SYSTEMS CULL COWS
Cows are holding condition.
Cashing-in on the culls Caught by Covid-19 with a mob of cull cows, Paul Rogers kept on milking them. Photos and story by Karen Trebilcock.
W
hen Otago farmer Paul Rogers couldn’t get his 135 culls into the works due to the Covid-19 lockdown he started to think of other possibilities. “They were telling me we could get 20 in this week and then another 20 or so and I just didn’t want to be left feeding the rest after we’d dried off,” he said. As well, the beef schedule at the time wasn’t flash and he had 1000 bales of balage he didn’t need. So he decided to keep milking. The herds on the two farms on the Taieri – one (195-hectare milking platform) milking 630 cows, and the other, fiveminutes’ drive away, 550 cows (245ha selfcontained) – were dried off as normal at the end of May with an empty rate of 12%. But the empties, culls and the late calvers were kept milking and put together on one farm making a mob of 200 cows, 42
or four rows in the 50-aside herringbone dairy. During the winter they spent nights in herd homes fed silage and a small amount of palm kernel and their days were on the fodder beet paddock next to the dairy with balage. On the way between the herd home and the beet paddock they passed through the dairy and got milked once a day at a respectable 9am, after everything had thawed a bit and the sun had come up. It only took farm manager Daniel Bellamy with Don Lolo and Nico Caeiro, who has been milking in New Zealand for six years after arriving from Argentina, an hour to milk the cows and move them on to a new break of beet. In late June production was holding at 1.2kg milksolids (MS)/cow/day average which is where they were at in May before the herd was dried off. “They’ve just kind of sat there doing the
same production,” Paul said. Fed 18kg DM/day, body condition was also holding. “It’s not as if the empties are supporting a growing calf.” Fonterra picked up the milk every second day without a winter milk contract in place. “This is just a trial, we’re not locking into winter milk just yet.” Whether it works financially, Paul has no idea. “There are a lot of variables – we were into the next season’s payout from June first and we don’t know what that will be and then there’s the premium for winter milk, the beef schedule would hopefully be going up and there was the cost of balage.” Made onfarm at the cost of about $30 a bale (excluding the grass), in the summer it was worth about $80. With the winter crops in the south not the best after last year’s wet spring
Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | August 2020
