Matthew and Sarah Bolton established Oete Farm to showcase the dairy goat industry to New Zealanders.
Their success at this year’s Ballance Farm Environment Awards, where they won the supreme award along with four category awards for the Auckland region, validated the journey the business has undertaken since it was established six years ago.
Matthew says the awards success reflected the hard work and team effort from his 30 full and part-time staff spread across the 273-hectare farm at Patumahoe, west of Pukekohe.
“I haven’t won the Environmental Awards, we have won the awards – the staff, everybody – and I told them that they need to own this as well,” Matthew says.
The business has two farms – Oete Farm and the neighbouring Oakdale Farm, which is in its first season of production. He also has a 10ha gold kiwifruit orchard adjacent to the farms, run as a separate operation.
Properly showcasing the farm means being as transparent as possible and setting an extremely high standard with what takes place inside the farm gate.
The new 80-bail rotary shed on Oakdale, for example, will be equipped with cameras and Oete has an active page on Facebook.
“I want the New Zealand goat industry to be a good story. We don’t want to be tarred with any sort of indication of dirty dairying or anything like that,” he says.
“Our staff know that anybody should be able to walk onto this farm on any day and not see anything that they should not see.”
“We don’t swear at goats, we don’t hit goats, we don’t do anything like that. We treat goats like we want to be treated.”
Goats can only eat 3.5kg of feed a day so has to be of the highest quality possible.
Feed is constantly being offloaded in the sheds and he uses Lely robots to push it back towards the edges of the lane so it can be accessed by the goats.
He also receives constant feedback from NIG on the quality of the milk and factors that into the goat’s feed.
The two farms combined are 273 hectares and sit adjacent to each other on the road. They are run as one operation.
The main milking goats are divided into several mobs and he keeps the bucks and yearlings in separate pens.
Kidding gets under way in mid-July. It is their busiest time of the year and they will have up to 380 kids born in a day. At that time, the staff work in shifts throughout the day and night.
The kids are taken from the mother at birth, towel dried and are taken to their nursery and taught how to feed.
Within the nursery, the kids are kept in old wooden kiwifruit boxes, with shavings on the bottom for warmth, while they are reared on milk.
As they get bigger, they are transferred to a larger pen, transitioned onto grass before eventually going to one of the indoor sheds and are mated as yearlings.
The farm is currently rearing around 2200 kids in the nursery.
Oete also runs a programme with local schools that operates in a similar vein to calf clubs, where children purchase a kid and rear it at home until the local Ag day takes place where Oete staff judge the goats.
The animal is then returned to the farm and the family is refunded the money.
This year, 150 school children took part in the scheme, but pre covid-19 numbers were as high as 400.
For Matthew, it means the farm gets hundreds of goats back that were raised as pets and are used to human interaction whenever visitors come onto the farm.
“Another reason why we do this is to get children thinking that there are other opportunities out there other than just working in town,” he says.
The goats are mated naturally with bucks and no AI is used, which means a lot less pressure on staff after kidding.
One buck is used for every 35 female goats, any more risks the health of the buck, he says.
Goat’s hormones do not drop as fast as a cow’s, meaning the goats do not always need to be pregnant every year.
Some can be milked for two years and this along with a staggered mating helps him maintain supply over winter and manage kidding.
The main burst of kids takes place over July with a second smaller burst in late spring and another in autumn.
Matthew has a staff member whose job it is to monitor the goat’s heath, while other staff keep an eye on the herd while in the barns.
The goat’s feet are trimmed thrice a year, they are also vaccinated and blood tested. The barns are cleaned out four times a year and are continually topped up with dry shavings so the goats remain in a dry environment.
The cut-and-carry system means no pugged paddocks, which gives him peace of mind knowing that the goats are in good health.
“It’s one of these farms where you can sleep easy. If it is raining at night you know everything’s nice and warm, they’re dry and fed well.”
He expanded the farm after NIG approached him, wanting more milk. He had an agreement with the company that if they wanted more milk, they would come to the Boltons first.
He leased the neighbouring dairy farm for 20 years and built a new 80-bale milking shed and barns.
Being the only goat farmer in the region had its drawbacks during the resource consent process. Getting the necessary consents for Oete was a challenge for the then-Franklin District Council prior to the supercity amalgamation.
It proved to be a challenge again for the Auckland City Council when he applied for a resource consent for Oakdale.
“When we said we were setting up the second goat farm, they said it will be very straight forward – more of a copy and paste job – but it was anything but,” he says.
The process was delayed for several weeks causing him to delay mating his does, which otherwise would have been kidding on the new farm.
It created a temporary situation where Oakdale was not ready and for a short period he and his staff were working from 4.30am-1.30am the following day, training and milking goats as they had to care for the new farm’s goats as well as the existing stock on Oete.
Oakdale is now up and running with minor work still to be completed in the milking shed, such as painting and finishing off an observation room above the dairy to allow visitors to see the goats being milked.
Prior to Oete’s conversion, the farm’s nitrogen leaching rate was 37kg N/ha. Currently, it is sitting around 7kg N/ha.
Matthew says having such a low footprint also rubbed off on the staff. It made them feel good that they were working at a farm where things are done properly and correctly.
“And having fun while doing it,” he says.
“Why we started with goats is that environmentally they are a lot more sustainable on land. I was looking for a change, but also something similar.”
The staff all use electric vehicles to move around the farm and solar panels are used on the roof to reduce the power consumption in the milking sheds, providing most of the electricity required.
The shavings from the barns are returned to the paddocks, increasing its organic matter, or are sold to local farmers as fertiliser.
Over 100,000 native trees have also been planted on 5ha.
The paddocks are irrigated using gun irrigators. Moisture probes are used in the soil to measure when it is time to irrigate and the system uses Halo software to let Matthew know when the gun should be used.
“It makes the whole thing more efficient,” he says.
Looking ahead, he just wants the farm to get better and better.
“We just want something that we’re all extremely proud of and also because we have so many visitors to the farm, we just want to set a really high example of farming,” he says.
Farm Facts
Owners: Matthew and Sarah Bolton
Location: Patumahoe, Pukekohe, Auckland
Size: 273 hectares, two farms, Oete Farm and Oakdale Farm
Goats: 5500
Breed: Saanen, Toggenburg, British Alpine and Anglo-Nubian
Sheds: Oete Farm 56-bail rotary, Oakdale 80-bail rotary
