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Clean slate on family’s expansion farm
01-02-2010
The latest farmers to accept the challenge of the Monitor Farm Programme are taking a clean-slate approach.
Jeff and Sue Bodley and their son Robert took over their Waikato property in March, 2009. They hosted their first Waikato/Franklin Monitor Farm field day early in December.
Monitor Farm facilitator Brendan Brier, of Brier Ag Consultancy, said that as the Bodleys had owned the farm for such a short time, during which they had basically farmed it as the previous owner did, a clean-slate approach could be taken to the Meat & Wool New Zealand Monitor Farm Programme.
The timing was good because the Bodleys were still learning about the farm and had yet to settle upon their preferred stock policy.
The purchase of the Kerr Road farm, between Naike and Matira (east of Huntly) was part of an expansion plan for the Bodleys, who also own 350ha at Rangiriri and a smaller unit at Te Kauwhata.
The purpose of the first field day was to introduce farmers to the farm and get people thinking about its direction. A community group will be appointed to offer ideas and help decide the farm's future policy.
At the field day, Robert Bodley, who is managing the farm, said he was looking forward to what the programme would offer.
"It's a big opportunity for myself, being fairly young and because it's a new a farm. I hope the collective grey matter (of the participating farmers) can help us make the farm work and make it profitable."
The Kerr family broke in the farm from scrub and farmed it up until its sale earlier this year.
"It has been in good hands, so I'm grateful to have the chance to farm it," Robert said.
Jeff Bodley said he first approached the Kerrs about buying the farm two years ago. The Bodleys had been looking to extend their farming operation but buying additional land in the Rangiriri district was not an option because dairying dominated. They had to look further afield.
The Kerr Road farm is about 30 minutes' drive from Rangiriri and totals 445ha. Of this about 65ha is in native bush, 11ha is in plantation pines and 6.5ha is in swamp, leaving 373ha in pasture. This effective area includes about 65ha of cultivatable hay and silage contour, with the balance rolling to steep hill.
Average rainfall for the past 13 years is 1563mm, and the farm rises from 35 metres above sea level to 240m asl.
Robert Bodley said the locals had told him to expect a cold winter and these warnings proved well-founded.
"We had some really mean frosts and there was ice on the hills for three days in a row. That stopped the grass growth and so I had to feed out about 150 round bales of hay and 150 of baleage from mid-June."
The farm runs about 1150 Romney breeding ewes which were bought as a going concern. The farm will continue to breed its own sheep replacements "at this stage".
Robert liked the Romney but was open to ideas on future breeding policy. The ewes scanned 144% this year and the final lambing tally was expected to total about 125% (ewes to ram).
He said he sent an early draft of 49 lambs away on November 10 "just to see what the weights were like". These lambs averaged 13.9kg carcaseweight (CW), lighter than he would have expected.
"But the way prices went, we wouldn't have got any more for them if we had carried them for another three weeks."
Robert, who runs the farm on his own but draws on help from Rangiriri when needed, was expecting to wean and shear in mid-December and hoped to get another 200 lambs away at that time.
The farm also carried 500 rising one-year steers, 30 R1 Friesian bulls and 75 R1 dairy grazers. Mostly Angus, the R1 steers were bought as weaners in summer or autumn and will be farmed through one winter before going to the Rangiriri farm for finishing.
Northwest of Huntly, the Rangiriri property finishes 1100-1300 two to 21⁄2-year steers annually at 320-350kg of carcase weight. Depending on the season and sheepmeat prices, it also finishes up to 2000 lambs at an average of 18kg CW.
Its mainly flat contour and alluvial soils make the 330ha effective an ideal finishing unit. Te Kapa Farm (the name is taken from a lake on
property) is subdivided into about 40 sheep-proof paddocks averaging around 12ha. Electric fencing is used to split paddocks further into 2ha cells for grazing cattle.
Jeff Bodley has years of stock trading experience under his belt and times his buying and selling decisions carefully.
"I try to read the market and buy cattle when they start to hit the yards in bigger quantities. It doesn't always work, but the aim is to buy the cattle before we actually need them so that we aren't at the mercy of a grass market."
Eight years ago the Bodleys made the switch from an all-bull system to all-steers at a time when steers were considerably cheaper than bulls to buy. Steer prices overtook bull prices shortly afterwards and though Jeff admits the timing was nothing more than a fluke, the decision was driven by other factors.
"Some guys thought we were pretty clever getting out of bulls when we did, but there was no science to it. We just wanted a change."
As well as the Rangiriri farm, Jeff and Sue also own 80ha at Te Kauwhata, on the other side of the Waikato River. This block has a lot of swamp and is stocked with younger cattle in winter.
The new Kerr Road Monitor Farm is subdivided into 43 paddocks and wintered about 578kg liveweight/ha or 11 stock units/ha last year.
Soils are mainly Maeroa Ash over clay and some of the steeper areas at the back of the farm are prone to erosion.
Brendan Brier said the early results of pasture monitoring suggested the farm had a potential annual pasture production of just over 8 tonnes/DM/ha and a potential carrying capacity of around 14 stock units/ha.
Ongoing pasture monitoring would give a better picture of the farm's true productivity.
Pasture quality was an issue that might have to be addressed because the current pasture, as Robert Bodley put it, was "not that flash".
Brendan Brier said that whether this was fixed through "hoof and tooth" or regrassing was another question for the community group to answer in future.