FEBRUARY 2019 ISSUE 100
WEST VIC REGION
Growing for success RICK BAYNE
THE HOLLOWAY family farm at Mepunga
has been built around growth, not only with an expanding parcel of land but with well-fed cows and booming production. “You’ve got to keep growing, the day you stop growing your business is the day you might as well sell it,” Bruce Holloway says, and the amount of investment over the past decade shows he practises what he preaches.
The Holloways think family farms are the future, but not small family farms like in the old days. Bruce and his wife Roslyn farm with son Sam. Their daughter Tamara also helps out, along with Sam’s girlfriend Amanda. Bruce’s father Bill bought the farm in the early 1970s, but it took a serious eye injury more than 10 years ago for Bruce to change things up. “I was cutting trees with a chainsaw and cut my eye down the middle. It was stitched up but it took 12 months to get back to normal,” Bruce said.
“After that happened it made me reflect that if something happened to one of us, what would happen to the farm?” An old herringbone dairy was replaced with a new 50-unit rotary; an effluent pond and two new centre pivots were added to supplement an existing pivot; and an underpass was built. The upgrade coincided with Sam’s decision to stay on the farm and become the sixth generation of the Holloway family to pursue farming. The milking herd has since increased from about 300 to 420–480. “We’ve gone from 2 mil-
lion litres production to 4.5 million litres this year,” Bruce said. They milk off 365ha, including about 100 ha under irrigation. “What we do is no different to most people, except we’ve got irrigation,” Bruce said. The upgrades, most recently including new grain silos and mixer, have been good investments.
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