Trent Guy
Hi, my name is Trent Guy. My wife Aimee and I, along with our four children Damien, Charlie, Tobie and Sophie, farm a 123ha effective dairy farm in Northland near Parakao up the Mangakahia Valley. I am currently a board member on the Kokopu School BOT and I also do a small AB run for LIC.
We purchased two farms side by side at the start of the 2013/14 season and began the task of developing two farms into one 280-300cow unit. Of the 123ha there is 60ha of floodable river flats, 30ha of non floodable flats and 33ha of gentle rolling land. We’re also able to irrigate 60ha of that with long lateral sprinklers.
We run a medium input system with all maize grown on-farm, and feed on the covered feed pad that we built in May/June of this year.
I have many goals, two of them are:
- To breed a herd of cows that will produce 1.5 times their body weight in milk solids and to do so profitably (production is vanity, profit is sanity!!)
- To lift the total DM grown on farm to 18tonne!
I have many more goals so you will have to keep reading along each month and they will come out here and there along the way.
So now I can see you sitting there thinking what drives and inspires me, well, my wife tells me I’m a perfectionist, so I like things to be done well, but the main thing that pushes/drives me is a love of dairy farming and family. Remember it’s not always peaches and cream, but if you do a job you love you will never work a day of your life!