Farm

I’m a rotten driver and it all started here

/ dairymilkmaid / 1 Comment
Alex driving the Bobcat

What's the holdup? Where did that idiot learn how to drive?

My late father used to tell anyone who would listen that “Marian’s a terrible driver, you know. Once, she would have driven us both into the river if I hadn’t snatched the wheel just in time.”. It was okay if I was there to defend my reputation.

You see, I was two years old at the time, propped up on phone books with a peg on the accelerator, while dad threw hay off the back of the ute. It was my job to steer the ute in serpentines and, according to legend, I had let him down with almost tragic consequences.

Although she is the ripe old age of five, Zoe does not drive and I’m not sure Alex has the right temperament just yet.

The hay is down and I’m hoping for a wet Christmas

/ dairymilkmaid / 3 Comments
Hay in windrows

No rain dancing until Christmas Eve, please

Christmas in this part of the world is always a surprise – you never know whether it will be stinking hot or if you’ll be running inside to the warmth of the pudding. This year, I hope it pours!

We have a huge slab of the farm’s pasture cut for hay and it’s going to be baled in the next couple of days. If we get some nice follow-up rains, our farm will be celebrating the New Year with spring-like pastures. If it disintegrates into a series of scorchers, we will have short, dessicated pastures.

No matter what happens, I have made the right decision to cut the stalk off and return quality to the pastures. Too much stalk for dairy cows is like too many rice cakes for an athlete: there just isn’t enough goodness in the diet. On the other hand, any farmer will tell you it’s foolish to be smug on the promise of a weather forecaster with your hay still in windrows.

A prickly character on farm

/ dairymilkmaid / 2 Comments

Dairy farms are great places to teach kids a love of – and respect for – creatures of every kind.

We are really privileged to have acres of beautiful bush on our farm and we come across all sorts of creatures – even the threatened goanna. One of the cutest but least cuddly is the echidna and the forest has thousands of these little ant-eating waddlers.

An environmentalist once told me that she builds connections with farmers via birds because they are the most visible fauna on a farm but it’s the far less glamorous and more timid creatures that make an ecosystem. This was brought home to me yesterday when one of the shire’s environmental staff visited to assess the farm’s potential for green projects. One of the criteria was whether the farm is home to threatened flora or fauna. Apart from the goannas, I really don’t know, and that’s a shame.

I hope my children will indeed learn so much more than I’ll ever know about our wonderful world.

Confused by milk prices? I am!

/ dairymilkmaid / 1 Comment

A little while ago, I made a lame attempt at explaining how we are paid for our milk. In my defence, the co-op’s most recent supplier newsletter has published this:

“MGC milk price figures are current for the 2011/12 season for a Traditional Payment Option farm supplying 155,000 kg MS. MGC milk price figures include announced loyalty payments, Productivity Incentive (PI), 2.5 c/l volume charge, premium 1 incentive and seasonal incentives. MGC milk price figures exclude levies, GST, share take-off, share dividends, Growth Incentive (GI) and future loyalty payments.

The value of milk supplied in December and January is illustrated below”

Dec 2011 Jan 2012
Fat% Protein % c/litre $/kg MS Fat% Protein % c/litre $/kg MS
High 4.67 3.73 36.6 4.35 4.80 3.70 39.2 4.62
Ave 4.06 3.24 31.4 4.30 4.17 3.22 33.8 4.57
Low 3.65 2.92 27.9 4.24 3.75 2.90 30.0 4.51

Apologies for the formatting of the table (MG did a better job in its newsletter).

Now, bear in mind that all of the factors in the text above the table vary from farm to farm and that there are two other payment models. We have chosen the Domestic Incentive model, which is completely different again. OMG. If I sound evasive when you ask how much farmers are paid for our milk, now you know why.

As the grass grows golden everything changes again

/ dairymilkmaid / 2 Comments

Feed bails

The new feed ration ready for tonight's diners


I shouldn’t admit this but I use the lawn as a bit of a guide to pasture growth rates. Our lawn is far from manicured and includes just about every grass species known to man. Of course, it’s not grazed either, so it’s really easy to see how it is performing. And, this week, we raised the mower’s cutter deck in an attempt to preserve its greenness.

That’s not to say I don’t watch the paddocks like a hawk. Out on the farm, we’ve been battling to prevent the grass from bolting to head, raising seed heads atop stalky stems that fill the cows with fibre rather than goodness. The seed heads also signal senescence – a type of hibernation for grass – dramatically reducing growth rates.

It means that rather than being able to graze a paddock, say, every 21 days, we must rest it for up to 60 days when summer really kicks in. To manage this, we strip graze the paddocks so the cows get a much smaller yet still fresh portion each day. With less grass on offer, we must make up the daily ration with supplementary feed. I have some gorgeous vetch hay waiting in the shed and there’s all that silage we baled just a few weeks ago.

My first step though is to lift the amount of grain we’re feeding to balance out the increasing fibre in the grass. Just a 1kg boost – easy enough to turn up the dial but, oh, what a performance it turned out to be!

