High-tech farms help underpin self-sufficient economies

Led by Farm-To-Farm Tours (FTF), Rangiora, the trip began at Bergen, on Norway’s coast, and ended at St Petersburg. They visited 20 farms, six of them dairy, the largest milking about 300 cows.

FTF principal Ross Macmillan, a Lincoln agriculture graduate with 40 years as a farm consultant and tour operator, led the trip, the company’s third to the region – Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Russia. The company has organised and led 12 trips in the last three months, “catering largely for semi-retired farmers seeing this as their time to travel”.

Macmillan told Rural News the company chose Scandanavia for its population size – similar to New Zealand’s, spoken-English prevalence and hugely successful economies.

“Of course, we were there in high summer, 25oC, and it’s difficult for New Zealand farmers to imagine living and farming six months of the year under snow, but that’s the reality. So on visits to six dairy farms we saw every cow housed and producing 7000-9000L of milk (500-700kgMS/cow). Most of these are robotically milked. 

“The cows average 3.5 milkings/day and the trend… well it’s more than a trend, is to milk by robot split about 50:50 between Lely and DeLaval. The machines are strategically located and the labour saving is striking.” The bank interest on the $250,000 capital outlay may well be much less in these countries than the yearly wage of dairy shed workers the robot replaces.”

One farmer cautioned on robots about the need for ready availability of maintenance and repair handy to the farm. “If you have 50 cows wanting milk at midnight and a machine breakdown, that’s a lot of frustration and milk down the drain.”

‘Slow’ food, Macmillan says, is another term for locally produced food. “We ate the local fish in Bergen, local pork and beef, and all the seasonal berryfruit and vegetables throughout Scandanavia, much of it organic, driven by EU incentives for such produce. The EU monetary incentives for this are substantial. 

“Of course, one Kiwi visitor Kiwi asked ‘Why bother to produce milk at high cost? Just import it from New Zealand’.” But this takes no account of their collective memory of having been through two world wars. They’re keen to protect their food supplies and to eat local.

“These economies are very buoyant of course – notably Norway’s, on the back of North Sea oil and gas. Those cities – Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki – have many internationally recognised companies, many highly successful.”

Timber is huge in Sweden and Finland especially, and the wood is slow-growing and high quality. Some 30% of Denmark’s energy needs are met by biofuels and wind.

“They have no qualms about burning wood and straw for heating. We looked at furnaces 8m long x 4m wide x 4m high, running at 300oC. They use a front loader to feed in enormous logs and this heats water that’s piped to houses, barns and animal sheds including piggeries.”

This heat also dries grain harvested at 18-20% moisture and dried to 14.5% for storage.

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