When Canterbury sharemilker Karl Dean looks out the lounge window a shimmering Lake Ellesmere is virtually on his doorstep.
The shallow, brackish coastal lake is the largest in the province and managing a dairy farm so close to its shores carries a responsibility.
Maintaining a balance between running a commercial farm and protecting the property’s soils and nearby lake comes naturally to him and wife Amie.
Closer to the lake, heavy clay soils hold the water, but are baked hard in the summer.
A sandy ridge running through the farm was the former edge of the lake probably in the late 1800s, before European settlement, and its level dropped.
Now the ridge extends about 700m to 800m from the current lake edge.
Mr Dean said they took a simple approach of managing the lake paddocks by keeping the cows off when they were not growing grass.
Once the grass appeared they were dry enough to support animals and be productive, he said.
"Effectively we are farming half a lake edge and half an old lake bed. That’s good and bad. So now [in winter] we obviously don’t graze cattle anywhere near the old lake and everything is up towards the road which is about three to four metres higher in elevation to protect the soils."
They try to restrict grazing mainly young stock on the lake edge rather than mature dairy cows. The heifers produce less milk and eat less feed so excrete less on lake paddocks.
Mr Dean said they were like any Canterbury farmer wanting to be environmentally conscious by isolating wet areas to avoid disturbing soils.
The Deans run a 50:50 sharemilking operation with a herd of 450 cows on 320ha near Irwell.
That includes a 120ha lease block for sheep, beef and cropping which also comes under his oversight.
Both blocks are owned by the same landowners — Kelvin and Gem Coe — and the short distance between them helps with managing such a diverse operation.
Another lease block at Burnham used for beef finishing is owned by Mrs Dean’s parents.
"We don’t do anything simple here," he chuckles.
"The dairy side still makes up two-thirds to three-quarters of the income. I’ve been dairy farming for over 20 years and this is our seventh season on the property here and 13th year in Canterbury and before that I did six years in Taranaki as well."
A system-one farm, their milk-solid production is restrained by Canterbury terms for good reason.
"Obviously, the land down here by the lake is quite precious and you can’t be as intensive as you would further inland. So we average about 425 kilograms per cow with very little imported feed, mainly just a bit of straw for winter. Everything is grazed on the platform — young stock and wintering stock as well. So we do a lot of bale grazing for winter now rather than kale and we have just had some pivots put in the last 12 months so that will increase production."
As heavy as the mainly clay type soils are, when it gets dry the soils go hard and there is a shortfall of feed each summer.
With the addition of two new centre pivots — each 300m long — about 25% of the farm is now under pivot irrigation. A third 520m full-circle pivot is planned to replace gun irrigation over the next year or two to raise this to 50%.
Mr Dean estimates milk production would have lifted to 440/kg to 450/kg per cow had they been running before March.
"Commercially, it means milk production will be increased probably by 10% to 15% quite easily which is quite a significant amount. It means if we get a very bad year we can actually just keep growing more grass than we have in the past. We think we will make most of the gains year on year in the shoulders of the season when we will just want to put a little bit of water on, not a lot, on these two pivots."
In the past it has been a struggle waiting for soils to get just dry enough for the grass to start growing and there is a fine balance when it tips over into becoming too dry. By the time a round of water is laboriously completed they are often faced with soils either too wet or too dry, whereas the pivots will give them more control, allowing them to irrigate just the right amount of water they need without 10-day delays before the next round.
Nitrogen rates vary from year to year under the national cap of 190 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare per year for grazed land.
Mr Dean said they stick to putting on only enough nitrogen required to grow as much as grass productively as possible and limit it so not too much is going on the soil in one application.
"Some years we will use more because we have the ability to grow more grass and other years we don’t because if the weather doesn’t play ball down here there’s no point putting nitrogen on to have it wash away."
The property is lightly stocked at two mature cows per hectare, plus the young stock. Part of this is being self-contained with a run-off block incorporated in the farm and certain parts of the milk platform shut off for making silage and baleage for winter.
Halter collars detect cows in heat and a good reproduction increase in the herd has come from them allowing the Deans to feed the cows better in the spring.
Last year they had a 7.8% empty rate and about a 78% six-week in-calf rate.
A condensed calving is delayed for the main herd until August 3 because the soils can still be cold, depending on the season. If the water table is high and there has been a late spring, they don’t want to be stuck with not enough grass for the first grazing round.
This approach has produced more milk despite fewer days of milking at their 30-a-side herringbone shed.
Twice-a-day milking is tapered off depending on production rates. Before the pivots were introduced they would go three milkings over two days at Christmas and then once-a-day for March and April.
The thinking now is with more efficient irrigation they will be able to continue twice-a-day milking for longer from the extra grass grown.
Cup removers placed in the shed in their second year have reduced their labour needs to one staff member. An automatic drafter has sped up the process and last year a program called Herd-i used cameras and AI to detect cow lameness and body condition.
When they first took on the sharemilking job, their herd was sitting on about 390kg per cow. Partly, this can be attributed the dairy farm initially only being 120ha, not self-contained and the land was split differently for the sheep and cropping lease. When the lease was reviewed they were able to broaden the dairying operation within the original consent.
