Sally says she was complimented by the Dairy Industry Award judges on how she kept the farm office, but it is actually all Chris’ work. He is organised and meticulous equally in the office and the milking shed, she says.
“It is something he should be very proud of; he does that in all aspects of the business. He basically does all the bookwork himself as that is one of his strengths.”
Chris is a one-man band on his parents Oak View Farm near Karaka, South Auckland, but he takes an afternoon once a week to catch up on the office side of the operation. Otherwise the inside jobs get put to the side.
Chris told a winners field day at Oak View that the DairyBase tool is new to him but it is “a wonderful tool to give a picture of where you sit and allows you to benchmark yourself against others”.
One thing highlighted as they moved through the competition process was that their operating expenses are quite high. “So it has given us ideas to move forward on -- areas to focus on.”
Dairybase has given them an insight into what they should be doing so they can get a better picture.
Chris said Xero is a good tool because you can backdate, look at where you’ve spent money, run budgets, run as many reports as you want and search history and it is simple to use.
He says in their first season (2016) they didn’t budget correctly. “It is important to budget because it is so easy to overspend in different categories.
Monitoring is key because if you overspend in an area you can attempt to flick that money out of another area or find the reasons why you overspent and try and reduce it.”
Chris and Sally are 50/50 sharemilking 200 cows on Oak View which has been in Chris’s family for five generations. His father Allan retired in 1999 and brought sharemilkers on to run the farm. He helps Chris out “filling some gaps” on the farm at times.
Chris and Sally met in Australia five years ago while Chris was doing a wheat harvest. Sally is from a sheep and beef cattle station. They decided to move to New Zealand to pursue a dairy industry career, knowing an opportunity would arise on Chris’s parents farm.
He wanted some experience before becoming a sharemilker on the family farm so they started in Matamata in 2014 and he progressed to a 2IC position in Waerenga.
Sally worked off farm as an art teacher until they had their first child in 2016. She says the vision statement for the farm is fostering for the future: looking after it today so it can flourish tomorrow.
“We believe in investing in our family and our livestock and environmentally sustainable practices on our farm.
“We are doing all this work today so we can build a secure future for our family. Even though we are starting out small, if we keep working the way we are and investing in our family, livestock and on the farm we will have a bigger business in the future.”
She says it is great to be on the family farm with proximity to Auckland CBD, however in the long term they cannot afford to remain in that region. The Guy family will sell Oak View and become equity partners in a larger farm.
A2 milk in the pipeline
Oak View is a 95ha total farm area with an 80ha effective milking platform. They lease an adjoining 80ha of which 10ha is part of the milking platform.
Chris milks 200 cows in a spring calving herd. Last season they were system four but this season they tried to run a system thee and utilised the runoff for supplement rather than buying it in, he says.
They milk through a 16-side herringbone; their shed and yard are small and that is their biggest limitation on expansion.
They use the adjoining lease block to raise young livestock, drawing down the loan as quickly as possible and planning to move on to a 500-plus sharemilking farm. The lease block is economic using 10ha in the milking platform, wintering cows there, rearing 2-year-old beef or heifer calves for sale and growing 150t of silage.
Chris says on the lease they started with 93 replacement Friesian heifers out of their herd from which they now have as R2s. Because of the low payout in the first season they reared 60 Friesian bull calves to weaners and steered the rest and carried them through.
They generally carry through 115 stock each year to 2-year-old. They need about 55 heifer replacements for their herd.
In the season just gone they tailed with Hereford bulls and kept a lot of red-and-white face calves to diversify into the beef market.
“It is quite hard to sell in-calf heifers whereas with the beef calf market, if you find yourself in a pinch you can exit at any stage,” he says.
They now sell early Friesian bull calves at 4-10 days while the money is still good and white faces are also sold early.
He knows he makes money from the lease block but for a one man operation it can be time-consuming so he wants to keep its operation simple.
They will bulk milk test their herd this year to see what percentage are A2 and if it is close, they might head down that track.
“There’s definitely dividends to be made by being an A2 herd and if it’s achievable we can get there.”
