Mark and Vicki Meyer milk 400 cows on their 190ha property northeast of Dargaville, in the northeast corner of an area farmers say is likely to go through its fifth drought in six years.
While much of the country has had a gentle summer with equal amounts of rain and sunshine, the west coast of Northland has been plagued by dry windy days. Little rain has fallen from October to February and dry winds have drawn out soil moisture.
Meyer says his farm is no exception: the property has had only 190mm in almost three and a half months. There was 68mm of rain in November, 82mm in December, 40mm in January and nothing to the time of writing on February 14.
He estimates that pasture growth deficits for the farm sit at over 500kgDM/ha for the autumn period and serious rain needs to fall to prevent the herd from needing to be dried off early, not good when trying to improve reproduction.
In the 2004-05 season 20-25% of the herd the couple was sharemilking at the time was empty. To improve reproduction they put young stock and valuable older cows onto once-a-day (OAD) milking for the entire season. Only the strongest, most capable cows were on twice-a-day (TAD) milking through to December when they also went on OAD.
The result is an average body condition score of 4.0-4.5 despite dry conditions and empty rates of 6.7% in the 285-cow OAD herd from nine weeks of mating.
However, keeping condition on stock becomes difficult when faced with drought-like conditions and dwindling silage stocks.
Meyers feed only grass and grass-silage and he says that with the exception of a 15ha turnip crop, animals have access only to grass. “I try to run a low cost, low input system. I’ll only stick something into it if I can see it fitting in with the way I farm.”
Meyer intends to feed palm kernel next month if rain still holds off, but wants to be sure all his empty and cull cows have been removed.
“There’s no point putting supplements into something I’m not going to keep at this time of year.”
They have used earlier pregnancy and herd testing to make their decision easier, all the cows being herd tested and pregnancy tested within a day of each other.
Empty cows were the first to be culled but as there were so few they were able to look hard at other cows to improve the herd’s overall performance.
Older cows, poor producers, cows with odd-shaped udders and cows with high somatic cell counts will be on the short list.
Empty cows were due to have gone off the property on February 20 and cull cows not long after. Meyers will decide in March, if no rain falls, whether to buy in PKE.
While the cow’s production has largely held steady and the farm has already gone past its 120,000kgMS target, Meyer says he has shifted stock from the TAD to the OAD herd and will dry off animals from there depending on body condition. “I mark cows I think are dropping condition while I’m in the shed checking them off at milking time.”
However, he says the pasture on his farm doesn’t need a whole heap of water to kick it into gear.
With a large amount of kikuyu on the property Meyers is confident 20-30ml of rain unaffected by wind will be enough to make pastures shoot off again. “Kikuyu doesn’t need much rain before it shoots away.”
Once that happens he will try to find a round long enough to allow rye to rejuvenate while being short enough to stop kikuyu getting too long.
