"Improving Our Lot" - Planned Holistic Grazing, for starters..

[Henarar]

unless they are your own, they come to late, and stay to long, and we still have a load of electric fencing still up and chased for it to go !

you should specify when you want them on and when you want them gone or no can do.
and any fencing left a week after the sheep are gone will be picked up and put in a farm sale

 

[Kiwi Pete]

length of rounds, for us, is restricted by acreage and the dairy, to that with dairy, you would need a huge acreage.
So for us, your loooong rotations are impossible. It's finding a balance that works, on the plate meter system, should add from NZ, our rotation could be as short as 14 days, that's working the grass hard, and when we hit a 'problem' - drought, the grass collapsed, ably assisted by us, keeping the cows whipping round quickly, we now know better, and the p/meter system, works well here, you feed the surplus grass, baled, back to the dairy, when grass is short, for us now, feed purchased hay, to allow the (better) grass, time to sustainably produce the growth.
Our hay source, is mainly old pasture stuff, so has a good mix of plants in it, which may, or not, help the cows enjoy it, and spread a few seeds about, good 'old' pasture hay, made well, looks and smells fantastic to us, and to the cows ? Our system of grazing, differs from the p/meter, in the fact that we keep grazing the 'to high covers', stop worrying about what the cows leave, and purchased feed, when short, rather than feed baled surplus. In my mind, that purchased hay, is the same, as renting more land, only without the hassle of making hay. The next big problem i can see for us is, having created a system to deal with drought, what the hell do we do if we have a really good growing season, reap, and save, for a rough year.
The general grazing system here in the UK, is now based on the NZ principles, so, a question for @Kiwi Pete , has the NZ system changed, and what is the current thoughts on grass, over 'there', because what you are doing today, will be what we do, tomorrow, the best farmers, will have progressed from 'bulk' standard grazing, so, over to you @Kiwi Pete .

Hmmm bear in mind that our 160 day round can / will be done on 8 hectares per mob?
Small mobs, granted, but it isn't an acreage "thing" in my mind; more of a "what's actually important enough to go after the most"

For us, it's the ability to handle adverse conditions: the 100 day dry spell, the 100 days with maybe 1000mm of rainfall, the week of snow covering the grazing, and the chance that I get killed at work or die in my sleep. The show has to keep rolling!

Bearing this in mind, that 14 day round you mention just cannot cope with 100 days of "bad weather", in fact it isn't going to work in ideal weather for more than a rotation or 2? As mentioned, the dairyman next door is always on 25 days and although he "wants to" get it out, he can't afford the supplements to get there by the time he worked out he needed to. It's because of the spring management that he has a crap year.

And in a good growing year, it still doesn't do any favours because his cows are ploughing the same tracks and the same gateways at least 6 times too often for our clay/silt soil type.

Don't worry about the rest of NZ, most are like the late 90's Honda quads - used to be the best, stopped trying...stopped innovating.... rapidly falling off the charts

- because they read rubbish from Doug Eggmeades and try to overproduce even harder.

I think many kiwis would do well to look at how overproduction works for overseas farmers, before they trying to outproduce the overproducers without having a percentage of farm income direct from the taxpayers as a fallback .

 

[onesiedale]

they have their place

In an oven

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

How many cows would you need to milk in an ultra- low cost system to make a reasonable living I wonder? I see several dairies in the UK doing this, admittedly retailing their own milk as a premium product, on under 30 cows. That seriously changes the workload.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

How many cows would you need to milk in an ultra- low cost system to make a reasonable living I wonder? I see several dairies in the UK doing this, admittedly retailing their own milk as a premium product, on under 30 cows. That seriously changes the workload.

"It depends"

All very well having a low-cost system until someone ducks off to town in the Audi and comes back with a grand's worth of crap for the house.... for example

if the money spent in town comes from town, and the money made on the farm goes into the farm, then it's quite a pretty picture. I think it's actually our "personal spending habits" that makes farming look increasingly unviable to many - "60 years ago you could buy a new tractor for every cow sold" maybe stretching it, but 60 years ago we didn't have, need or even know about half the crap people spend their dough on.

