Inside the Moxhams' Award-Winning Organic Dairy Farm

Their farm is located at Koputaroa, a small rural community about eight kilometres north of the township of Levin. It's an established dairy farming area - the local primary school was built there in 1891.

It's flat to rolling country and has some low-lying swampy areas and to the east are the formidable Tararua Ranges. The Moxham family have farmed here for the past 50 years.

Wayne and Ange have two farms - both certified organic. The larger of the two runs 500 cows on 240ha and the smaller one - 70ha runs 120 Friesian cows that produce 45,000kgMS, and it's this farm that won the award.

Wayne Moxham says his father had been farming all his life and did the usual thing of putting on lots of superphosphate and nitrogen, like others around him did. But he says his dad saw the farm start to decline under this regime, wondered if there was a better way and suddenly switched to just applying lime and things started to come right.

A few years on, Wayne says a friend suggested that they were close to becoming organic, and this triggered them to become officially a certified organic dairy farming operation in 2010.

"Fonterra at the time were paying a premium for organic milk, so we thought we'd give it a crack, and the more we got into it, the more it made sense to me. There weren't a lot of organic farmers around when we started, so we kind of had to work it out for ourselves. But since then, more farmers have converted to organics and that's helped," he says.

One thing that strikes you when you go for a farm walk on the property is the quality and lushness of pasture. Like most organic farmers, the Moxhams rely on quality pasture because it's pretty much impossible to source organic supplements from off farm. They harvest baleage in the spring and they are a grass-based system.

Before they converted to organics, they just planted ryegrass and clover and when they sprayed out the weeds, the clover died. This is what conventional farmers do, says Wayne, but he believes this just poisons the ground. Because he can't spray out the paddocks now, Wayne just runs a rotospike device over the land and sows the seed.

"When we re-grass we put in multiple species such as plantain, chicory, clover, different species of ryegrass and even sunflower seed. We don't use coated seed either because that is unacceptable for organic farming. So now our girls (cows) don't just have a constant menu of ryegrass, they have other species and as a result are happier and healthier," he says.

There are other advantages with mixed species, says Wayne Moxham. He says the likes of plantain reduce nitrogen emissions and also the different species of grass grow better at different times meaning there is always quality feed available.

Business Expands Into Gelato

Management of the farm has been the key to the production of the high quality of organic milk and since 2010 they have been supplying quality organic milk to Fonterra. But in 2019 the couple made a bold move that has set them apart from many dairy farmers - they decided to build a creamery and bottle and sell some of their organic milk to the public.

Up until then, Ange Moxham had been working as a deputy principal at a nearby school, but with building of the creamery underway, she decided to quit teaching after 25 years to work full time on the farm, with a particular focus on the creamery.

Staff were employed to run the farms on a day-to-day basis while the couple focused on the creamery, with Wayne keeping an oversight on the farms.

"Part of the deal about devoting our time to the creamery was to make sure we had a quality [farm] manager and assistant manager, because Wayne still couldn't be in the cow shed milking if we were to launch our creamery properly," says Ange.

Udderly Organic is launching organic milk gelato.

In September 2023, after months of trials and tests, Ange and Wayne finally won approval to sell their milk and quickly sales have built up. Wayne says the word has got around about their milk and they have been besieged by customers wanting to stock their product. They now deliver their milk daily to more than 100 outlets, ranging from Wellington in the south to Masterton in the east, and north to Whanganui and Palmerston North. They employ staff to do this, however, Ange says from time-to-time Wayne hops in the van and does a delivery.

"He likes getting out and meeting the customers," she says.

But there is one more twist to this story. Ange and Wayne are now in the process of launching another product made from their milk - gelato.

"What we do to make it more attractive to the people who stock our milk is at the end of the week we take back any that is unsold and we don't change them for it. But that product is still perfectly good, so we freeze it and are now using it to make our gelato," says Wayne.