The right stuff Fonterra Sustainable Dairying Award winners

The right stuff

A Canterbury farming group is putting the best family farm traditions in harness with innovative solutions that benefit the environment – and its investors.

Matt Redmond, a former winner of dairy manager of the year, oversees the two Culverden basin farms owned by Craigmore Farming Services. Photos: Tony Benny

Flexibility and innovation are watchwords at the Craigmore group when it comes to both its people and its farming practices.

Alarge-scale Canterbury corporate farming group is working to harness New Zealand’s family farm ethos in a different way to bring innovation to agriculture.

Craigmore, which has 22 dairy farms in Canterbury and North Otago and one sheep and beef property near Middlemarch in the Maniototo, has been recognised for its efforts and earlier this year won the Fonterra Responsible Dairying Award at the Dairy Industry Awards.

The judges recognised Craigmore’s efforts to lead change and to trial innovations on its 22 farms to create solutions all farmers can use, something that’s been central to the enterprise since it was established by brothers-in-law Forbes Elworthy and Mark Cox in 2009.

“They had the inspiration that New Zealand farmers actually want to do the right thing for their farms, their communities, their animals and for the environment but they were always constrained from being really creative and innovative because of balance sheets,” says general manager Stuart Taylor.

“The idea was to bring international capital to New Zealand and put it together with young innovative farmers and then you get the synergies of change.”

Craigmore takes a non-corporate approach to its operations and no attempt is made to impose the same centrally controlled system on every farm, recognising not only that all the farmers it employs have their own personalities, but so do the different farms.

“The founders and I don’t believe you can have one system that’s successful with every bit of land or every farmer,” Taylor says.

“The philosophy is take the piece of land – and the land will have a personality based around her structure, topography, rainfall or soil types – and then take the farmer and they’ve all got different personalities and you try to get those two personalities to get expressed in the crossover pieces where the synergy really occurs.”

It’s what Taylor calls an “empowerment model”, where the farmers have to meet certain expectations around how they look after their people and stock, how the farm is presented, and the budget, but beyond that, they’re encouraged to do it their own way.

“So you get the person in the right place and the farm in the right place with the right system and then you run a really good farm and on top of that you pick out the passion from those two personalities and then you do an innovation based around that passion.”

For Matt Redmond, who won Manager of the Year in the 2019 Dairy Industry Awards, that means he can treat the two Culverden basin farms he oversees for Craigmore effectively as his own, though he has no capital investment.

Landsend is 245ha with 800 cows and the adjoining Riverend is 217ha and carries 520 cows.

Redmond has led two projects on the farms with the support of head office, one the creation of a wetland to arrest the loss of nitrogen into nearby waterways and the other the

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FARM FACTS

• Owners: Craigmore Sustainables – Farming • Location: 22 dairy platforms in

Canterbury and North Otago, from Culverden down to Oamaru and one sheep and beef farm in

Middlemarch • Farm size: All farms 7,963ha owned • Cows: All farms 17,460 dairy cows • Production: 2021-2022: Total across all farms 7,857,712kg MS • Production target: 2022 - 2023: Around 7.9 million kg/MS • Staff: Between 120 and 130 across the farms

Agri-relationship manager Caroline Aymes and general manager Stuart Taylor oversee the 22 farms and one sheep and beef unit owned by Craigmore.

Matt Redmond likes the security of working for a salary and hasn’t taken the opportunity to become a shareholder in the two farms but he and his wife, in partnership with Craigmore, have recently bought a 100ha farm near Hawarden.

introduction of Halter collars, which is transforming the way the farms are managed.

The farms are near the junction of the Pahau and Hurunui rivers, and both have springs at the top end that feed streams that come together in a wetland area at the lower part of the two properties.

Willows have been cleared and a small amount of earthworks undertaken, and recently a team from Craigmore’s head office in Christchurch planted 2000 native shrubs and trees around the sides.

“The team planted them in a couple of hours, it was amazing how quickly they got it done,” Redmond says.

The plants came from Synlait’s Whakapuawai nursery, ready to plant, complete with protection and support, in a swiftly dug hole. The aim is for the water that leaves the wetland, flowing into the Pahau and then on to the Hurunui, to contain no more nitrogen than when it emerged from the ground in the two springs.

Redmond is also excited about the difference the Halter collars fitted to the herd at the end of last season are already making.

“You can do without fences and it doesn’t matter where you put those fences in a paddock, those cows, as soon as they walk into a paddock, they’ll get pulled to that area that you’ve drawn on your phone.”

