WORDS AND IMAGES BY ANNIE STUDHOLME
Streamlining efficiency and embracing technology underpins continued investment at the Mawle family’s Blackford Farming dairy operation in the Rakaia Gorge.
Milking cows was not on the agenda when the Mawle family first sold up their farming business in Bedfordshire, England, and moved 12,000 miles to Canterbury more than fifteen years ago. After an exhaustive 18-month search to find the right property, many questioned the Brits’ bold decision to convert a deer and beef farm in the Rakaia Gorge to a dry land dairying operation.
Today, twin brothers Rob and Tom milk more than 2,100 ‘Kiwi Cross’ Jersey-Friesian cross cows on the 640-hectare (effective) property, with the additional wintering property at Line Road and further land leased for winter grazing. The operation is effectively split into two separate units, with each of the brothers responsible for milking 1,050 cows. Each has its own 60-bale Waikato rotary milking platform, with four staff working on a six-day on and two days off roster. Both use Allflex Sensehub Cow Collars and have installed automatic calf feeders. But the development hasn’t stopped there with the recent addition of two massive composting wintering barns, or ‘mootels’.
Rob and Tom got their first taste of Canterbury in 1999, returning in the summer of 2003/04 to work for Carr Contracting while playing rugby for Southern. After two summers going back and forth to the UK, the entire Mawle family, including their parents, John and his wife Jean Mawle and sister Ellie Pike, decided to move en masse in 2005.
In England, the Mawle’s owned 300 acres and sharecropped a further 1,000-hectares. Latterly the grain buildings had been converted into 22 industrial units. The decision to sell up wasn’t taken lightly, but with the brothers about to graduate from Harper Adams University with dreams of going farming came the grim realisation that their current farming operation wasn’t big enough to support everyone. They had a family meeting and unanimously voted to move to New Zealand.
With dairying taking off, Rob soon found a job on a dairy farm. After just a year, he bought 300 cows and went 50:50 share milking. Tom, meanwhile, was doing his best to stay away from cows working for the Guild family on Highpeak Station.
Having looked all over New Zealand for the perfect property to put down roots, the Mawle family kept gravitating back to the broader Methven area. After 18 months and 45 farm viewings, they finally made the deal to purchase Blackford on the south bank of the Rakaia River at the foot of Mount Hutt. “It had a good aspect, good soil and good rainfall,” says Rob. “Coming from the UK, we didn’t want to have irrigation because of all the rules and regulations around it.”
Blackford was carrying 1,100 beef cattle and 2,500 deer when they took over. The Mawle’s ran it as a going concern for the first 12 months. They continued with existing contracts and planned to develop the farm for the lucrative dairy support market, capitalising on the dairy boom. Fencing was upgraded, laneways added, and they embarked on the unenviable task of renewing all pastures. Because it was a dryland system, most trees and shelter remained intact.
The next logical step was to add a dairy shed, but with the farm sitting at between 450m to 580m above sea level with an average rainfall of 1,250ml, plus howling nor’ westers to contend with, no one knew just how many milk solids the property could produce. They had their doubters, with plenty sceptical about how one of Canterbury’s most westerly dairy units would perform, but history was on the Mawle’s side. As late as the 1960s, cows had been milked in the Rakaia Gorge, and originally, there was a creamery at the end of Blackford Road, explains Rob.
“It’s north-facing and while we can get snow here, the warm nor’ west winds help keep growth rates up. Although it can get dry, it responds well to rain. We probably get between 30 and 40 per cent of nor ‘west rain in a typical year, but the shoulder seasons can be tough. Silage is like our irrigation. If you can grow grass, you can feed anything, and we knew it could grow grass,” he says.
They pressed ahead. Plans were drawn up for a 60-bale Waikato rotary milking platform, utilising the latest technology, including automatic cup removers and Protrack. “It was the biggest shed to build for just one person to milk in. At that stage, the farm’s potential hadn’t been realised, and we simply didn’t know how many cows we could milk. It was all a bit of an unknown,” says Tom.
