Year-round milking makes planning vital
Keeping the farm dairy up to scratch can be a problem when it’s used to milk cows 365 days a year.
Dairy farmers on seasonal supply usually have a window of opportunity to catch up on farmdairy maintenance when the cows are dried off; but when cows are milked the year round, shed maintenance requires detailed planning.
Kurt Vickery is a sixth-generation dairy farmer on a 420-cow farm of
123 (effective) hectares on Ngatimaru Road, Tikorangi. He is in his second season supplying winter milk to Fonterra.
‘‘I am the sharemilker,’’ he explains. ‘‘Dad is the farm owner and also owns the dairy herd.
‘‘Through the winter I have a milking herd, a dry herd and a calving or transition herd. There is not a single day in the year when the shed is not being used. The shed, a 40-bail rotary which was built in 2000, has got lights so I guess that if we have to, we work into the night.
‘‘However, from now (April 19) until the end of July, cows will be milked only once a day. From the time that we finish milking in the morning, we have got what is left of the morning, plus the afternoon, to catch up with farm maintenance.’’ Three generations of the Vickery family still work on the farm – Kurt, his father Derek, and Derek’s father, Malcolm.
The main property is used as a milking platform, while young stock are grazed on a 40ha run-off 10 kilometres away. Approximately
12ha of maize is also grown there annually.
Additionally, Kurt owns his own dry stock block of 330ha, of which
162ha are effective. This supports
400 beef cattle, all of the calves from the milking herd, plus 160 bought-in calves.
While Kurt and Derek are able to handle basic areas of shed maintenance on a day-to-day basis, professionals are brought in to tackle more complex issues related to the servicing of the milking plant.
‘‘The shed is our biggest asset,’’ says Kurt.
‘‘Usually, because of the time restraints, we generally get the experts in to do most of the milkingplant maintenance. We manage to do the day-to-day maintenance.
‘‘If need be, we can have the cows miked and the shed turned off by
7.30-8am, especially once we get into winter milk and I’m not milking many cows. ‘‘We get down to about
80-90 cows around this period. Every week, I dry off any cows which are due to calve in four to five weeks, so they will have only fourto-five-weeks dry. As cows are dried off, they go into the dry herd for two weeks, and then into the transition herd for a similar period.
‘‘At peak, at the end of September and the beginning of October, we are milking around 420 cows. Once the cows start calving, I go back to twice-a-day milking.
‘‘The difference between winter milk supply and seasonal milking, in terms of farm maintenance, is that with winter milk you need to be better organised. If we need to do a water line here or a fence line there, we need to plan for it a week in advance and sort the rotation out around that.’’
When the new rotary shed was built in 2000, meticulous planning ensured there was only a two-week window between finishing up in the old shed and the new shed being operational. ‘‘Dad actually milked in the old herringbone shed, and they built the new shed on the end of it,’’ recalls Kurt. ‘‘When the cows were dried off, the builders just smashed the end wall out and pulled the old cowshed down.
‘‘We still have the old herringbone, which is incorporated into the new shed as the exit race. We have a head bail and a crush
which operate as under-cover yards as well as an exit race. This enables us to treat lame cows and calve cows in the spring.’’
Because they have the necessary equipment, Kurt and Derek are able to do all of their own track and race maintenance. ‘‘We have a tip trailer, a digger and our own truck, so we can manage this by ourselves,’’ explains Kurt.
‘‘We have just finished installing a new irrigation water main up the left-hand side of the farm.
‘‘We will soon start installing a new water main up the right-hand side of the farm and will also extend our tanker track. This will be the third time we have had to do this.
‘‘There is quite a bit of work ahead of us in upgrading the cattle races and there is also a lot of fencing required. Wires rust out and posts break. Development fencing, such as riparian planting or pulling out hedge lines and replacing them with conventional fences, is also undertaken.’’