The South Waikato cheesemaker can judge that for herself when she sometimes sees the Ebelings’ 450-cow herd from her window when they graze the paddock next to her home.
Rather than just take milk from a milk tanker, Sue values having a deeper connection to where the milk is sourced.
“I want to have relationships with farmers who really do a great job on their farms with their soils and their animals, and that’s part of the success story with having a relationship with the Ebeling family,” Sue says.
Over the years, she has won multiple awards and medals for her cheese, and she credits that success with having such wonderful milk.
“We’ve won well over 150 medals and trophies for our cheeses in the 13 years that we have been in business,” she says.
In 2018, Over the Moon Dairy was named New Zealand’s best cheese for its black truffle brie at an international cheese competition, and at year’s NZ competition in Hamilton, it won eight medals, six of which were silvers.
“They are still making great milk and we’re still making great cheese. It’s a great partnership,” she says
Sue has lived on the same road as the Ebeling family for 33 years, initially farming the land with her former husband by employing sharemilkers over the first four years.
She kept the house and a small lifestyle block when that relationship ended and eventually the rest of the farm was sold to the Ebelings. Later, when she needed a new milk supplier, she knew the Ebelings were interested.
“We made an arrangement and they have been supplying us with cow milk ever since,” she says.
Sue and one of her cheesemakers in the storeroom.
That effluent is sprayed out onto the maize paddocks periodically from April-September after the maize is harvested as a base fertiliser for next season’s crop.
The rest of the farm has effluent fertiliser applied over spring to March.
This reduces the amount of chemical fertiliser he needs for crops. In the 2019-20 season, he used 127kg N on the milking platform, not the crops.
Bram says any perception that this system comes at the cost of environmental sustainability are wrong.
“People can say the high inputs and the high amount of cropping isn’t being sustainable and having a low environmental footprint, but most of our planting is direct drilled. Even our maize is strip tilled and there’s no cultivation,” he says.
He says their system works. It preserves the soil carbon and with 70ha of the farm being sprayed out with effluent from the cows as fertiliser, little imported nitrogen is used on the dairy platform, apart from urea in the spring when it is too wet to be spread out.
He also wants to increase that effluent area to 80ha, as his budget allows.
The farm’s purchased N surplus was 144kg/ha last season from 127kg/ha applied.
The family has also extensively planted the Ngutuwera Stream riverbank with kahikatea trees over the years.
“I’ve been planting that since I was a boy, and we’re still topping that up now,” he says.
“It’s a great feel-good thing. We were doing that before you had to do it, and now everyone’s doing it and I think that’s a positive thing.
“In regard to the sustainable stuff, it’s something we’ve always wanted to be, regardless of supplying Sue. What we do here, we do it because we want to do it and we want to do it right.”
The herd are mostly Friesian genetics, with a limited amount of Jersey genetics to prevent the cows from growing too large because the cows must be robust enough to be able to walk on the farm’s hilly terrain.
“We need a cow that’s strong enough to climb those hills, not too big and wants to eat and stay up there and not wait at the gate wanting the lollies on the feedpad,” he says.
He 100% AIs the herd using CRV genetics with the spring calvers being mated for nine weeks and the autumn calvers for six weeks.
They use short gestation Belgian Blue semen on some of the herd to get better value for his heifer dairy-beef calves as part of the autumn calving mob.
The autumn-born calves go to the grazier in August, while 70-80% of the spring-born young cattle are sent to a grazier off-farm in December. Smaller cattle are kept on the farm and go to the grazier in May once the rising two-year-old heifers come back to the farm.
He has pushed back his spring calving date from July 7 in previous years to August, to take advantage of winter milking. The spring calving cows are dried off on June 25, while the autumn herd keeps the milk flowing.
He has also invested in Allflex cow collars to monitor heat detection, which he says have been hugely beneficial in front footing health issues among the herd.
Paskamp’s close proximity allows for easy integration between the two farms and he runs them as essentially one unit, but with two cow sheds.
Unlike the home farm where the cows are run as one herd, the cows at Paskamp are run in two herds out of necessity. A Staphylococcus aureus infection on the farm means he split the cows into a ‘clean’ mob and an infected mob, which is milked last to prevent cross-contamination.
Eventually, he plans to run the herd as a spring calving and autumn calving mob once those staphylococcus-infected cows are culled over the next few years.
They also run beef cattle on a 10ha block connected to the home farm.
He says he is always trying to improve the farm’s performance and lower its farm working expenses, and thinks there is some way to go before he would consider the farm in the top 10% of the country.
“But we’re masters of our own destiny too. We own the cows and we can crack into this,” he says.
Farm fact box:
Owners: Pieter and Johanna Ebeling
Lessees: Bram and Olivia Ebeling
Location: Lichfield, South Waikato
Farm size: 140ha
Herd size: 440 Friesian cows
Production 2020-21: 215,000kg MS (home farm)
Target 2021-22: 215,000kg MS