The solar-powered collars use a combination of vibrations and sounds to guide the cattle, each of which shows up individually on the app on Redmond’s phone and those of his staff.

“I can draw a break on the phone and it will show how many metres per cow, how much dry matter and I can choose wherever I want in the paddock. I can make sure I get an exact area and not have to go to the next post to hold the reel up.”

The collars also give feedback on cow health and indicate which cows are on heat, which Redmond hopes will simplify mating.

Part of his motivation for introducing the collars was to make better use of

labour and solve the problem of not having enough houses on farm for all the staff. Now it takes only one staff member to milk the cows through the herringbone shed on one of the farms.

Instead of there being two milkings of 1.5 hours each, with two staff in the shed, it now takes two hours per milking but only one staff member is required each time. That means the farm manager and 2IC only have to milk once a day each. No one has to bring the herd in because they’ve had the message from Halter and make their own way to the shed.

“The cows are in two herds, so if you’re in the shed at 5am, you can tell second herd to walk to the shed at 6am and they’ll turn up there and be ready to go. The other staff member is on a sleep-in and the cows have spent less time in the yard than if there were two people milking.”

An added bonus of the cows spending less time in the yard and coming in at their own pace, not being pushed along by someone on a motorbike, is a sharp reduction in lameness.

“We used to have 3-4 lame cows a

“The founders had the inspiration that New Zealand farmers actually want to do the right thing for their farms, their communities, their animals and for the environment.” Stuart Taylor

Continued page 24

The team in the cow shed at afternoon milking at Landsend.

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Riverend farm is 217ha and carries 520 cows, which produced 232,767kg MS last season.

week before Halter. Since then, there’ve only been about four in three months.”

Redmond likes the security of working for a salary and hasn’t taken the opportunity to become a shareholder in the two farms, but he and his wife, in partnership with Craigmore, have recently bought a 100ha farm near Hawarden, about 20 minutes closer to Christchurch, with the intention that the property will be a support block for the two Craigmore farms.

As well as putting the right farmers on the right farm with the hope of unlocking their passion to try new things, Craigmore is flexible in how it employs its people, tuning contracts to suit individuals, depending on what they prefer. “I’ve got a suite of different ways of paying people and that’s based on

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the individual,” Taylor says.

“Some people just want the security of a salary, other people want profit-share, other people want KPI derivatives, other people want contract milking and others want to own the land.

“It’s about understanding the individual’s goals and working with them to create the right solutions.”

Taylor is a fifth-generation farmer himself but he doesn’t believe that background gives him all the answers, especially in a time when farming faces many challenges.

“It’s how do I help farming adapt to this changing world and it’s not by saying, ‘You need to do this.’ It’s about allowing people the space to keep trying different things because that’s where we were really successful as an industry in this country.”

Among other innovations being tried on Craigmore farms are in-rumen boluses that monitor a cow’s health, when she’s eating or drinking, whether she has a temperature, has mastitis, is in heat or about to calve. On another farm, there’s a composting wintering barn.

“Instead of having cows on concrete with stalls and effluent flowing off and getting treated, effectively it’s a big concrete box filled up with sawdust and then the cows manure and urine mixes in and starts [composting] and you end up with a compost that you spread on the paddock.

“His farm looks like a golf course, it’s beautiful. He has very high attention to detail.”

But while farmers are encouraged to Staff member Lou Anthony King on Landsend heads off to do some jobs on the farm.

A spring-fed wetland, created in an effort to capture any nitrogen runoff from Landsend and Riverend farms, was recently planted out by Craigmore head office staff. follow their passions and try innovations, it’s also okay to “just focus on being a good farmer”, Taylor says. “Tell everyone you’re a good farmer, you look after you people, your cows, you’re running a profitable system, be proud. If you want to innovate and you’re passionate about it, have a go and then tell everyone about it. “Don’t try to do everything because each individual farmer can’t solve everything. There’s a storm of change coming, you can’t deal with all that change. But we [at Craigmore] can do everything because we have 22 farms

“We used to have 3-4 lame cows a week before Halter. Since then, there’ve only been about four in three months.” Matt Redmond

so we’ve got the ability to specialise and take those risks.”

As well as giving its farmers the freedom to try new things, to follow their passions, Craigmore actively seeks partnerships with other innovators, offering a place to trial new ideas.

Agri-relationship manager Caroline Amyes says one of the things that goes with having international capital invested in Craigmore is the need to do environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting, a concept becoming more common as it is adopted by banks.