Also, not living and breathing "selling more raw milk" means more time for other stuff that you can do - like bashing out butter, soap, growing pigs and veg and calves and whatever piques your interests.

There's a lot that can be done, but only if you have it between your temples to make it happen...

Let's use cheese, retails here for about $10/kg, so 7 tonnes of cheese would be a good living.
Raw milk, by comparison, sells out the gate for around $5/kgMS, so you need twice as many cows without getting technical

People would rather milk twice as many cows and have twice the variable costs because YouTube apparently doesn't tell us how cheese is made, and getting rennet from a calf is just yucky.

What if the trap and me are the same?

 

[som farmer]

in the UK we have one of the lowest spend for food, in the world, and that is the market we have to sell to.
Health wise we are 'overweight', as are the yanks, but food is cheap. Is this a reason we have so much processed crap available to eat ? If food is cheap anyway, to add value, you have 2 choices, aim for the high quality, farm assured route, or cheapen it down, by adding ultra low cost stuff to it, chuck in a few addictive flavours, a catchy slogan, pretty packaging, and good advertising, bugger the consequences, and as i type, i'm realising this explains the cheap processed foods exactly, what will be the results in 50yrs time ?
I cannot really see a way out of that, if produce price rises, manufacturers have the same choice, aim high, or add even worse crap to it, to keep price low. Guv policy is to keep food costs low, and public spend high, on taxable goods. This is bad long term, but to do so, in the short term, would be political suicide. I haven't really thought about this, put this way, before, and nearly wish l hadn't. And there basically isn't a way out, for the gen public, a truly awful future for them. And there isn't a lot of hope for farm incomes to rise, because of guv policy, on food. Taking that further, we would need long term food shortages, or a good pair of secateurs, to alter that. Up till now, ag subsidies, have basically been a bung to counter the effect of cheap food, that position has been slowly going to pot, until now, subs ae based on the 'public good', rather than their food, one could argue it would be better for them, the other way around.
Throw in climate, and the green lobby, into the mix, and where does it leave us, as farmers. Been sure, for a long time, guvs only pay lip service to climate change, to really implement it, would, again, be political suicide, so until the sh1t hits the fan, not a lot of action, the 'green' lobby, tend to overstate their case, to the point, it seems fanatical, and is largely ignored.
This doesn't leave us farmers with much choice, the secateurs, prune everything down, as far as we can, the exact opposite, of guvs wishes, they want cheap food, and max spend of farmers money, on taxable goods. It also leads farmers down the 'regen' route, by default, in the need to produce cheap food, we need to lower costs, the secateurs, finding ways to keep fertility up etc, then chuck in the 'greens', putting a different layer of wants in, it actually leads us, as it did me, naturally down this road. The problem, it doesn't help the cheap food needs of guv, but it does help us, financially, and mentally.

 

[Treg]

How many cows would you need to milk in an ultra- low cost system to make a reasonable living I wonder? I see several dairies in the UK doing this, admittedly retailing their own milk as a premium product, on under 30 cows. That seriously changes the workload.

4

 

[Treg]

https://www.thegodolphin.com/news/trenow-cove-dairy
There you go @holwellcourtfarm , she's got a nice setup ( as in really simple ) , think she was milking 4or 5 when I visited a few years ago.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

