Dairy Farming for the Future
Jillian and Hayden Usher share their story.
In our early 30s, we had an opportunity to purchase the family dairy business off our parents at market value. An hour after we did this, Fonterra announced its massive drop in shares and we had not choice but to find an alternative way forward.
We needed to find a way to increase our profits or risk losing a third generation farm. At the time we were using conventional fertilisers and we had what I would consider very high empty rates, lames issues and mastitis.
The majority of the milking platform is heavy deep soils converted back in the 50s.
We found we had huge reserves of phosphate 60-70 years that the family had purchased unused. So we decided to find a way of unlocking that nutrient. We stopped using phosphate based fertilisers and started looking at liquid solutions. We tried many liquid solutions, never progressing forwards and we wanted but also not regressing backwards. Until we came across a product called Magnify and trialled it across parts of the farm and had significant results. We were 300-500kg of dry matter per hectare ahead in 21 days, ahead of what we were using.
After 2 years we had enough confidence to reduce our nitrogen back by two thirds. Our empty rate is now around 10% for 9 weeks with absolutely no intervention. The Vets are still saying that the district average is still around 18%. Our lames issues have reduced to basically nothing and also with no other intervention.
A surprising thing was our production sky rocketed, which we ha not actually anticipated. Our challenging time is in spring with calving, when we get tunnel vision, we get run down, we get stressed, but its not until we get out on the farm that we put our doubts to sleep as we see that we are doing quite a lot better than we thought we were.
We find that other people fear us going backwards by using new technology, but to date this is unfounded. We have now been farming in this way for 14 years and through regular soil and herbage testing and pasture assessment we know that we are not going backwards.
A couple years ago we took over a support block up at Bennets, just out of a wet winter, it had a totally different soil type than we have up here on the farm and a not as well known fertiliser history, so we are still using conventional fertilisers up there to get levels lifted up to where they need to be along side the Magnify products to supplement and implement the growth.
Our nitrogen levels are below 10kg per hectare, changing to Magnify has been extremely productive for us, reducing our carbon foot print overall as well.
We are only using 30-35 units of nitrogen a year and we are still growing as much as neighbouring farms who are using over 200 units per hectare per year.
We expected to see our Olsen P’s drop but instead have seen then increase slightly, so basically we run a very lean operation with a low cost structure, we don’t have a lot of imported feeds, because we have a low stocking rate we can generally grow the amount of feed we need. 130ha / 360 cows / 2.8 cows per hectare / 400kg per cow / 420 kg cows.
Overall the quality of the grass transformed – it was still green on the outside but different on the inside. Animal health expenses dropped to just $5-10/cow.
Written by
Jillian and Hayden Usher
