When Marv Pangborn turned his back on a banking career in the US in favour of a sharemilking job in Canterbury in 1987, it was during a time where dairy farming in the region played second fiddle to sheep, beef and cropping. But, in his nearly 33 years here, he’s seen the farming focus shift sharply to dairying.
Today Oregon-born Marv and his Kiwi wife Jane live near Rakaia on one of the two dairy farms they converted on what had previously been undeveloped, dryland on the north side of Rakaia River. Their daughter Lauren and son-in-law Liam Kelly are 50:50 sharemilkers on one of the properties and contract milk the other.
Marv was born with dairy farming in his blood, descended from a line of farmers that goes back to the earliest days of European settlement of America.
“They can trace back my male line nine generations,” Marv says.
“The first guy got off the boat in 1664 in New York and we’ve all been farmers since but I ended up down here (in New Zealand).”
Marv got his first taste of Canterbury in 1975 when he took advantage of an exchange programme between Oregon State and Lincoln universities. He met Jane and after he returned home to finish his degree, she went to Oregon on exchange. They married two years later.
Marv worked for a bank as a rural lender for eight years and he and Jane had two children, but she missed home and he didn’t see a future in banking. Then out of the blue an offer came to go sharemilking in Canterbury. The timing was perfect.
A good friend, dairy farmer Jim Geddes, who Marv worked for when he was at Lincoln, recommended him to an investor who was having trouble finding a sharemilker.
“He’d bought two dairy farms that had been converted, some of the first conversions in Canterbury, with border dykes. He financed the first year at 12% (to buy the cows) when the banks wouldn’t even touch us,” Marv recalls.
By today’s standards, 12% interest sounds high but in the late 1980s that was half the going rate and gave them the opportunity to get into dairy farming, but, even so, with the payout at around $3.65/kg MS, there wasn’t much to come and go on.
They bought the herd on the farm for $400/cow and after sharemilking for a couple of years, the owner sold the farm to early Canterbury corporate farming enterprise Applefields, which turned out to be another opportunity for them as Applefields purchased the cows for $650.
The Pangborns bought 80ha of undeveloped dryland on lease from Environment Canterbury (ECan), built a house and he worked for Wrightsons and then US semen supplier Worldwide Sires for a couple of years, while Jane and the kids reared calves.
The Kiwicross herd had a six-week in-calf rate of 79% on Farm 1 and 77% on Farm 2, which is well above the national average.
He says they also now take both morning and afternoon samples when they do the four-times-a-year herd tests.
“I think we went from 65% to 95% reliability doing that,” he says.
It’s more accurate than the calculated estimate with morning testing, so now we’re dealing with the true facts.”
No bulls are used over the herds, which are all put to AI to produce valuable replacement calves.
“Liam has a really intensive mating programme and the calves arrive very quickly,” Marv says.
“He works really hard, makes sure the cows are in good condition and gets good results.”
His six-week in-calf rate is 79% on Farm 1 and 77% on Farm 2, well above the national average.
For the past few years they’ve been using semen from LIC’s A2 genomic team bulls, which is cheaper than semen from older, proven bulls, which covers the cost of the DNA testing.
“The reliability is quite strong because nine out of 10 are pretty good,” Liam says.
“For us it’s all about being as close as we can get to 100% recording, but also real strong measurement of their performance and we have discussed weighing the animals to find the most efficient animals.
“You might have a big Friesian and then a crossbreed and one might be 550kg and one might be 500kg but it’s producing more milk. So, once we’ve weighed them and put that data against the cow you get more reliability with your BW and PW.”
They use sexed semen with some cows to help speed up genetic improvement and AB the heifers.
“The best genetic gain is to AB your heifers because they’re your youngest animals with generally the highest genetics,” Liam says.
“The heifers are coming through with really high BWs because of the most current genetics and you can match that by using sexed semen with the best cows, so the genetic selection pressure he’s putting on is really high,” Marv adds.
Liam only breeds from their top 60% of cows and the rest are inseminated with Wagyu semen. The resulting calves are contracted to finishers with heifers and bulls fetching the same price.
“A lot of people have used beef bulls but some guys couldn’t get rid of their Herefords. I know a few friends who were selling them to lifestyle guys, but with the Wagyu it’s all contracted,” Liam says.
In his more than three decades of farming here, Marv has seen dairy farming in Canterbury go from a handful of conversions to become the dominant agricultural land use, at least on the flat land.
“I thought it was a better place for the kids to grow up than the US and it just happened – I’d always wanted to be a dairy farmer, I didn’t want to retire as a banker,” he says.
“We have been really lucky. It was the old story of ‘when you paint yourself into a corner, sometimes you get pretty innovative,’ and I painted myself into a corner quite frequently. Everything worked which is amazing.”
Farm facts:
Owner: Pangborn Family Trust
Location: Bankside, Canterbury
Farm Size: Farm 1: 190ha effective, farm 2: 145ha effective
Cows: Kiwi cross, Farm 1: peak milk 660, Farm 2: peak milk 520
Production: 2019-20: Farm 1: 346,705 kg MS, Farm 2: 263,433 kg MS
Target: 2020-21 kg MS similar to 2019-20