But when the 2008 Global Financial Crisis hit, plans hit a snag. “We had the shingle down and the site pegged out. Then, the GFC hit, so we shelved the whole project for another 12 months and instead focused on renewing pastures and cultivating,” says Rob.
With the shed completed, albeit a year later than they had anticipated, the Mawle’s calved and milked 950 cows through the new shed in the first season and bought 150 more in-milk cows. Rob brought 525 cows with him from his share milking position, and they purchased 450 more cows from the North Island.
Still not convinced about dairying, Tom’s introduction was a “baptism of fire,” working alongside Rob and two Filipino staff. By the second season, they had grown the herd to 1,250 cows, and by the end, plans were afoot for a second shed, which was eventually commissioned in December 2013. This left the brothers to run each unit separately, each milking 1,050 cows.
The second conversion was made possible in part by the opportunity to lease 116 hectares of neighbouring land, taking the total milking area to 614 effective hectares. Initially, they ran it at a moderate stocking rate of 3.2 cows per hectare, with inputs of supplementary feed (grain and silage) equating to around 800kg per cow. This resulted in an average of 450kg of milk solids per cow, up there with the top dry land operations anywhere.
Though those first few years were marred by payout extremes, the Mawle’s pushed ahead with constant development, particularly with regard to embracing new technology. First, they introduced Allflex Sensehub Cow Collars across both herds and, more recently, automatic calf feeders. The collars collect and analyse critical data from each cow’s reproductive cycle, rumination patterns, and health status. They provide unparalleled insight into the herd. While both come with huge financial outlay, the benefits outweigh the capital costs, says Rob.
“I think the move to more technology, particularly the collars and automatic calf feeders, has helped Tom and I monitor the day-to-day running of each farm in greater detail and with more consistency. They give us accurate daily feedback and reassurance that the decisions around feeding and animal welfare are being held to a high standard. It also frees us up to do other things.”
Though the collars don’t replace humans, they enable more targeted and timely interventions. “It means you are picking that cow (with a problem) up in the middle of the mob rather than at the end,” explains Tom.
At mating time, collars also reduced pressure on staff when they needed to detect which cows were on heat. Some staff were better at it than others, but collars removed that variation, provided consistency, and reduced risk at what was already a busy time. Collars were useful tools to guide other farm decisions.
For the past two seasons, they have used automatic calf feeders. The Mawle’s installed four feeders across the two dairy units (two on each), each rearing 300 replacements. Each feeder has four stalls capable of feeding 16 calves at a time, 24 hours a day. They can use either whole milk supplied from the farm’s vat or powdered milk, which is heated as needed. They have many programmable features like litres per feed and feeds per day. All calves have access to straw, meal, and grazing. Each calf is individually fed with feeders that monitor consumption, drinking rate, and weight, with alerts about any problems detected. Like all calves, they still must be taught to drink first before being transitioned to the feeders, which usually takes three days.
“We identified that finding good calf-rearing staff with the necessary skill set was becoming more of a challenge,” says Rob. “By moving to automatic calf feeders, between both units, we had been able to drop one labour unit, going from four staff to three. It’s still busy for those first 8-10 weeks, but then the workload drops off. There is no fatigue; the machines just keep feeding calves.”
While the labour savings were a big plus, the improvements the brothers had seen in their calves won them over. The constant monitoring meant any potential issues were often detected before they had been seen manually, and nothing was missed. “You still have to go and look at the stock, but at least the technology will give you a heads-up where to look,” says Tom.
“We are seeing good results in our calves going away at weaning. We have consistently seen a uniformed group of calves coming through. There has been an average live weight increase of 10kg per calf at weaning, with a definite lift in the tail end of late born calves we usually experience. And the mortality rate is exceptionally low,” adds Rob.
Whether that will make a difference in the long term is undetermined. The Mawle’s are calving the first heifers that went through the new automatic calf feeding system this spring.
Not content with sitting still; the development hasn’t stopped there. The Mawle’s have recently
built two massive composting wintering barns, with the potential for more to be built in the future. Until now, Tom’s herd have been sent to local winter graziers, while Rob’s cows are wintered on the family-owned 148-hectare run-off block on Line Road. But while that arrangement has been working, in the future, the Mawle’s realised they would need to purchase a second run-off block or look at alternatives, like a feed pad or a barn.
