Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Many small changes add up

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A Canterbury family is hitting its environmental goals ahead of schedule. Tony Benny reports.
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Changing the regrassing programme along with tweaks to fertiliser and irrigation practices has allowed Canterbury family-corporate farmer the Camden Group to achieve the 30% reduction in nitrogen losses demanded by the Canterbury Regional Council, ECan, well before the 2022 deadline.

Brothers Leo and John Donkers started Camden Group 25 years ago and now own four dairy farms and two support farms as well as being involved in share-milking businesses on three other farms. Their business growth has coincided with the development of dairying in Canterbury over that time.

“There wasn’t a cow milked west of the main road (SH1) when we bought our first farm and that land use change has been quite phenomenal,” Leo says.

The rapid expansion of dairy farming in the region has put pressure on the environment and farmers now have to comply with increasingly strict regulations to reduce that impact, particularly the loss of nitrogen into groundwater.

“We have to change our management practices to enable us to continue farming in this environment,” he says. 

“The consent to farm will be mandatory for many farmers, ensuring that we all meet and better the agreed environmental, animal welfare and social standards that are put in place to allow us to continue to farm.

“Consumers, both local and around the world, want to know the products they buy are being produced along certain standards and being dependent on exporting, this is doubly important.”

When the Selwyn Waihora zone committee, which, under the Canterbury Water Management Strategy, set nutrient loss limits and environmental targets for the catchment and signaled five years ago that tighter controls were coming the Camden Group took a hard look at its operation, encouraged by the success Lincoln University Dairy Farm had achieving the targets while remaining profitable.

One of the first things tackled was the pasture, which, despite being resown in high performing species, wasn’t consistently delivering the pasture production gains hoped for. Part of the problem was the persistence of the low-performing native pasture species.

“Our expectation was we would continue to grow more grass but we just didn’t and that’s when alarm bells started ringing. We did a lot more research and found these species we planted were not persisting and we had high levels of browntop and poa re-establishing in our new pastures.”

On the advice of seed company Agriseeds pasture systems manager Graham Kerr it adopted a two-year, double-spray strategy along with a change in species and sowing method.

“The programme was we sprayed with glyphosate, direct-drilled an annual and sustained that for a year,” Leo says. 

“Then, at the same time the following year we re-sprayed, cultivated and drilled permanent pasture.

erry Kilday, left, and Leo Donkers check out the new grass.

Barley and grass is grown as a whole crop for winter silage and kale and grass are grown for winter feed on the 250ha run-off for the group’s cows.  

Milking cow balage is bought from the 250ha run-off block, shared between four group dairy farms.

“By supplying feed in-house we have better control over what we feed and the quality of it.” 

Staff do weekly pasture walks and usually start regrass at the end of September and aim to do 15% annually.

The herd is wintered on the shared run-off, which is home to about 3800 cows from the four farms. Animals from each farm are kept separate and identified by their eartag colours.

In late May, before drying off, the herd is sorted into mobs of early and late calvers. The heifers are kept separate from the main herd during winter and calving.   

Before calving starts on August 1 springing cows are drafted and brought home in mobs.

They do night checks of the herd and this season were bringing in calves every few hours because of the bad weather.

“Some days we can easily get 50 calves on the ground.”

They rear 250 replacements, which are kept indoors for about a week then shifted to another shed where they have access to pasture. Calves are moved onto the paddocks at 3-4 weeks.

Their weaning target is 70-80kg and the goal is for all calves to be at 100kg before they are sent to the drystock unit in December.

Kilday is optimistic and proud of what they’ve achieved so far.

“I think we look back now and think what on earth were they doing 20 years ago and I think the general public still think that’s what farming is doing.

“We are doing really good things and we are looking at new technologies and better ways of doing things and we don’t get it right every time but we’re getting better and are fast followers of new research and technology changes, which are starting to show real benefits.” 

Leo believes environmental targets can be met by dairy farmers without needing to make radical changes to the way they farm, focusing instead on the changes that have small effects but making many of them. 

“Spreading out your effluent, sowing cool season-active pastures, soil moisture monitoring, don’t put on nitrogen, even in April and May, along with good management practice and sowing plantain, those things that are really easy.

“Building sheds and laying concrete to house cows is a huge system change and locks us into a higher cost model, which dilutes our clean and green image as an export nation,” he says.  

“We’ve got a lot of aspects to try to change and be sustainable in what we’re doing but make sure that we’re meeting every target that’s being set and meet the expectations of all our stakeholders.” 

Farm facts
Owners: Camden Group – Willsden Farm
General manager: Leo Donkers
Operations manager: Terry Kilday
Farm manager: Robin Hornblow
Location: Te Pirita, Canterbury
Farm size: 306ha effective
Cows wintered: 1080 Kiwicross
Production: 2017- 2018 488,815kg MS
Target: 2018-2019 486,000kg MS
Farm working expenses: $4.25

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