Striking gold with a dairy business
A West Coast couple are at the top of their game, writes Sonita Chandar.
Four years of panning for gold on the West Coast didn’t make Paul Stevenson a millionaire but in a way his dairy farm near Kumara got a lot closer to the jackpot.
Paul, who farms with wife Andrea at Taramakau Settlement, were named the Dairy Business of the Year (DBOY) West Coast winners last year.
They were first-time entrants and entered after a few people mentioned it to them.
Andrea says they gained a greater insight into their business to see how they compared with others. ‘‘Paul and I were both looking for fresh thinking in the business, especially as we had been really focused on our family. After the low payouts of recent years we felt like we needed a bit of inspiration as well.’’
Paul says the competition gave them confidence they were ‘‘doing things right’’ in most areas.
‘‘It highlighted areas where we could make changes and improve, especially in the environmental area with more riparian plantings, which is in the long-term plan.’’
They believe environmental management continues to be an important area of the farm business and are focusing on the areas they can improve on but acknowledge there is always room for further improvement. ‘‘We will be focusing on winter management of the herd and although we have a Herd Home, it is not big enough to hold the entire herd,’’ Andrea says. ‘‘This is likely to be an issue in the coming years from both an environmental and animal health perspective.’’ The Herd Home can hold 240 cows so they will be looking at options on how this could be increased.
Judges said they ‘‘demonstrated consistently good business performance in a number of areas and solid environmental performance’’. Their return on capital of 1.3 per cent was solid, with an operating profit of $318/ha and a cost of production of $3.61 a kilogram of milk solids.
Their pasture cost was the lowest at $232/tDM with pasture making up 81.7 per cent of the cow’s diet, with a further 4.9 per cent of the diet from home-produced forage. They also won the People Performance and Leadership Award of which they are particularly proud as they say staffing issues can be challenging.
The son of West Coast dairy farmers, Paul has been farming most of his life. ‘‘Farming is all I have really wanted to do,’’ he says.
‘‘I started milking when I was about eight and helped wherever I was needed. We did the usual stuff such as tractor driving and making hay.’’ Leaving school at 16, he worked on the family farm with his parents. But a couple of years later his father decided to retire and sold the farm, so Paul moved to Canterbury for one season before returning to the West Coast.
For four years he operated a digger at a gold mine. ‘‘At the time, there weren’t a lot of farming jobs around and the pay was pretty good,’’ he says.
He worked hard and saved every cent he could and bought a couple of rental properties in Greymouth.
Andrea grew up in Reefton, where her father was a builder and her mother a business manager. The family shifted around but returned to Greymouth when she was 16. She had always enjoyed the outdoors so applied for a job on a dairy farm. ‘‘That farm was a great training ground and where I fell in love with dairying.‘‘
She met Paul in 1997 and they married in 2001. They have three daughters, Mikayla, 14, Jess, 11, and Hayley, 7. They took on a lowerorder sharemilking position milking 280 cows at Kowhitirangi for a year before packing their bags and heading off overseas. In the UK, they both worked on a cropping farm. They returned home in 2001 and took on a lower-order job with Ian and Jill Robb and their sons Andrew and Noel who owned four farms.
The following year, they were offered an equity partnership so they formed Pan Farms Ltd. To fund their purchase, they sold the rental properties that Paul had bought earlier. They initially leased 200 cows. Two years later, they shifted onto another farm owned by the Robbs. This farm was bought by the partnership and consisted of two small farms that were combined to make a new 200ha property milking 400 cows. Over the years, this was increased to 600.
A lot of development work went into the property, including races, paddock formation and a new rotary shed. ‘‘The beauty of it was being able to increase our percentage in the partnership each year through the increase in production,’’ Paul says.
‘‘It came to a point the Robbs and ourselves agreed that as we had increased our share over time, it was now the best time and opportunity for us to take over completely, allowing the Robbs to move forward with their future plans.’’ People often ask them if they had help from family or if they inherited the farm and they are proud to tell them they did it all themselves. Last season the herd averaged 464 kilograms of milksolids to produce 267,000kg. They have set the same target this season.
The weather can be challenging on the West Coast as their annual rainfall is high at 3200mm.
‘‘On average, we receive similar sunshine hours to Canterbury,’’ says Paul. ‘‘But it when rains, it really rains.’’
They are great believers in wintering the herd indoors, which allows flexibility in their rate of feed and what they feed.
Springers are housed inside and calve in the Herd Home, especially if it is wet. But they do calve outdoors if the weather is good.
‘‘The Herd Home is definitely a must for us,’’ Andrea says. ‘‘We couldn’t do what we do on the West Coast without it.’’
Calving begins on August 7 and they keep about 120 replacements.
Their herd used to be fully jersey but they found the cows were a bit small so introduced kiwicross to increase cow size without going too big. Their long-term goals are to continue to work hard, grow the business and remain open to opportunities that may come knocking. ‘‘Who knows what is around the corner?’’ Andrea says. ‘‘I would love to build a 50-bail rotary and milk 100 cows – that would raise a few eyebrows. But to have milking over within half an hour sounds like a dream and would be fantastic.’’
The beauty of it was being able to increase our percentage in the partnership each year.
Paul Stevenson