Reid’s involvement with Lincoln stretches back to the early 1980s when he started sharemilking with 115 cows about 100km south of the university, at Winchester, on a farm he subsequently bought. “The old Lincoln dairy farm was running then and they used to have some great field days,” he told Dairy News.
However, the model grew tired and foundered. Reid helped develop its successor, the Lincoln University-based South Island Dairying Development Centre (SIDDC) and today’s Lincoln University Dairy Farm, though he’s quick to play down his part. “The late Dr Bill Kain was absolutely inspirational. He started SIDDC.”
But Reid was a founding member of the SIDDC board and prominent in setting up the Lincoln University Dairy Farm (LUDF) in 2000 – 2001, later serving in its business advisory group.
Recently he led a review of LUDF’s direction, leading to its ‘Precision Dairying’ focus which has been in place just over a year. “I could see history was going to repeat itself if we didn’t do something. We were just doing the same thing year after year... It had lost its zing.”
Industry leading farmers, once regular attendees of field days, were starting to stay away. “I said ‘we have to reinvent this thing. What’s the next step?’ ”
The resulting policy appears to be paying off: milking slightly fewer cows but pushing for even higher pasture and milk production, and in turn profit, without increasing – and preferably decreasing – the environmental footprint.
“I’m pretty rapt with it,” Reid admits, reflecting on a 70kgMS leap in per-cow output in the first season, with record production per hectare too (Dairy News, July 24). “It’s an absolute credit to the management team.”
Reid is a past winner of the University Foundation’s South Island Farmer of the Year Award. He was a director of Alpine for 11 years before it became Dairy Group, served on the board of the DairyNZ predecessor Dexcel, and is still on the board of LIC.
Meanwhile his farming business has grown to 3500 cows and he’s still hands-on whenever possible: when Dairy News spoke to him late one night last week he’d just come in from selecting calves, after a day on site helping build a shed on his latest conversion farm. “I’ve got a fantastic job that’s kept me self-employed for 36 or 37 years. I just love dairy farming.”
The Lincoln University Medal, awarded by the university council, was instituted in 2008. It acknowledges meritorious service by staff members, alumni or community members for long and outstanding contributions supporting the “fabric and reputation” of the university.
