59. On The Udder Side Of The World - A Conclusion

Dairy farmers in the UK are now, more than ever trying to emulate, or at the very least take inspiration from the hugely successful NZ dairy industry.

My main reason for going to NZ was to find out about the Kiwi style of dairying. Instead I found out more about myself.

I am only joking, I could not type that with a straight face. I am going to avoid the stomach-turning clichés that generally litter people’s accounts of their travels. This is just going to be a few paragraphs of what I will remember about the country and what I will take from my experience to aid in my progression up the ladder in the dairy industry.

The good thing about New Zealanders is that they were British a few generations ago. Some of the best of British though. It was the adventurous and risk takers who got on the ships with a sheep under each arm, a bible in their back pocket and a head full of farming knowledge. 

I realise that this is a huge generalisation, completely discounting the Polynesians, other Europeans and Asians that make up the Kiwi population, but where I was in Otago, this was the case. They followed Cook to the opposite side of the world and settled down on the islands that from a non-expert’s view, have geography and a climate pretty similar to the UK, volcanoes aside.

In his short shorts, Swanndri bush shirt and dirty boots, the rural New Zealander that I have come to recognise lives for farming, rugby and a few beers with their barbequed venison steaks (I am focussing on the farming for now). The reason they love farming is not because they are doing well in a successful industry, the industry is successful because they love it. Actually it is not just the rural New Zealanders who love it. I have chatted to various city folk in Wellington, Chistchurch, Dunedin, etc who are genuinely interested in agriculture. Their uncle might own a farm or their grand-dad used to milk cows or they may have no connection to farming at all. But it is pretty much guaranteed that they will be interested in it. 

A typical conversation in a city pub might go:

Me: That was no way a try, his foot was in touch.

City Bloke: No it wasn’t, I thought you Poms all preferred soccer-ball anyway?

Me: Absolutely not.

City Bloke: So are you backpacking round NZ?

Me: Nope, I am working on a dairy farm down/up in Otago.

City Bloke: Sweet as! How are you finding it?

Me: It is great, better than the dairy farming in England anyway.

City Bloke: What’s the difference?

And then a lengthy conversation about dairy farming will ensue.

If I was in a British city and mentioned that I was a farmer, there would be no interest in it. If there was it would probably be negative because I would be a murderer of animals or a posh twat. It is funny really because you would think that food production should really be at the forefront of people’s minds. It is the most vital industry in the world.

The general attitude to agriculture in NZ seems to me to be positive. There is a greater percentage of the workforce working in the industry, and most of the country’s economy is agriculture based. The powers that be tend to not let too much red tape and committees get in the way of progression of agriculture. A great example of the farming industry doing it right is of course Fonterra, where the farmers control the marketing and distribution of the product they produce. In the UK dairy farmers sell their milk at the price not under their control. New Zealand’s geographical position, relationship with China and low population means that it thrives as an export economy. Obviously the UK is very different and the NZ system would not work, but the general positive attitude to farming and the acceptance of how important food production is would improve the British industry no end.

I undoubtedly learnt a lot about the NZ style of dairy farming, hopefully knowledge that I can use and implement as my career in agriculture progresses. One of the aspects of dairy farming I have learnt most about is pasture management. When you look at a cow, everything lends itself to converting fresh grass to milk. That is the direction I want to take in my dairying future, farming on pasture based systems and focusing on milk composition rather than yield. Having now worked on the two extremes of dairy farming, I absolutely have a favourite! Low input – low output, block calving is much more fun than the all year round calving, TMR based herds I have previously experienced.

I am very aware that you couldn’t just pick up a NZ dairy farm and put it in the UK. The milk market and the climate are not the same, but I do strongly believe that the future of British milk production will come to rely on effective management of on-farm resources. Oil prices will go up drastically in my lifetime, which will cause feed prices to rise. It will become even more expensive to bring in silage or plant short term/annual crops. The costs of keeping livestock indoors and maintaining the health of an animal that is producing a huge amount of milk from a vast quantity of food will only spiral upwards. The way forward is a grazing cow, and the efficient use of that green leafy stuff.

New Zealand is a great country. The memories will stay with me; landscapes that day to day consistently keep me in awe of nature must be praised. The place made this Shropshire lad feel pretty insignificant in the world sometimes, but immensely privileged to see some of the highlights of it. I urge you all to visit New Zealand, it is absolutely worth the journey and very nearly worth putting up with the terrible standard of sausages for eleven months.

I thank you all for reading my ramblings and looking at my amateurish photographs. I have enjoyed writing this blog immensely and I am most grateful for the feedback I have received.

I will remain in Old England for the foreseeable future, milking cows, generally enjoying the countryside and trying to find a wife. Maybe in a few years time I will find that I am quite ready for another adventure, and if so, look out for that blog. You could also follow me on Twitter if you want to keep up with my exploits @FLawder.

Until then, then.

Freddie Lawder

58. New Zealand to Old England

Blog readers, I am back in England!