“If you go to talk to a farmer about ESG reporting you get a very blank look but farmers do understand what you’re talking about if you mention social licence and it’s the same thing. It’s understanding how we look after our environment, people and animals and our governance which includes our business performance,” Amyes says.

“We break that down into different pillars because that helps us manage our focus and aligns with our strategy.”

Craigmore has long-term goals, including a 35% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, believing that not only does it have a responsibility to do so but it has the capacity, too.

The farms will use Overseer to track the changes and Craigmore is looking at a variety of possible solutions, including a feed additive it expects to be available soon and which it is keen to trial on farm.

“We work closely with lots of different industry groups like Fonterra, Synlait and DairyNZ to try to understand what’s coming up so we can be one of the first commercial operations to try it once it becomes available,” Amyes says.

Craigmore is also keen to try EcoPond, a solution being developed by Ravensdown, on one of its farms.

“They partnered with Lincoln University and they inject ferric sulphate into the effluent system, which removes 99.9% of methane emissions from your system. We’ll be one of the first farms to have that in a commercial operation and we’ll work with them to test it and see how that works for the guys running the farm.”

Methane from effluent accounts for only 3%-6% of farm emissions, a relatively small amount, but eliminating it would be a shift in the right direction, Amyes says.

“We’re not the researcher, we’re not the scientist, we’re still a commercial farming operation so we can be the first to trial it in a commercial setting, but we’re not going to be the ones necessarily creating the solution.”

The ecosystems in all streams on Craigmore farms are being probed using Beef + Lamb’s self-assessment tool, and from that information an improvement programme will be developed.

Another focus is soil biodiversity. Craigmore has worked with a company to soil map all its farms with visual soil and plant assessments and assess carbon stores so changes in carbon can be monitored over time.

“We’ll use that information, the soil’s strengths and weaknesses, to make sure we’re actually managing those soils effectively, getting the best out of them and not degrading them,” she says.

A discovery by French researchers that shows a correlation between fatty acids in milk and enteric methane (burps) is to be trialled under New Zealand conditions too.

“It will help us to understand the impact that supplement and pasture composition has on methane emissions. The more we understand, the better our decision-making can be to help us reduce our methane emissions. There won’t be one solution to the methane challenge, rather a suite of tools.”

The equation the French scientists came up with is based on a total mixed feed ration rather than pasture, so the New Zealand trial is an attempt to validate that in our pasture-based farming system.

On another farm there’s a dung beetle trial going on.

“There’s quite a bit of proven science around how they mobilise the dung and put it into the soil to improve soil composition,” Aymes says.

The trial will take about five years, not only to see if the beetles are surviving but also what their impact is.

Another trial under consideration is a robotic weed sprayer that works a bit like a robot vacuum cleaner or lawnmower.

“It looks like a little quad bike with a tank on the back and a spray unit and it wanders round the property spraying weeds.”

Amyes sees a potential health and safety benefit of the sprayer with staff less likely to be exposed to chemicals.

“And if people like us don’t try them we won’t know how good they are.”

On another farm, winter grazing trials are underway in an effort to find an alternative to crops.

“What type of pasture species will work in a deferred grazing, round bale-type system to winter on that rather than crop?”

As part of that trial, a self-feeding silage stack, as opposed to taking the feed to cows in the paddock by tractor and silage wagon, is being tested and a Lincoln PhD student has been taken on to bring some academic rigour to the investigation.

In a time when agriculture faces enormous challenges, be they environmental, changes in consumer preferences or the social licence to continue working the land, Craigmore is trying to lead the way by harnessing

“There’s a storm of change coming, you can’t deal with all that change. But we [at Craigmore] can do everything ... we’ve got the ability to specialise and take those risks.” Stuart Taylor

Using the Halter phone app, Matt and his staff can draw in virtual fences that keep the collar-wearing cows on Riverend on the right feed breaks – and even call the cows in for milking.

There is a winter chill in the air, with recent snow on the hills and mountains that surround the Culverden basin.

farmers’ passions in a way similar to the traditional family farm while at the same time looking to adopt solutions that will both benefit the environment and make a return for investors.

“It’s an emerging way of thinking, you get impact investors. They invest to get an impact,” Taylor says.

“Craigmore tends to attract investors who are keen to do things in a different way. None of the investors just want cash-driven returns, they all want a cashdriven return out of behaviour, so there’s expectation around how we behave.

“It’s responsible investing and you’re getting that through the financial institutions now. It will emerge they’ll only lend to people doing these things, from an environment perspective, how animals are looked after and people looked after.” n