in the UK we have one of the lowest spend for food, in the world, and that is the market we have to sell to.
Health wise we are 'overweight', as are the yanks, but food is cheap. Is this a reason we have so much processed crap available to eat ? If food is cheap anyway, to add value, you have 2 choices, aim for the high quality, farm assured route, or cheapen it down, by adding ultra low cost stuff to it, chuck in a few addictive flavours, a catchy slogan, pretty packaging, and good advertising, bugger the consequences, and as i type, i'm realising this explains the cheap processed foods exactly, what will be the results in 50yrs time ?
I cannot really see a way out of that, if produce price rises, manufacturers have the same choice, aim high, or add even worse crap to it, to keep price low. Guv policy is to keep food costs low, and public spend high, on taxable goods. This is bad long term, but to do so, in the short term, would be political suicide. I haven't really thought about this, put this way, before, and nearly wish l hadn't. And there basically isn't a way out, for the gen public, a truly awful future for them. And there isn't a lot of hope for farm incomes to rise, because of guv policy, on food. Taking that further, we would need long term food shortages, or a good pair of secateurs, to alter that. Up till now, ag subsidies, have basically been a bung to counter the effect of cheap food, that position has been slowly going to pot, until now, subs ae based on the 'public good', rather than their food, one could argue it would be better for them, the other way around.
Throw in climate, and the green lobby, into the mix, and where does it leave us, as farmers. Been sure, for a long time, guvs only pay lip service to climate change, to really implement it, would, again, be political suicide, so until the sh1t hits the fan, not a lot of action, the 'green' lobby, tend to overstate their case, to the point, it seems fanatical, and is largely ignored.
This doesn't leave us farmers with much choice, the secateurs, prune everything down, as far as we can, the exact opposite, of guvs wishes, they want cheap food, and max spend of farmers money, on taxable goods. It also leads farmers down the 'regen' route, by default, in the need to produce cheap food, we need to lower costs, the secateurs, finding ways to keep fertility up etc, then chuck in the 'greens', putting a different layer of wants in, it actually leads us, as it did me, naturally down this road. The problem, it doesn't help the cheap food needs of guv, but it does help us, financially, and mentally.

Is that really true?

I simply cannot imagine the vast majority of the world spending lots of "money" on "food" like the decadent westerners do.

Considering each acre farmed receives more in BPS than a yearly wage in many developing nations, even a dairy cow effectively has a better deal than some people do.

Hence I struggle with "cheap food", because if you're buying it, it's expensive food

I know it's "relative", but it's still probably a bit misleading to believe that food is cheaper than what you can grow for a few pinches of seed and a bit of toil - the actual grocery bill is about $1200 per person per year in this household, or £200/month for a family of 4

Even our resident watering-can man can do "cheap food"

 

[som farmer]

Is that really true?

I simply cannot imagine the vast majority of the world spending lots of "money" on "food" like the decadent westerners do.

Considering each acre farmed receives more in BPS than a yearly wage in many developing nations, even a dairy cow effectively has a better deal than some people do.

Hence I struggle with "cheap food", because if you're buying it, it's expensive food

I know it's "relative", but it's still probably a bit misleading to believe that food is cheaper than what you can grow for a few pinches of seed and a bit of toil - the actual grocery bill is about $1200 per person per year in this household, or £200/month for a family of 4View attachment 952193
Even our resident watering-can man can do "cheap food"

that fact was from the WHO, where l slipped up, lowest % of income, subtle difference. It's all relative, the richer the country the lower %, probably on 'better' food, than the poorest, who pay the highest %.
However, it's great being a richer country, everything costs more, from tractors, right through to luxury yachts, and what we expect from our guvs, from NHS through to cleaning the roads. All that requires more money in the system, which is raised by taxation, as we are 'greedy' with what we want from guv, guv requires max tax, as food doesn't yield much, cheap food, serves 2 purposes, keeping the electorate fed, and letting more money be spent on taxable goods.
The real poor, are basically shafted, in whatever country they are in. You can see why communism holds such an attraction to poorer people, in fact the CAP was created to keep smallholders/farmers, on the land, as history showed, that if financially forced off, and into towns, most would vote communist, and it was the 'cold' war
Where does that leave farming, prices won't dramatically rise, unless an 'event' forces them up, so our only solutions, are, to reduce supply, politically unallowable, though might start subs on food again, or to reduce our cost of production. Land has been basically shafted, and relies on increasing amounts of 'science' to keep producing, or we look at alternative policies, regen, is about the only sensible way forward, and ticks other boxes as well.

