Friday, March 29, 2024

Power to the people

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The power bill is a big expense for many farms. Anne Hardie talked to Franz Josef farmer Graeme Berry about using local resources to reduce that bill to zero. Water is an abundant resource around Graham Berry’s Franz Josef dairy farm, which prompted him to build a small hydro power scheme that now supplies all his electricity with enough extra to sell into the national grid and pay its cost. It was a lengthy exercise that took years to acquire the necessary consents and ended up costing nearly half a million dollars, but that extra power sold into the national grid pays the interest while the farm and dairy now pay zilch for electricity. Graham was looking for a sharemilking job 11 years ago when he ended up buying the 123-effective hectare farm a few kilometres south of the Franz Josef township. It backs on to Department of Conservation land that rises steeply into the Southern Alps, so the rain literally buckets down at times and the annual rainfall measures about 4.5m. It’s basically a dairy farm surrounded by rainforest, which makes it both picturesque and challenging. By the time Graham had made necessary improvements on the farm, it was more like a conversion, but today he milks 252 crossbred cows at 2.1 cows/ha and last season produced 102,000kg milksolids as well as wintering the cows and keeping the young stock at home. The trick has been keeping the stocking rate low and a bit of meal in the system to get through the tougher parts of the season. “The first year we were here it rained for quite a few weeks and we looked at what resources we had around here. I didn’t have a clue about hydro, but I talked with a local electrician who laughed at me and said it needed more water head.” Undeterred, he got talking with different people including the Department of Conservation, which owns the national park behind the farm where the hill provided more head for the water heading on to the farm. Ironic
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