Trip home to NI allows comparison to NZ dairy

Following an all-too-quick trip home for a few weeks, I returned to a warm late summer in mid-Canterbury. It was around 2°C when I flew out of Dublin Airport, and three flights later, I landed in Christchurch to 28°C.

On my arrival back, I called in with our scanner who was doing a final scan of some ‘doubtful’ cows. As we scan slightly early to allow us to get cows off the farm, we do a second scan a few weeks later to determine the true empty rate.

Following this, we have 7% empty, and over the next week we will get the remaining cows removed to reduce the stocking rate for the latter half of the season.

Early culling allows us to extend round length and, in theory, close up the farm with a good cover of grass for next spring.

Water

The plan was to get straight back to irrigating fields upon my return and give the guys on the farm some time off.

As usual with farming, not everything went to plan, and we now find ourselves under water restrictions. This is due to the water flow in the river dropping below a certain point, which means we can’t extract water until the flow increases.

We do have the option of stored water, which is released from a lake up in the foothills. However, a lot of this has been used recently, meaning we will be very restricted in water usage until the flow increases in the Rakaia River.

Young farmers

During my travels at home, it seemed like much of the time I was drawing comparisons to New Zealand (NZ), especially the pathways for younger farmers.

Here, farm owners have a variety of options, most of which also create opportunities for young farmers. At home, we seem to have very limited knowledge of joint ventures and arrangements.

An example of my next step in NZ is to contract-milk a farm, which means I provide labour and machinery required for the farm. In return, I would receive a set rate per kg of milk solids that is produced on the farm.

This is different from share milking, which requires a level of stock ownership.

Contract-milking is seen as one of the first steps on the pathway to share milking. Share-milking, if leveraged well, can then lead to farm ownership in a relatively short period of time.

For someone like myself, who would jump at the opportunity to farm in my own right at home, it seems that many young farmers in NI are almost capped at a certain point unless they have a farm to inherit.

In NZ, we find that those young farmers tend to excel in the industry and in many cases, are driven enough to purchase farms either outright or in the form of an equity partnership.