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

that fact was from the WHO, where l slipped up, lowest % of income, subtle difference. It's all relative, the richer the country the lower %, probably on 'better' food, than the poorest, who pay the highest %.
However, it's great being a richer country, everything costs more, from tractors, right through to luxury yachts, and what we expect from our guvs, from NHS through to cleaning the roads. All that requires more money in the system, which is raised by taxation, as we are 'greedy' with what we want from guv, guv requires max tax, as food doesn't yield much, cheap food, serves 2 purposes, keeping the electorate fed, and letting more money be spent on taxable goods.
The real poor, are basically shafted, in whatever country they are in. You can see why communism holds such an attraction to poorer people, in fact the CAP was created to keep smallholders/farmers, on the land, as history showed, that if financially forced off, and into towns, most would vote communist, and it was the 'cold' war
Where does that leave farming, prices won't dramatically rise, unless an 'event' forces them up, so our only solutions, are, to reduce supply, politically unallowable, though might start subs on food again, or to reduce our cost of production. Land has been basically shafted, and relies on increasing amounts of 'science' to keep producing, or we look at alternative policies, regen, is about the only sensible way forward, and ticks other boxes as well.

You need to add in that, here in most of the UK, the price of land (note: not necessarily the value) is unrelated to food production as it has become an asset class in itself traded as much by non-farmers as by farmers.

 

[som farmer]

You need to add in that, here in most of the UK, the price of land (note: not necessarily the value) is unrelated to food production as it has become an asset class in itself traded as much by non-farmers as by farmers.

the land we were going to farm, to keep tidy, just made £11,700 acre, it does leave 3 acres for us, but we think we know the buyer, so might end up getting the lot again ! But, it gives us no chance of buying to expand. However there are 2 sides to this, land bought for long term investment, tax reasons, or just comes with a house purchase, still has to be looked after, and some people are quite happy to see it kept tidy, and a few animals.
At college, nearly 50 years ago, chap there moved up to countryside, around london, and started a business farming, these odd acres, either by renting, or being paid to keep them tidy, he had a landscape type business, as with the way of things, lost touch, the last i heard, years ago, he was going great guns, often wish to know 'what happened'.

 

[Henarar]

We farm a lot of bits of land to keep them tidy, either bought by folk for investment or just came with a house

 

[crashbox]

Photos as promised from first "long grazing" experiment...

Cows moving onto this morning's break:

Residuals left behind:

Most people (probably myself included) would say very low utilisation and a lot of "waste" here... Thoughts please?

@Kiwi Pete, on your system, what stocking density is realistic (e.g. 1 cow per acre)? I guess you are doing it without supplementary feed e.g. concentrates?

 

[onesiedale]

How many cows would you need to milk in an ultra- low cost system to make a reasonable living I wonder? I see several dairies in the UK doing this, admittedly retailing their own milk as a premium product, on under 30 cows. That seriously changes the workload.

Back in my former career as a young cheese maker, I always dreamt of having my own small farm and making a living off milking around 25 cows and making cheese.
Now the family have grown up, both son and daughter have returned home to make their careers, it's given us the chance to look at adding value to what we do. Whilst there is loads of room for the cows to become even more low cost, I can see a day when 300 OAD cows could comfortably provide a living for three families plus three members of staff.
We are tenants paying a serious rent and as first generation farmers pretty much all capital has been borrowed to get to where we are. Things can only get better

 

[som farmer]

Photos as promised from first "long grazing" experiment...

Cows moving onto this morning's break:
View attachment 952285

Residuals left behind:
View attachment 952286

Most people (probably myself included) would say very low utilisation and a lot of "waste" here... Thoughts please?

