Tree and milk combo for award winners
Andrea Fox meets the dairy farmers who took home this year’s North Island Husqvarna Farm Forester award.
Variety rules on the Waikato farm of Dave and Sue Forsythe, where the cows’ diet is as mixed as the tree types.
The couple have a 243 hectare intensive dairying and forestry operation almost encircling Waikato’s old volcanic Kawa ‘‘mountain’’, south of Te Awamutu.
About 185ha of the flat to rolling contour property is in grass.
The rest is steep land on Kawa’s western face, which hosts most of the forestry. Radiata pine, planted 17 years ago, is the prominent crop. Specialist timber forest species include sequoia redwoods, eucalyptus, cypress lusitanica, acacia, totara and oak plantings and kawa poplar. Native trees also feature.
The next big tree planting job will be along fence lines in the dairy paddocks, mostly deciduous exotics.
The farm milks 650-700 friesianfriesian cross cows in two herds which last season supplied Open Country Dairy with 346,000 kilograms of milk solids. The aim this season is for minimum production of 350,000kg. Calving was twice yearly, spring and autumn, but from this season will be autumn only.
The Forsythe cows have a supplementary diet almost as exotic as the trees.
Potato waste, mainly in the form of raw chips, provides starch for in-milk cows but can also be stored. Kiwifruit from Tauranga packhouses is a bovine favourite in autumn and cheese whey from Open Country a staple.
Icecream waste and corn steep liquor, a by-product of corn wetmilling, also make it into the troughs in the Forsythe covered feed pad when available.
The farm was one of the first users of palm kernel extract but Dave says it’s been off the menu for four years because the oil content quality has slipped along with its image. The farm was also a pioneer supplier to Open Country.
Liquid supplements are stored in five silos beside the feed pad and distributed via a 10,000 litre tank on wheels. About 20 tonne of liquid supplement is fed daily.
Supplements with a blend of grass and maize silage provide about 60 per cent of the herds’ diet, with pasture supplying the balance.
Oat silage was bought in this year. Paddock drilling-in of plantain has been successful, especially this year, says Dave, as a result of the wet summer and good pasture management by contract milkers Dan and Carla Swan, now in their second season on the farm.
‘‘We’re trying to balance their [cows’] diet, trying to keep them fully fed 12 months of the year and utilise grass better and so they’re not excreting so much nitrogen. We’ve been watching our milk urea levels closely for 15 years,’’ says Dave.
‘‘So while we are hearing that dairy farming is wrecking the environment, it can be quite the opposite.’’
The Forsythe farm, which has grown through buying land next to the couple’s original 50ha farm at Cruickshank Rd, taps technology wherever possible to improve efficiency.
Electronic identification neck collars enable the tracking of individual cow performance, and automatic gates direct cows to the feed pad and the property’s 200-cow Herd Home, which is used for dry cows.
Covering the large feed pad three years ago has taken two million litres of water use out of the system a year, says Dave. The farm features major solar panel installations. Calf feeding is automated.
Cows in season are identified by the in-shed technology system and automatic drafting during mating saves a lot of staff training time and makes the work of the manager easier.
Artificial breeding is being used for eight weeks this season. Leased hereford bulls are used to follow-up and wagyu bull semen on heifers to reduce bobby calf numbers. Earnings from the sale of beef calves are shared with the contract milker.
The property has two milking sheds. The main shed is a 36-aside herringbone and the second milks colostrum for calves and animals on antibiotics.
All dung and urine is collected and stored for use as fertiliser. Liquid effluent is irrigated onto pastures throughout the farm. No urea or artificial nitrogen is used. Sulphur is applied as required.
Soils are mainly Maeroa ash. The property gets up to 1400mm of rain a year.
The Forsythes, both born in Te Awamutu and raised on dairy farms, these days live off-farm but still on its doorstep.
Until two years ago, the farm was milking 950 cows but with the milk price going into freefall and after a management review, the decision was made to reduce numbers and take the farming system down a notch. The couple say they’ve always been adaptable. About 20 years ago they were System 1 and have gone to 4-5. ‘‘I know it’s changed now, but I got sick of skinny cows and overgrazed paddocks’’, says Dave.
Farm costs were slashed in the milk price downturn to under $5/kg and remain under the thumb, he says.
The farm management review was also the cue for the couple, who had worked up to farm ownership through sharemilking, to discover that rare dairy farming commodity - weekends.
They now regularly spend them at their bach at Aotea, between Kawhia and Raglan.
The forestry on Kawa Mountain was started for several reasons, not least being Dave’s passion for trees. Trees were few and far between on the blocks purchased by the Forsythes that make up their farm today.
When the Kawa Mountain block was bought 17 years ago it had a nodding thistle issue and apart from being exposed and steep and therefore unsuitable for dairying, had thin soils in places. It was going to be hard to keep under control without trees.
A cluster of old pines was cut down and replaced with cypress and new radiata pine. Weed control is provided by tree shading. The Forsythes also had an eye to diversification for longterm income.
They have yet to make any money out of their investment in forestry, says Dave, who is president of the Waikato Farm Forestry Association.
Many trees are still 20 years from harvest. The redwoods will be ready at different times and so will be selectively felled.
However, the couple have pocketed a return from being registered in the carbon emissions scheme.
Dave sold credits about four years ago when they were $20 each and bought back credits at a cheaper price.
The Forsythe farm has been officially reviewed and judged carbon neutral ‘‘and more than that’’, he says.
The couple’s next project will be to plant mostly deciduous exotic trees along fence lines in the farm’s 90 paddocks.
Dave says he was ‘‘blown away’’ at winning the North Island farm forester title – the first time the Forsythe property was considered.
‘‘You’ve got to go to the national annual conference [to be a contender] and we never could because we were always busy calving.’’