The feed system is governed by a timer rather than a checkweigher, so we have to guess how much extra time to dial up, scoop samples into buckets, weigh and review if necessary but the scale’s batteries were flat. Determined to get it right though, I dumped a 1 litre juice bottle on top of a bucket of the current ration and, with Clarkie’s help, set up a rudimentary scale with a scrap metal rod suspended from a roof truss with hay band. It wasn’t glamorous but it worked a treat!

All I want for Christmas now is a yard hydrant wash system, an underpass and a pasture meter like Graeme’s.

Quad bike manufacturers look like Big Tobacco

/ dairymilkmaid / 2 Comments
Quadbar

Crush protection devices will save farmers' lives

Just like Big Tobacco before it, the quad bike industry has been adamant its machinery is not responsible for the deaths of Australian farmers – rather that they got themselves killed.

The Weekly Times and SafetyOzBlog have reported the gyrations of the manufacturers and their representatives, the FCAI, which even included forcing some sponsored riders to remove crush protection devices. They claimed that the only answer was more rider education and that rider error was almost invariably the cause of the 23 deaths on farm ATVs in 2011 so far.

I thought it was all over bar the shouting match when The Weekly Times reported that the FCAI had dropped its opposition to Australia’s crush protection device, the Quadbar. Then I heard that at least one manufacturer has advised its dealers that its position is unchanged.

Now, the SafetyOzBlog carries this media release from the respected and independent Australian Centre for Agricultural Health and Safety tearing strips off the FCAI for failing to correct what the ACCC described as misleading and deceptive conduct.

“Embarrassing or not, the families of those people killed and permanently injured in such rollover events have a right to know why the FCAI, as suggested by the ACCC, has not only misrepresented the evidence but why they have not addressed this issue in a timely manner. The inaction and questionable approach of both the FCAI and manufacturers is showing complete disregard for the safety of their customers.”

People on our farms are dying. No matter who is responsible for the rollovers, the Quadbar is estimated to protect between one in four and one in three people. It’s worth it.

For more information on quad bike safety, call the Australian Centre for Agricultural Health and Safety (02 6752 8210) or visiting the website at www.aghealth.org.au

Our cows are so cool

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Our cows are dignified ladies who like to keep their cool in more ways than one. Bred in cooler climes than Australia, Holstein Friesians start to feel the heat once the mercury climbs over 25 degrees Celsius.

We’ve been really busy preparing the farm to help them deal with hot summer days:

  • planting thousands of trees for shade

    New plantation for shade and wildlife

    New plantations will provide shade for the cows and corridors for wildlife

  • installing 4 kilometres of large capacity water pipes and 17 massive water troughs. Milking cows can drink up to 250 litres each on a hot day or 20 litres in a minute!

    Water trough

    Installing water troughs has been a 3 year project

  • putting up sprinklers in the dairy yard to offer a cool shower while they wait to be milked and

    Yard sprinkler

    A shower cools the cows, the concrete underfoot and offers relief from flies

  • adding salt, minerals and zinc to their diets.

    Feed in the bail

    Zinc is added to the cows' feed during summer

I also select the paddock for the day with a keen eye on the forecast. Today is pretty uncomfortable, so they’ve been sent to a paddock ringed with trees and will graze a more open paddock tonight.

Cool cows are happy, healthy cows who make more milk, suffer fewer illnesses, carry pregnancies better and are nicer to work alongside! Dairy research body, Dairy Australia, has done lots of work on heat stress in dairy cows and you can access lots of useful info at the Cool Cows website.

 

 

 

 

Why not have a whinge when we deserve it, after all?

/ dairymilkmaid / 6 Comments

On Tuesday, I was given the opportunity to have a really good cathartic whinge on Melbourne radio and I almost took it. The announcement of an increase in public transport fares prompted 774ABC radio host Mark Holden to ask for examples of what’s gotten cheaper.

The obvious answer is milk, of course! So I rang in and said consumers were getting a great deal on milk, which is at 1992 prices. He wanted to know whether farmers are doing it tough as a result. Now the answer to that question is complex and I wasn’t going to try to explain it all in five seconds so I said that, yes, one in three dairy farmers had left the land since deregulation but that Australians are among the world’s most efficient dairy farmers and that allowed us to deliver low prices. Now that’s a strange message, isn’t it?

It means that instead of whingeing about low prices, we can be incredibly proud of being able to deliver them. Most importantly, we can be incredibly proud of the shape we’re in: we haven’t succumbed to a factory farming model.

  • 98 per cent of Australian dairy farms are family farms rather than corporations
  • The average herd size is 220 (small enough to know every cow)
  • Our cows enjoy “cowness”, as Tammi Jonas would put it, free to roam the paddocks

In other words, our farming practices have become more and more professional without compromising the ethics that guide all the farming families I know: love of animals, love of land. We have a great story to tell and we should shout it from the rooftops!