Big changes all part of Century farm’s story
Change is the only constant when you’re farming and a Waikato family has seen more twists and turns than most in 110 years on one property, writes Andrea Fox.
Tirau couple Les and Gwen Syme can only watch while their son turns upside down the way they dairy farmed for years.
But the new Century Farms and Station Award recipients couldn’t be happier.
Son Alan, who in 2015 bought and leased the titles which make up the picturesque 230-hectare Syme family farm bordering State Highways 1 and 5, makes no bones about why he has since switched from a System 5 operation to System 2.
‘‘Mum and Dad’s mentality is production. Mine is profit.’’
The season just ending is Alan’s second as owner but fourth back home at Mataora farm since he swapped a high school teaching career, which included overseas stints, for his dairy farming heritage. This dates back to 1907 when a young Irishman, William Fitzgerald, began a 999-year lease of 193 acres at Tirau, one of 10 farms balloted from a 2550-acre block called the Mangapouri Estate.
Fitzgerald was Les Syme’s grandfather on his mother’s side. When he and his bride of three years Matilda, sighted their ballot win it had no buildings, no permanent water, few fences, little grass and plenty of turnip fallow, oat stubble and manuka scrub. Encouraged by the enviable government scheme of the time which decreed that their lease payments counted towards freeholding the property, the couple set to and built a cowshed, windmills, a stable and a villa – in which great-grandson Alan grew up – and created water reservoirs and planted several species of large trees.
The farm was freehold by 1919. The couple had three children, one of whom, Mary, or Emmie as she was known, left Tirau Primary School aged 12 to help her father milk 60 jersey cows.
In 1932 Emmie married Albert Syme and in 1944 they bought the property from her parents.
The young couple were among the first of the district’s farmers to send whole milk to the Waharoa dairy factory instead of cream to the Tirau butter plant. They had three children, including Les (Leslie), who bought the farm in 1970.
Les, now 80 and diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease 11 years ago, recalls when he left school the farm was carrying 60 cows and 500 sheep, which he phased out. He met Hamilton-born and bred Gwen, a teacher, through a mutual friend and she joined him on the farm in 1973.
Their expansion of the original home farm started in 1981 with the gradual purchase of three neighbours’ properties – always, Gwen recalls, with a deep intake of breath and many sleepless nights about taking on debt. But doubts were overridden by the conviction that the opportunities to procure more of this fertile Tirau ash soil were too good to miss.
Contract milkers have been employed on the mixed contour property for 15 or so years, with intensive System 5 farming being introduced during the high milk price years of 2010 to 2014 as they chased production.
In 2009 the properties, though on separate titles, were joined with the building of a 54-bail rotary cowshed on the home farm.
Fast forward to this year and the days of $2/kg milksolids being spent on supplements alone to achieve 360,000kg a season are just an unpleasant memory as Alan seeks to make the business profitable again using mostly pasture. It’s still a work in progress, he says.
‘‘I’m still trying to find the sweet spot. Some changes have been good, there’ve been some mistakes too and there are areas to improve on. But it’s better than it was.’’
He employs contract milkers who have two staff.
Cow numbers have been increased with 735 milked at the peak of the 2016-2017 season in two herds, compared to 700 the previous year. The friesian and crossbred herds were dried off early in May after yielding 254,000kg milksolids for Fonterra. That was below Alan’s target of 280,000kg, which was impacted by the wet cold spring and the high number of young cows in the herds. Around 35 per cent were first-calvers in 2016-2017. Next year it will be 25 per cent, but that’s still high by industry standards, says Alan. He intends to increase cow numbers again in the new season.
‘‘I’m trying to turn over a better cow. The cows we had don’t suit what I’m trying to do. We had and still have, big friesians but we have lots of hills here and a smaller cow would be more efficient. I want an easy-care cow.
‘‘The aim is to get a better cow with better genetics. Some of the cows we had were decidedly average so I’m culling a bit deeper and putting better ones in their place.’’
Artificial breeding by LIC is used for six weeks with recorded leased jersey bulls following up. ‘‘That’s different again to Mum and Dad who used to buy hereford bulls,’’ says Alan.
‘‘But in the end I decided on jersey bulls which are cheaper, a lot tougher, more active and with less weight and smaller calves, there’s less damage to cows. The calves aren’t worth as much but it protects the cows. I don’t have to find that money to buy bulls or worry if they get lame.’’
He’s also drying off earlier in the season than his parents did and has brought calving forward. Heifers will start on June 20 and the main herd on July 1.
‘‘It’s about days in milk. I think it’s an easier hole to fill at the front of the season than the back. You can put feed in at the front and know the grass will start to grow soon. Our risk here is summer dry, so if we can get in the days in milk before Christmas we still have other options – we can go oncea-day or culling or crops or put feed in.’’
Gwen says before Les’ illness they had a good herd with good genetics but quality slipped as they tried to keep things simple to cope.
‘‘It’s good Alan coming back and seeing things with fresh eyes.’’
But none of the changes are set in concrete, says Alan, who with wife Liz has four young children.
‘‘What we’re doing now might be different in two years. I’m open to change. Last season (2015-2016) we kept calves on as weaners, this year we didn’t. Next year who knows? This season we grew 7ha of maize. The year before we grew chicory but didn’t this year. That’s not to say we won’t next year.’’
His drive to turn the herd over to jersey and jersey-cross has seen a high rate of replacements kept but this will fall as cow quality increases. Alan says returning to the family farm was ‘‘always at the back of my mind’’ and his father’s health was the decider when a teaching contract finished in the Cook Islands and a job in Singapore beckoned.
Dairy farming has changed significantly since he grew up on the farm and he’s had a lot to learn.
‘‘There were no systems as such back then but looking at the bills that were coming in, it didn’t make sense. When I came back there was a contract milker still in place so I could learn the business which was an advantage. There’s lots of stuff I still don’t know, I’m still learning, but the other side of that is that I don’t have pre-set ideas.’’
He’s completed an ITO agribusiness diploma and attending a swag of Dairynz discussion groups has been useful.
‘‘Our focus is on pasture as the cheapest feed source offered and looking after that. If there’s a hole we’ll put something else in it, maize and maybe a bit of PK if required and we harvest a bit of grass silage.
‘‘In total for the season we try to get 16 tonnes of pasture down a cow’s throat. The big one for us is trying to graze at 1500 (postgrazing residual kg Dm/ha) which is the industry standard.’’
With the new focus on grass feeding, Alan’s been aggressive about regrassing, in the past four years renovating about 75 per cent of the farm with various species of rye and clover.
‘‘Mum and Dad didn’t really have a programme for regrassing but I’m trying to grow more grass and we’re using more nitrogen than in the past.’’
Fertiliser application depends on annual soil tests.
‘‘It’s a whole different mentality. I’m high debt and Mum and Dad weren’t so my focus is to drop those farm working expenses.’’
He’s got them down to just over $3/kg from $6/kg and aims to achieve that consistently. ‘‘Every year they’ve got lower and lower but it’s like turning the Titanic.’’
Les says he’s happy with the changes ‘‘if it works’’.
The family’s 110 years of continuous farming was honoured at a Century Farms award dinner in Lawrence, along with 35 other farmers. Whether Mataora stays in the family another century will depend entirely on whether it is profitable, says Alan.