The barn option was not for everyone, but the brothers firmly believed it suited Blackford because of the amount of silage they fed out and the challenging climate. “We are like a little piece of Southland or the West Coast in Mid Canterbury. It is very unique,” says Rob.
“Our winters can be quite severe,” adds Tom. They can be wet and muddy, and the feed utilisation is poor, despite our best efforts to mitigate it. We feed a lot of silage, and we kept thinking about how we could best use it. The options were putting up a barn or building a feed pad.”
Hailing from the UK, the Mawle’s were familiar with sheds and knew what they could do. Back in the UK, they fattened 400 beef cattle in one shed. After much deliberation and having visited different barn options in Southland and the West Coast, the Mawle’s opted for a 22m x 100m composting wintering barn, constructed out of steel by Kiwi-based ProSteel Systems, which they were confident was robust enough to withstand the howling nor’ westers and snow falls. “Everyone we talked to wished they had gone bigger or hoped to build another one. That was good enough for us,” says Rob.
To maximise the space available under the roof, they opted to feed from the outside rather than a central laneway like those they were used to in the UK. Being 100 per cent self-composting, the barn had a low environmental footprint, and they had worked closely with Environment Canterbury to ensure all environmental standards were met. The consent was given to 8m2 per animal (275 total).
The current compost barn systems experience no leaching of nutrients due to the microbial activity and absorbent nature of the composting bed. Aerobic bacteria are encouraged by daily or twice daily aeration through deep ripping cultivation of the bedding material. This releases moisture via steam in the warm bed pack.
Managing the compost is going to be critical, says Tom. They didn’t know how often the wood chips would need to be replaced at this stage. Eighty per cent of the initial layer had come from trees on the farm, but going forward, they were hoping to keep it at 50/50 to save on the cost of buying it all in. They have more than 6,500 trees on the property, many of which are over 100 years old and have a replanting programme in place to replace those trees taken down every three to four years.
“We feel the wintering barns will give us security at calving time in an unpredictable environment, better feed utilisation throughout the year, an extended milking season for late-calving cows and many other benefits. These include logistics of mobs in and out of the shed, reduced pugging and re-grassing and a nice environment for staff to work in,” says Rob.
When Real Farmer visited in April, cows had been in the Blue Shed for three weeks. Tom was already milking on a 10/7 roster. Half the herd was on grass and supplementary silage, while the other half was split into three mobs, each spending 2-4 hours in the wintering barn daily, with the potential for the last herd to be indoors overnight depending on the weather.
“It’s just over three weeks, and we have already seen savings in silage. There’s not as much waste. The other farms out there saying they can feed 10kg total ration (7kg silage and 3kg chopped straw) in the barn compared to 12kg green feed in the paddock plus 3kg of straw. So, 15kg total in the paddock. Same weight gain, just warmer cows, and better feed utilised,” explains Rob.
Once the main mobs have been dried off (May 25), the late calving cows (approximately 250) would drop to once a day milking and spend 24/7 indoors until the end of June. “We still have to feed them. It’s economically sound to do that extra silage with an $8 payout,” says Tom.
Then, in July, the in-calf heifers would go indoors to calve, followed by the springer mob. A temporary fence could be put up indoors if required. During the summer, it will provide shade.
The Mawle’s ultimate goal is to have two barns on each milking unit. This means half the herd could spend time indoors, and the rest could winter at the Line Road run-off, but for now, it’s a case of waiting and seeing, explains Rob. “Ultimately, it has to pay the extra money from milking longer and saving in feed. There’s still a lot to learn. We are still trying to quantify it as best we can. But already we can see some benefits. The staff are loving it, and the cows seem happy.”
Succession was one of the key drivers for the Mawle’s move down under, and family remains at the heart of the Blackford Farming operation. Although John and Jean have stepped back from day-to-day farming, they are still very much involved, and Ellie continues to do all the farm accounts. Both Tom and Rob are supported in this faming venture by their wives, Claire, and Stacey, and now with their own families, the future focus is to work hard for their own succession plans for the next generation.