13 minute read
Road to dairying
by AgriHQ
Moving on up
By Tony Benny
This month we begin our Road to Dairying series, where we’ll chat with farmers who are relatively new to the industry and take a look at their journey so far.
Peter O’Connor always knew he wanted a career in dairy farming so when he finished his university studies, he jumped right in. His quick rise up the career ladder has been recognised with his naming as top dairy trainee in the 2022
Dairy Industry Awards.
Brought up on the West Coast,
O’Connor is a third-generation dairy farmer and his father and uncle farm near Westport. Another uncle, Damien, a former dairy farmer too, is Minister of
Agriculture.
O’Connor boarded at St Bede’s College in Christchurch, working on the family farm in the school holidays and went straight on to Lincoln University.
“I thought, ‘Well if I don’t go to university out of school I’ll never get there. If I have a gap year I’ll end up driving tractors or dairy farming somewhere else so I went straight to
Lincoln University,” O’Connor says.
Although he was a top student, he always wanted an outdoor, hands-on job and was never attracted to corporatetype roles.
“In high school I liked maths and physics, so that kind steered me towards thinking about engineering. However,
I went to an engineering open day for school-leavers at one of the firms in
Christchurch and I realised if I did that I’d be sitting at a desk and that didn’t really spin my wheels, so I thought, ‘Oh well, off to Lincoln I go’,” he says.
When he finished university, graduating with First Class Honours,
O’Connor spent a summer working for a silage contracting business co-owned by well-known large-scale Canterbury dairy farmers Leighton and Michelle Pye.
“I was talking to Leighton one day and he goes, ‘What are you doing after the season finishes?’, and I said I was going to go dairy farming. ‘Oh really’, he said, ‘One of my contract milkers is actually looking for a 2IC’,” he explains.
“I’d sort of had a 2IC role in my head. I didn’t want to be holding myself back for a season while I got the experience, I wanted to take a bit of a dive into the deep end I suppose.”
The opportunity soon came with an interview with contract milker Steven Ketter.
“I think Leighton must have given me a good reference and Steve offered me the 2IC job which worked out really well, so after the contracting season finished at the end of April, I had a month of milking and drying the cows off and whatnot and got into it,” he says.
“I’m happy to admit I was light on practical experience in some aspects, like springtime with calving cows. I’d always been around it but hadn’t really done it myself. I had a lot to learn there, just what to do when things go wrong with down cows and calving difficulties and what the best way to fix them is.”
He learnt fast about dairy farming Canterbury-style and its differences to farming on the West Coast.
“I tell people I came to Canterbury to learn how to make milk because production here per hectare is probably at least three times more than what we do on my home farm,” he says.
“People have said farming in
Canterbury famer Peter O’Connor is the 2022 Dairy Industry Trainee of the Year. And after only a year in the industry, he is moving into a management role on a 400-cow farm near Lauriston.
Canterbury is more of a science and farming on the West Coast is more of an art. In Canterbury you can turn the water on and have a very good idea of how much grass you’ll grow, but there’s a lot of unknowns over there on the coast.”
The 242ha, 900-cow Mayfield property, owned by the Pyes, is a high-input, highly productive operation, producing 499kg MS/cow, and just under 1850kg MS/ha this season. To help achieve that the cows are each fed 600kg of imported feed – palm kernel and grain – in the shed, as well as bought in silage.
“Whatever system you run, you’ve still got to make use of your grass so we make use of ours as much as we can, make sure we’re hitting residuals and we’ll adjust what we’re feeding to make sure that’s the priority. As the season’s gone on, that’s become more and more my responsibility,” he says.
O’Connor says he’s always asking questions and must have learnt fast because after one season Ketter offered him a significant step up the career ladder.
“I learnt a lot and I’ve still got a lot to learn, but I guess he thinks I’ve learnt enough that I can manage a farm,” he says.
Next season he is stepping up to a manager’s role, working for Ketter who has taken on a 400-cow 50:50 sharemilkers job about half an hour up the road in addition to his contract milking position.
He had expected to stay in his 2IC role for another season but has embraced the opportunity to take on a manager’s job, which he reckons shows his belief Peter obtained a Bachelor of Agricultural Science (First Class Honours) from Lincoln University and worked a variety of jobs during holidays, including silage contracting.
Peter is a third-generation dairy farmer and did entertain the idea of studying engineering but decided sitting at a desk all day wasn’t for him.
that dairy farming offered enormous opportunities is well-founded.
“I still think there is a stigma, or a looking down on dairy farmers in New Zealand, but there’s so much opportunity. I loved driving tractors (back home and in the university holidays) but I didn’t see the future in them.
“There’s lots of opportunity to buy stock or get into your own business, whether it be contract milking or something like that, you start working for yourself, whereas if you’re driving tractors, then you’ve got to go and find all the work for yourself and have a tractor and a tractor is a depreciating asset, whereas stock are appreciating,” he says.
O’Connor’s not sure what his next career move will be after managing but he’s confident opportunities will arise.
“I don’t want to say I’ll definitely go contract milking after that or whatever because there might be opportunities for something else, like an equity partnership, a small sharemilking opportunity or an opportunity to buy into something,” he says.
“I’ve got an open mind on what my next step might be but I want to get to farm ownership, and to do that you have to build your equity and to build your equity you have to take risks and keep moving up.”
And he’s unsure whether he’ll stay in Canterbury long-term or move back over the hill to the West Coast.
“I don’t have the answer to that yet. I do quite like farming in Canterbury, it’s very calculated, you know what you’re going to get, and a lot less rain. I like to think I will go home, but whether I actually get there or not might be another story,” he says. n
Taking her shot
By Samantha Tennent
A former consulting officer has taken the plunge and changed careers to be a full-time farmer.
