Father and son enterprise

01-03-2010 | Jackie Harrigan

Simon and Dennis Wishnowsky have some serious questions to address about the direction of their farm business.

"Cloverlands", at Halcombe in the Manawatu, has been a family farm since it was cleared by great-grandfather in the 1890s. In his day, 90 acres was enough to finance a family. Through additions and sales - and the repurchase of some land - the home block now consists of 212ha effective and the neighbouring 200ha Carters block is leased for the next four years.

Of the total 407ha effective, 95ha is flat (Marton silt loam over clay loam which has high fertility but is prone to pugging), 100ha is rolling, and 212ha is medium hill country (mainly Halcombe silt loam, similar to the Marton silt loam and Pohangina silt loam which is light and of poor fertility).

The farm runs along four ridges with long intersecting gullies and medium steep sidings. The property has good water, pine forestry woodlots, and attractive pockets of native trees.

The father and son Wishnowsky team farm the property, but during the past four years each has run separate enterprises on the block. Dennis managed the home block and Simon looked after the Carters leaseblock.

They run 4993 stock units with a sheep-to-cattle ratio of 52:48, and 25-30ha is cropped annually. A typical crop rotation on the home block has been a cash crop of barley or maize followed by winter oats, then summer brassica, then autumn-sown new grass or alternatively winter brassica, then summer brassica, then autumn-sown new grass.

Some paddocks this year were resown into winter brassica due to wet conditions in spring.

Simon has full-time off-farm employment, as general manager of Venison Packers' meat plant in Feilding, so his farm work is done mainly in the evening and weekends.

He wants to build the profitability of the farming enterprise to enable him to either leave his town job and farm a larger, more profitable enterprise full-time, or to pay a labour unit, or part of one, to do basic farm work.

Performance-wise Simon would like the farm to be consistently in the top quintile (20%) of farms in the same class of the Meat & Wool New Zealand Economic Survey for financial performance and production performance.

Dennis spent many years running the Cloverlands property as a dairy unit, and in the 1970s installed one of the earliest rotary cowsheds with 17 bales. In 1990, he converted to a drystock property. Dennis is happy to continue working on the farm "for as long as he can be useful", but farm succession issues need to be looked at in the course of the programme.

As part of their goal to simplify the structure and stock policies of the farming business, Simon and Dennis have decided to consider the two businesses as one in future and both acknowledge the need for a more formal planning process.

They would also like to improve the strengths and eliminate the weaknesses of the farming resource.

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