@Kiwi Pete, on your system, what stocking density is realistic (e.g. 1 cow per acre)? I guess you are doing it without supplementary feed e.g. concentrates?

and the bulk tank say's.............
ours were bit to short today, p/meter measures, but it is hard to judge this time of year, 2 feeds or 3 feeds bit of field, we chose the wrong one.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

that fact was from the WHO, where l slipped up, lowest % of income, subtle difference. It's all relative, the richer the country the lower %, probably on 'better' food, than the poorest, who pay the highest %.
However, it's great being a richer country, everything costs more, from tractors, right through to luxury yachts, and what we expect from our guvs, from NHS through to cleaning the roads. All that requires more money in the system, which is raised by taxation, as we are 'greedy' with what we want from guv, guv requires max tax, as food doesn't yield much, cheap food, serves 2 purposes, keeping the electorate fed, and letting more money be spent on taxable goods.
The real poor, are basically shafted, in whatever country they are in. You can see why communism holds such an attraction to poorer people, in fact the CAP was created to keep smallholders/farmers, on the land, as history showed, that if financially forced off, and into towns, most would vote communist, and it was the 'cold' war
Where does that leave farming, prices won't dramatically rise, unless an 'event' forces them up, so our only solutions, are, to reduce supply, politically unallowable, though might start subs on food again, or to reduce our cost of production. Land has been basically shafted, and relies on increasing amounts of 'science' to keep producing, or we look at alternative policies, regen, is about the only sensible way forward, and ticks other boxes as well.

Interesting, isn't it?

When you look at "wealth", really it counts for very little. About the only real difference between the wealthy and poor is the wealthy moan about alot and the poor just get on with life.

I think the main difference in the two is that the wealthy struggle with shifting whereas if you have little, then you can move.... but as per the video I posted, 'where is "away"?'

(That's why we made our business a "poor" business, in a nutshell, as opposed to weighing it down with cows and tractors and stuff, it's really just a wee bit of land with green stuff on it,, makes shifting much easier)

 

[onesiedale]

Interesting, isn't it?

When you look at "wealth", really it counts for very little. About the only real difference between the wealthy and poor is the wealthy moan about alot and the poor just get on with life.

I think the main difference in the two is that the wealthy struggle with shifting whereas if you have little, then you can move.... but as per the video I posted, 'where is "away"?'

(That's why we made our business a "poor" business, in a nutshell, as opposed to weighing it down with cows and tractors and stuff, it's really just a wee bit of land with green stuff on it,, makes shifting much easier)

Which is why my goals for the farm business have at the top ' being a debt free tenant' - I suppose the ultimate is being a debt free land owner, but I've got to be realistic.
Life will be so simple when I'm free of the 'trap'

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Photos as promised from first "long grazing" experiment...

Cows moving onto this morning's break:
View attachment 952285

Residuals left behind:
View attachment 952286

Most people (probably myself included) would say very low utilisation and a lot of "waste" here... Thoughts please?

@Kiwi Pete, on your system, what stocking density is realistic (e.g. 1 cow per acre)? I guess you are doing it without supplementary feed e.g. concentrates?

Yeah, about 1.1 'cows' to the acre, it really depends on the size of the cows as much as a lot of other factors!
Big cows take a lot of feed to maintain, especially if it's "rocket fuel" as is the fashion, and the higher rate of replacement that goes with it then drops the effective cow carrying capacity - because the extra replacements take up more space .

Tricky to optimise all things but about a cow/ac plus ⅕ of a heifer plus ⅕ of a calf, if you've got good effective rainfall.
Doesn't really matter how much if it's effective, within reason.

Not a bad residual there, obviously "what happens next" is the thing, but I like to let new grass just get a couple of toppings like that for the first year or even two - you get it all back down the road, especially deeper rooting plants, they need to build that

 

[som farmer]

Which is why my goals for the farm business have at the top ' being a debt free tenant' - I suppose the ultimate is being a debt free land owner, but I've got to be realistic.
Life will be so simple when I'm free of the 'trap'

we have an option to purchase, on demise of l/lord, who seems to be remarkably resilient, 95 this week. It's fine having that option, it's not knowing when. That has to reflect how we farm, although we 'own' a proportion, family, we need to show we can afford that loan. If/when it happens, we have several alternative options, probably ending up relatively debt free. The bugbear, is not knowing when, and a local serious rise in land price.