Dairy to be different

“We have our fair share of debt, but we try to do some living in between the worrying”, says dairy farmer Mark Pike.

Working 130 hectares near Matamata in the fertile dairy lands of the Waikato, Mark has settled on a novel way of farming that revolves around leaving the cheque book in the drawer and keeping the stress levels down. It’s called low input farming, and for Mark it’s led, more by accident than any hard-line green philosophy, to producing only organic milk from their land

Mark and wife Jane purchased their land over the course of a few years and moved down from Auckland in the 1990s; Jane grew up on the land and wanted her kids to have a similar upbringing. They now have two boys, William and Harry, and have been certified as organic with BioGro since 2001.

Accidental greenies

Mark describes their milk as a “clean” product that’s far better for the environment – yet it wasn’t concern for the environment that sparked the change.

“At the time it was driven by the chequebook,” says Mark. “It was the late 90s – we were sharemilkers at the time, and things were starting to go wrong.

“We just seemed to be writing cheques all the times. We didn’t want to pay those big fat bills – fertiliser bills, bought-in feed. So we wanted to change the way we farmed before we recognised it as organic. It started happening before we gave ourselves the label.”

That’s not to say the Pike family don’t care about the environment – that was part of it too. Mark had a desire to “let the naturalness creep back in”, and realised a way to do that would be to put less into the land, while letting nature do more of the work.

However, that’s a view at odds with mainstream practice in dairy farming these days, which Mark describes as very intensive and very high input.

Put simply, high input farming, the current standard model in this country, is all about getting a higher yield – more valuable milk – out of the same sized piece of land. That means cramming more cows into the same space – and more cows means you need to grow grass faster. That in turn means using high levels of fertiliser, greater volumes of water, and buying extra feed when the grass gets low – all of which sees the farmer pulling out their chequebook or accumulating debt in the hope of big pay-days when the milk leaves the gate.

Of course those high inputs also mean high outputs for the environment – excess fertiliser killing the natural organisms in the soil and leaching into the water table; more cow effluent polluting streams; and higher rates of illness amongst animals living in stressed and cramped conditions.

The low input approach

Mark, on the other hand, says a low stocking rate is critical to his approach. Before going organic and low input he ran 350 cows, producing between 100,000 and 110,000kg of milk solids in a season. He’s now dropped that to 100,000kg off 290 cows on 120 effective hectares – or a respectable 344kg of milk solids per cow. That’s higher than the national average for 2010/11 of 334kg and because the milk is organic Mark is able to sell it at a premium ($1.05 per kilo extra on top of the base price paid by Fonterra). In short Mark reckons he can feed fewer, better, for much the same production.

So how is he doing it?

A big part of the secret is laying aside more land for growing feed. That means better nutrition for the cows – and less stressful financial exposure to extremes in weather that can affect grass growth. For example, Mark says his farm has survived the drought without the need for culling or selling any more animals than usual, and reckons he’s “sitting pretty” on a bounty of feed that will see him all the way through until the end of winter. By contrast a mate up the road who’s running the same number of cows on a high input model has just had to spend $230,000 on feed.

Of course, you can’t expect to sit back, do nothing and expect the land to perform: low input farming takes a lot of planning and work. Mark’s philosophy – and the BioGro rules on organics – mean the farm can’t use hormones, animal health treatments like teat sprays, or antibiotics. Natural remedies can deal with some ailments, but for the most part animal health tends to be a matter of prevention rather than cure. After all the best way to fix a problem is to avoid it in the first place, says Mark, who believes their low stocking rate keeps stress down in the herd, which in turn means fewer health problems in their cows.

Using conventional fertiliser is also a no-no, so Mark uses products like lime and chicken manure. In keeping with the BioGro rules the manure needs to be sourced from certified organic chicken farms and the driver who delivers it knows to make the run to the Pike farm his first for the day: that way the organic manure doesn’t get mixed with any leftover chemical fertiliser in the truck.

Living Earth

Mark’s also enthusiastic about a compost product he’s using that, he believes, is contributing to healthier soil and more nutritious grass. Living Earth produces an organic compost that Mark has been trialling for 19 months, and he’s impressed with the results.

The company is one of the largest collectors of green waste in New Zealand and has a philosophy of sustainable development. They take leafy waste from home gardens and transfer stations and turn it into valuable organic mulch and compost by cooking it in long windrows on Auckland’s Puketutu Island, and in Bromley, Christchurch.

Since setting up in 1994 Living Earth has diverted over a million tonnes of green waste from landfill, which is helping councils meet their waste-reduction targets – and helping Mark grow “quality grass and plenty of it”.

The compost is available to both domestic gardeners through gardening stores and large-scale rural customers and is tested regularly to check that it contains the right quantity of valuable minerals, plus what Mark calls a “tickle” of natural nitrogen to boost plant growth.

“It’s a great product, and the livestock are looking good.”

The philosophy at Living Earth also clearly fits with his attitude of letting the naturalness creep back in, and the Pike family’s way of doing things on their farm. “It’s recycling isn’t it,” says Mark.“It’s so sustainable it’s slapping you in the face.”