George Dodson on Efficiency and Low-Cost Dairy Farming

That's the view of George Dodson, the 2024 FMG Young Farmer of the Year and the founder of the Canterbury Young Dairy Farmers Leaders Network.

He was a special guest speaker at the recent Animal Health and Plant Association conference in Wellington, where he talked about his insights as a young up-and-coming dairy farmer.

George Dodson is a partner in a 50/50 share milking operation, along with his father and cousin. It milks 400 cows on a property at Leeston in Canterbury. As soon as he left school, Dodson began his farming career and by 20 was already managing a dairy farm. He has a great passion for the sector and in a relatively short time has emerged as leader with some valuable insights into dairy farming.

He says dairy farming has always been a low-cost business and it’s his intention to keep it that way.

“It’s just about managing production verses profitably. Obviously, costs are going to be tied to your production, so you will want to get as much production as you can to dilute your costs, but not for the sake of going out and spending money. It is just about being smart about what we put in our system,” he says.

Labour he says is a big cost and it’s hard in NZ because dairy farmers are very reliant on migrant labour. Dodson says the aim of his family is to run a low labour operation so that it can be run by him and his father, or him and his cousin or siblings. He says they want to get to a 600-cow farm and be able to ideally run it with just two people.

One of the pathways to this is applying innovation and technology.

“We are putting on Halter collars in September; that will make a big difference to our farm system. It will enable us to run two herds of cows, which means that we should get better performance out of our animals. As well, we are utilising a new fertiliser spreader and building a new cow shed. This will allow us to just have one person to milk the cows and this, and all the innovations, will drive efficiency and reduce labour,” he says.

A focus on management skills and keeping them up to date is another area identified by Dodson. He says embracing innovation and technology and such things as new pasture species are all part of a tool kit that can create a more profitable business.

“I think a lot of those sustainability targets are really well linked to financial and production efficiencies on the farms. For example, if you think you are losing a heap of nitrogen on your farm you are actually losing a heap of money,” he says.

Dodson says farmers should always want to do the best for the land because in the long term it’s the land that looks after them.