Although she loved spending weekends on her uncle’s farm, Kate Stewart never considered farming as a career option straight after secondary school. But after three years as a consulting officer at DairyNZ, she took the plunge last year and stepped into a full-time farm assistant role in Linton, Manawatū.
“I grew up in town but I would spend every weekend I could out on the farm,” Stewart says.
“It was the calves that got me and my ultimate goal is herd and farm ownership.”
She studied Agriscience at Massey University and received a DairyNZ scholarship and entered their graduate programme after she finished.
“I remember DairyNZ consulting officer Abby Scott coming to talk to our Teen Ag club at school and I thought it sounded like a really cool job,” she recalls.
She loved the role, especially daily interaction and learning from farmers. But being on the other side has really opened her eyes.
“I have so much more appreciation for what is going through a farmer’s head every day, I feel like if I was a consulting officer now I would be asking so many more deeper questions,” she says.
When the Linton opportunity arose, she asked DairyNZ for a sabbatical, she was not sure if she wanted to go farming long-term. But since then she has made the decision to go into farming and has left DairyNZ. Next season she will take on the assistant herd manager’s role on her uncles, Craig and Duncan Rowe’s farm in Rongotea next season.
She knew she had to give farming a shot, particularly when she was involved in the New Zealand Dairy Industry Awards, interacting with contestants always left her thinking she wanted to do what they were doing.
“I was 50:50 whether I wanted to farm long-term when I first started and I thought after a year I would know for sure,” she says.
“But I’ve worked out I’m not stuck in one or the other, I could go back into a rural professional role anytime, there are plenty of options.”
If she could get a message back to herself 12 months ago, she would tell herself not to be so scared.
“I didn’t know if I was cut out to be a farmer but I didn’t need to be so worried, I’ve really enjoyed it and my support network has been extremely valuable,” she says.
She has leaned on her friends from NZ Young Farmers a lot. During calving, she found she was hanging out for the meetings for social interaction. And her clubmates were who she called with all her silly questions.
“They’ve all been through it themselves and had all the same bad days, so they’ve been a great help,” she says.
The opportunities she has had and the networks she has built have really paid off. And she credits the farmers she interacted with while she was at DairyNZ. Two standouts were Wendy and Richard Ridd, she finds what they have created inspirational.
But her ultimate inspiration has to be her uncle Craig.
“He has always been a big driver for me, I always looked up to him and wanted to be a part of their business,” she says.
For other people looking at a career change to farming, she recommends reaching out to people to build connections. She hopes people get a good start with a good boss but knows a network can support and help guide people if they do end up in a tricky situation.
“I say just give it a go, but know what you’re getting yourself into and really have that support network around you,” she says. n
Kate Stewart spent three years as a consulting officer helping farmers before taking the plunge and diving into a full-time dairy farming role.
Kate Stewart
Eager to learn
By Samantha Tennent
Growing up as a townie hasn’t held back one young farmer who is keen and eager to learn.
Although Conrad Schreiber had not grown up on a dairy farm he was keen and eager to enter the industry and take on a dairying role. As soon as he left school, he put feelers out and did just that.
He landed an interview from an advert he posted on Facebook and must have made an impression as they offered him the job on the spot and he started the next day.
“It all happened quickly but they could see I was keen,” Schreiber says.
“I was completely honest and my ad said that I hadn’t experienced farming before but I knew the basics.”
He had started life in Taranaki where his uncle runs the family farm and Conrad and his family moved to the Kapiti Coast where he went to Paraparaumu College.
He had enough of a taste for farm life that he knew he wanted to get into it as soon as he could. He took agriculture through school and some additional courses through Taratahi to get some basic skills under his belt. But he knew the best way was to get stuck in and he would learn along the way.
“Looking back I realise it was a bit of a gamble jumping into that role so quickly, but I was fortunate with the team, they looked after me and taught me a lot,” he says.
“And they liked me so much they’re keen for me to come work for them again when they buy their own farm soon.”
He spent two and a half seasons on that farm, which split-calved 780 cows in Levin before venturing to find further responsibility and try a different type of farm. He wanted to continue learning and found a 2IC role on a smaller spring calving farm in Kairanga, Manawatū, where he has been for three seasons.
And keeping with the theme of making quick decisions, he entered the New Zealand Dairy Industry Awards in his first season at Rongotea.
“I hadn’t considered it before, but when I came here, the farm manager was a big advocate for the awards and encouraged me to give it a go,” he says.
“But I had nearly hit the time limit for years in the industry so I had to jump in straight away.”
He took a lot away from the awards experience and found the most useful part was that he was able to identify where he needed to learn more or develop his skills.
“The feedback from the judging process was really valuable, I found out what gaps I had in my knowledge and what I needed to work on,” he says.
He bought the feedback back to the farm to learn and develop further. He is planning to enter the next level of the awards next year to do the same thing, get that gauge of where he is at and identify what he needs to learn.
“I’m looking forward to the next step in my career, so I am soaking up as much as I can,” he says.
He has also found his experiences with NZ Young Farmers have contributed a lot to his career development. He has held a vice-chair role for his local club Fitzherbert a couple of times and he has entered the FMG Young Farmer of the Year, which has taught him a lot.
“Young Farmers has been another way to develop my skillset and knowledge,” he says.
“I also really enjoy the connections, especially meeting other dairy farmers to learn from.”
He is aiming to make it to a regional final one day but in the meantime he continues to learn and develop and enjoy the opportunities around him both inside and outside of the farm. n
Despite his lack of hands-on experience, young farmer Conrad Schreiber took the plunge into dairy farming and is now slowly climbing the industry ladder.
