
“The earlier targets tend to be easier to achieve with good milk and meal going into them,” Bryce says.
“But in the summer months it can be a problem to catch up if you get behind.”
They weigh their young stock a minimum of six times a year, putting them over walk-over scales at the back of the dairy.
“In difficult seasons we will weigh them far more often,” Rosemarie says.
Those animals which are falling below target are separated out from the main mob and preferentially grazed with extra meal and hay fed to them.
“They’ll stay there until they’re up to spec.”
Plan, do, review
The Incalf DairyNZ mantra of plan, do, review works well for Bryce and Rosemarie Costar, along with their other pointers for producing quality young stock:
- Use only high-quality colostrum, milk and meal.
- Rearing good calves requires time, patience and good hygiene practices.
- If you fall behind with target weights it’s hard to catch up.
- Be proactive, not reactive or it can be too late.
- Set up your systems so everything is done well and as easily as possible.
