SYSTEMS WINTER GRAZING
“. . . at the last minute we bought hay and fed it out on grass and it worked.”
All hail hay bale grazing
Mark and Madeline Anderson on their Clinton dairy farm.
Clinton-based once-a-day farmers Mark and Madeline Anderson have switched from growing winter crops to buying winter bale grazing. Karen Trebilcock reports.
M
ark and Madeline Anderson now spend about the same amount of money buying hay for winter bale grazing that they used to spend on growing winter crop. The 690-cow, once-a-day farm near Clinton in South Otago used to winter conventionally on swedes and kale, switching to fodder beet and then mixed species crops. But for the past three years they have been transitioning to hay bale grazing on long grass covers with this 46
winter being the first they haven’t had winter crop on bare soil. And the results speak for themselves. Paddocks aren’t pugged, cows have clean coats and are not wandering up and down the break, costs are down and earthworm numbers are up. “About 7.5km of our boundary is the Waiwera South River and we knew we were losing sediment into it every winter with winter cropping and through the process of regrassing,” Mark said.
“It’s a stony river and the council’s water testing was showing the numbers of macroinvertebrates were declining rapidly due to sediment loading. “The paddocks after winter cropping needed full tillage because of the soil compaction and pugging to get them back into grass so we were losing our soil structure every time we did that. “After spending many childhood days roaming the length of the river, and now doing the same with our
Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | August 2021