Continually improving their herd genetics has seen this increase. A mid-range cow producing 470kg is the goal, based on a Friesian and Friesian-cross cow with an Ayrshire and overseas-type larger-framed Jersey influence.
After their first year they introduced a no bobby calf policy and last year only three were counted.
To achieve this sexed semen is used in combination with beef bulls. The beef programme has helped the sharemilkers increase their income and even out highs and lows in returns.
To make it fair for the owners, milk powder is bought to raise calves rather than siphoning the milk vat. The leased land allows them to take the calves to 4-month-olds weighing 100kg to 100kg, with many of them sold to beef-finishing farmers in December and January.
The beef calves are trucked off to the North Island where they command better prices.
A round of artificial insemination is completed with the heifers with the best getting a sexed straw and those not impregnated joining the others by going to a Speckle Park bull.
The Speckle Park bloodlines are ideal for this because of their good calving ease, with the initially small youngsters growing out quickly.
"The aim is to have a good milking cow which can either produce a good dairy calf or a good beef calf."
Mrs Dean is in charge of managing the mating of mixed-age cows mainly with a mixture of sexed Friesian straws and Swedish Viking Red or Ayrshire straws.
A Why Wait program condenses the first round of mating from three to two weeks, with the top 50% of cows getting sexed semen straws to produce replacement calves, of which they will keep 120 of them. The rest of the herd goes to beef in a mixture of Murrey Grey and Belgium Blue bloodlines, sought after by breeders.
Bigger-framed beef calves are sold at 4 months old and they keep about 80 of the total of 300 calves themselves to raise them to rising 2-year-olds.
Over the the years they have refined selling beef calves privately from 20 buyers to three after developing strong connections. Belgium Blue calves have a strong following in Northland and some of the Murray Greys are sold to Banks Peninsula.
Prime lambs are sold from December to February at about 21kg to Woolworths or Foodstuffs via their agents.
Feed wheat, barley and maize are grown with planting selections varying each year. The plan to put in 20ha of wheat was dropped back to 13ha because it has been too wet, while barley has increased to 20ha as they farm within the seasons.
They try to grow 15ha-16ha of maize, half for grain and half for silage, and keep a paddock for grain if the market is good or chop it for silage otherwise.
About 6ha to 8ha is grown in peas for Watties’ Hornby processing site under a contract.
Crops are cultivated or direct drilled depending on the rotation and in a normal season half would be planted in spring and the other autumn-sown.
But a busy spring lies ahead as the planting has been truncated to only spring-sown crops because of the wet winter.
Mr Dean left school before turning 16 to go farming after growing up north of Wellington and spending holidays at his uncle’s farm.
He signed up for an unpaid cadetship 32 hours a week learning on a dairy farm in Manawatu for a year.
In Taranaki he worked his way up from a farm assistant to manger to contract milker and to a variable order sharemilker.
More than 100 cows and young stock were sold when they moved south.
"We’ve never been comfortable just doing one thing and are always pushing the limit. Even in our previous variable order job we had about 60 cows in Canterbury before we came to this 50:50 operation and we’ve put cup removers in, brought cows in to the herd, reared beefies, and we’ve done whatever we could on marginal bits of the farm and really pushed the market to make as much as we could to get ahead."
As often as not, this means an eight-hour sleep is a stretch, but he ticks along nicely at six and a-half hours. At calving, that gets squeezed to five hours.
Mr Dean said the Coes deserved praise for continuing to invest in the farm.
The property is just down the road from Coes Ford — showing how long the farming family has been in the area.
"They have been great and very supportive of my role with Federated Farmers as well. It’s quite a thing for an owner to let a sharemilker be off the farm and trust that things are going to run fine. They bought the farm 50-odd years ago from Kelvin’s uncle. I think the original farm was down by the ford so they have a long legacy in the area. It’s quite a tight-knit community in Irwell with three main families still in the area."
Until lately Mr Dean, 36, has somehow split his time between a family of two young daughters, running a sharemilking business and being the Federated Farmers North Canterbury provincial president and vice-chairman of the national dairy council.
That has gone up another notch with the sharemilker becoming the new national dairy chairman and national board member for Federated Farmers.
Juggling his new responsibilities was always going to be an undertaking and manager Brady Ballard has been put in to run the dairy farm to lighten the workload with staff member Nikita Maulgue.
A part-timer will join them for calving and pitch in during the irrigation season as they still have 85 long-line lateral sprinklers.
Mr Dean will remain in charge of the cropping and sheep and beef business.
The farm’s many strands keeps him interested and while cropping returns are back, milksolid, lamb and beef prices are in a good space.
The prospect of back-to-back $10/kg milk payout has seen them reinvest back into their business and reduce bank debt.
"If we have another good solid payout this year hopefully that will get us into some land. But we have to be able to buy somewhere nice and close that we can continue to run this place because it’s a really good way to generate cashflow and get ahead. But it’s such a big jump to go from 450 cows to any sort of farm. We could probably buy some blanket land and put it into cropping and beef with the machinery and infrastructure we’ve got and span this quite easily."
A long-awaited jump in dairy cow prices by about 25% for herd owners this year, after a 13-year interval, will help them in this direction.
Buying a dairy farm would be a bridge too far at this stage, but is the dream goal.
