The 31-year-old owns 1000 cows and sharemilks an even split of his herd between two neighbouring properties, colloquially known as Wixon Road Farm and Evans Road Farm.
Both farms were about 155ha each, and featured near identical setups including herringbone milking sheds.
Mr Goble was born in Lumsden and raised in Winton; his boyhood dream was to be a sheep farmer, despite his parents milking cows for a living.
"I’d been around dairy farms for a fair chunk of my childhood but I wanted to be a shepherd," he said.
When he left school, he worked as a shepherd near Te Anau.
After a year, he realised the dairy industry provided clearer pathways to advance his dream of farm ownership.
"If you are passionate about the dairy industry, it has a lot of opportunities," he said.
He began as a dairy farm assistant in Awarua — between Invercargill and Bluff — and then started lower order sharemilking, about 500 cows, on Wixon Road Farm about a decade ago.
Russell and Jordie Jack own both farms.
When he started in the job, a career plan was created by himself, Mr Jack and farm management consultant Ivan Lines.
As part of the plan, he was able to buy some of the cows he milked, and he leased them back to the Wixon Road Farm business after a year in the job.
For every three cows he owned, he was given one reared heifer calf as a payment.
"In the first year, you buy 100 cows and you get 33 calves ... and it snowballs from there and you’re away."
After two seasons, he began lower order sharemilking on Evans Road Farm.
He continued to buy and lease more cows on Wixon Road Farm until he was in a position to 50:50 sharemilk the property.
Two seasons later, he bought the cows on Evans Road Farm and began 50:50 sharemilking that property.
Every objective in the original career plan had been realised.
"We have ticked every box and we’ve achieved some earlier than we originally put on paper, which is pretty cool."
The career progression required plenty of hard work and was rewarding to look back on.
He and his partner Phelyn Beams, who rears calves and does the paperwork on farm, were searching for an equity partnership to enter.
"Now we are on to the next step, which has got to be land."
"We are pushing the cow production and we want cows that can do big milk, and they need a big shed to stand in."
Both farms he sharemilks on have two HerdHomes shelters.
The Evans Road Farm shelters were built for about $1.5 million, including groundwork, lanes, tracks fencing and $156,000 of rubber matting, about four years ago.
He was lower order sharemilking on Evans Road Farm at the time of construction.
A shelter being built as part of a 50:50 sharemilking operation was rare because the earning potential from the infrastructure benefited the sharemilker and cost the farm owner, he said.
When he became a 50:50 sharemilker on Evans Road Farm, an agreement was created with the help of Mr Lines that meant Mr Goble currently pays half of the interest payments on the cost to build the HerdHomes.
The shelters had allowed him to intensify his system, lifting milk production by drying the herd off later and calving them earlier, which helped him pay the interest costs.
Another two identical HerdHomes shelters were built on Wixon Road Farm the following winter for slightly more than $1.6million.
The main motivation for installing the shelters was to keep body condition on his herd and maintain milk production when a weather bomb hit.
The shelters were used for wintering, calving and as a feedpad, extending lactation, increasing production, reducing feed wastage and pasture damage.
A benefit of the shelters was fewer animal health issues, and they had no lame cows through the winter.
The cows were "happy as hell" standing on the rubber matting in the shelter, he said.
Before the shelters were built, the cows were wintered in Dunrobin in Western Southland, where they needed to be shifted every day by more than one staff member.
A return journey between Tisbury and Dunrobin was about three hours.
Now one staff member could feed all of the cows in the shelters.
He was thankful to have the shelters to use a feedpad during extended spells of bad weather, such as between March and November last year.
Despite the stormy weather, the business set a record for production of more than 620,000kg of milksolids last season, "but that didn’t come without a fair amount of feed".
Luckily, a good farmgate milk price helped cover the increased feed bill.
The herd was dried off on June 21.
Calving was planned to start on July 25, but some arrived earlier than expected.
A dry shelter kept cows happy during calving, especially during wet weather.
The in-calf cows were in a section of the shelter, eating silage, straw and any minerals required.
Being able to dictate the amount and type of feed given to certain parts of the herd was an "absolute game-changer".
The rest of the shelter was used for the remaining herd after their twice-a-day milking.
Cows were put in shelters for about an hour after each milking to eat a mix of silage and palm kernel before returning to a paddock.
When the cows ate plenty of feed in the shelter, they did not move around the paddock as much, as they ate less pasture.
A benefit of more sedentary cows was a reduction of pasture damage when conditions were wet.
Effluent captured in the shelters was spread across the farms from late October.
The effluent was spread on paddocks after cows had finished grazing them.
"You get some pretty good grass growth — it is rocket fuel."
The positives of the shelters outweighed the negatives, but one con was the investment required by a sharemilker to buy a feed mixer wagon and a slurry tanker to spread effluent.
He was considering using contractors with an umbilical effluent system, as it was a faster way to spread it than a slurry tanker, and would save time for him and his five staff.
The cows began wearing Allflex smart collars from about five years ago.
Data from the collars helped make decisions on the diet of the herd, especially the milkers.
At mating, the collars helped identify when the cows were in heat so they could be artificially inseminated with short gestation semen, to set calving across a shorter time frame.
"We calve thick and fast."
The shelters helped keep the cows full, happy and to maintain their body condition, which was beneficial leading into mating from October 20.
A lot of sexed semen was used in the first three weeks of mating, with the aim of producing as many heifers as possible by the end of August the following season.
His breeding programme objectives included improving udder longevity so they could cope with the demands of production.
To chase those genetics, they had been using some international bull semen in their breeding programme for the past two years.
He had no regrets changing career paths from sheep to dairy.
"I really enjoy the dairying. It’s not a job you’d do if you didn’t love it and there’s endless opportunities, especially in Southland — but you’ve got to put in the hard work."
