Spring has finally arrived … along with some more rain, wind and sun! Thankfully the growth has kicked in over the last couple of weeks and we can get the spring burst of pasture we have been hanging out for. Another good lift in the GDT last week was also a nice spring boost!! On […]
Five months ago we had a friendly call from our local Agritrade rep Shannon Patterson wanting to know if we were interested in taking part in a mineral trial in our young stock, knowing that we should be doing more monitoring and trying to grow our young stock better we decided to give it a […]
We have been sticking to the plan to survive the dry weather and this has involved: Extending the grazing round in January (when the turnips started) to get onto a 40ish day round (l.5ha/day). Introducing grass silage to fill the gap of grass DM and going from 30 to 40 day round. Feeding turnips at 4m2/cow/day. The current situation […]
It seems that every year we are having big dry spells through summer, so my thoughts more and more often go to what can we do to mitigate it. Do we grow more summer crops, more maize, or do we look at alternative pasture species? Generally, with summer crops if you have a good summer […]
Many things have changed for us over this past year, which has bought about many changes in the way we are running our farm. One of the first major changes was our worker, Rex, got an infection in his leg and sadly on 12th March, after many complications, he passed away. He is very sadly […]
Our Journey We farm 74 effective hectares of consolidated peat at Tauhei, north of Hamilton, Waikato. We started with an all Friesian herd and have progressively moved to a crossbred herd since then. Over the years we have tried many different farming practices, from TAD milking and achieving great results, then venturing into OAD milking […]