Rewarding farmers who embrace sustainability
Winners of DairyNZ’s Sustainability and Stewardship awards in the Ballance Farm Environment Awards have their eyes firmly fixed on progressing a positive future for New Zealand dairy.
“In general terms the spring has been very wet everywhere except Southland region so that’s impacted on the rate of calving throughout the country,” he told Dairy News.
“It is spring time but farmers have been saying how notably wet it has been compared to previous seasons for the same time of year.
“Obviously there are regional variations. But thankfully the pressure that is not here, but was around last year, is the milk price. Where they are able to and where appropriate we are seeing some supplementary feed being bought in to fill the gaps.”
Farmers are keeping cows off pasture where possible.
“Obviously they are conscious of conserving as much feed as they can before the spring growth takes off while minimising soil damage in the process.
“So sticking to the rotation planner they have got in place or the original intentions of feeding their stock has been challenging because of the weather.
“It has been notably wetter than previous years and that is supported by some of the stats from NIWA and the MetService.
“That’s farming though!”
Where the soils aren’t waterlogged grass growth is starting to come away a bit now because ground conditions are warming up, he says.
“But where soils are waterlogged, utilising the pasture is the issue, not so much what is being grown.”
There will be pockets and parts of each district “trucking along okay” but Bay of Plenty which had the flooding in April, and the Hauraki Plains which was extremely wet later on, will be struggling.
Speaking to Dairy News from Southland he said things there look pretty good relative to other parts of the country. But just further north, at Taieri for instance, you can see they are still suffering from the floods from a month ago. This “has been a challenge and curve ball which farmers didn’t need at this time of year”.
Federated Farmers Waikato provincial president Andrew McGiven says it has been a very, very wet winter. The ground conditions are saturated.
“We only need 3-5ml and we are saturated again so this sunny weather we are getting is gold at the moment,” he told Dairy News last week.
“To be fair I think we needed a season like this just to recharge our acquifers; those three or four years of drought we had, there were a number of wells and the like running dry.
“So I dare say we have recharged them all right, because all you have to do is dig a fence post hole and you are hitting water one or two feet down.”
Farmers with feedpads will be using them to the maximum at the moment, says McGiven.
“It is all about trying to maximise pasture utilisation and having the cows on the paddock only for the bare minimum of time to prevent pugging.
“I think it has shown that one pugging event can decimate your clover population by up to 80% so we are trying to look after our pastures for the coming spring and summer.
“Some people I have been talking to had had their annual rainfall by mid June. That’s unprecedented as far as I am concerned.
“Where I am we probably get a rainfall of about 950-1100ml (annually); last time I looked we were about the 1300ml already.”