Here is a short account of my lengthy and mostly tiresome journey from Christchurch back to Shropshire. If it wasn't for the excitement of seeing my family it would have been truly dire. My camera spent most  of the time buried in the bottom of my bag, I am still not sure which one it is in, so there are minimal photographic accompaniments in this one.

I flew out of Christchurch airport in the middle of the morning in the rain. Being the morning after the All Blacks test match I had hoped to see a few battered and bruised froggies at the terminal, but I didn't which was a disappointment.

I was wearing my heaviest clothes, thick jeans, steel toe-capped leather boots and my wool Swanndri hoody. This was a tactical decision to save weight in my suitcase. Between that and my cabin baggage I was only allowed to take 27 kg of stuff on the plane. This was a problem. I weighed about 35 kg of clothes that I wanted to keep before I left the bungalow. I had to perform a brutal and swift cull of perfectly good clothes that were not worth the risk of excess baggage fines. Anyway it boiled down to me wearing thick winter clothes on a airplane where the stocking rate of people is about four per metre². I hate how they make you walk through the business class seats before you get to yours just to highlight how little room there is in cattle class.

The eleven hour flight included everything bad about long distance air travel. It had irritating young children, a girl chucking up and I spilled some of my beer when they served a meal in some pretty decent turbulence. According to the pilot, we were going over India where the monsoon season was in full flow. I always choose beer as my drink because it is the only one where they give you a full can. If you want coke for example they will just pour you a tiny plastic cup of it from the can.

I was sat next to a bloke who looked like Mr Miyagi from the Karate Kid. He looked like he could teach me how to headbutt through a concrete wall or something. I kept my headphones on and didn't make eye contact because I didn't really want a repeat of my flight on the way into Christchurch (See blog post 2). He couldn't open his cup holder though so I had to keep opening it for him. Every time he would pat me on the shoulder and tell me I had the magic touch, which was a little weird. He couldn't open the cup holder because he had frost-nipped fingers, I think he wanted to tell me how it happened but I managed to avoid that.

At Singapore airport I had a wait of 7 hours before my next plane. This was long, but I had done my maths wrong and had previously thought it was 15 hours so it wasn't too bad. I splashed out on a some luxury transit lounge action and had the greatest shower I have ever had. It was a rain shower with a shower head of about 12 inches in diameter.

The transit lounge had nice and fast free wireless, but more importantly a free buffet. They had a good selection of curry but I only ate triangle food, samosas and tiny sandwiches.

I ate lots of them. Enough for them to run out. They weren't even that nice, I just have issues with free food sitting there not being eaten.

The journey from Singapore to London wasn't great either. It was fourteen hours through the night, I slept in short bursts for no longer than half an hour at a time. I would drift off to sleep and wake up with an achey neck and cramp in my legs. I did manage to watch a whole season of The Thick Of It, which is just hilarious. I probably annoyed a few other passangers trying to get to sleep by continuously snickering away at the political satire on the mini TV screen.

I am not sure when it got light, I think somewhere over Turkey, but it was definitely bright sunshine coming through the windows when we were served breakfast at about half 5. After a random circle over Chelmsford, we landed at Heathrow and my feet were finally back on British soil.

It was all smooth sailing from then on. Apart from my Dad forgetting the car parking ticket to lift the barrier at the exit. Some blagging skills were exercised and the journey up the motorway passed by very quickly.

Everything looked lush and green, it was good to see summer was in full swing.


My next post will be my last one on The Udder Side Of The World, keep your eyes open for it!

57. The Top Ten Things I Will Miss About NZ

Today I set off on my lengthy journey back home. I am currently in a hostel in Christchurch having just watched the All Blacks destroy Les Blues, at a pub though, not live.

After cleaning the bungalow, I was dropped off at Oamaru to catch a bus to Christchurch. The bus company was called NakedBus. In my experience, a naked bus is what happened at uni when the womens and mens rugby teams had the same away fixture. This was different, it was full of sixteen year olds who looked like they are fans of vampires and reality television. I sat on my seat, which was narrower than me and settled into my bad mood. The driver had the heating way up at 23.5 °C, I could see it on the dashboard. I was not impressed. I got my laptop out and watched a couple of classic episodes of David Attenborough's Life of Mammals which cheered me up a bit. 

Anyway I had the chance to think up the top ten things I will miss about New Zealand, here they are:


10. The TV show 'The Crowd Goes Wild!'

9. Fourteen-forty-four.

8. Milking at a rate of nearly 6 cows per minute.

7.  The low population (of humans).

6. The odd road names.

5. The Lord of the Ringsy vibe about the countryside.

4. The constant obsession with the greatest ball game in the world (rugby union for those of you who don't recognise the trophy). 

3. Speight's Gold Medal Ale.

2. The general appreciation and respect for farmers and farming from the public (even city folk).

1. Working with views as good as this every day.

That'll do for now, I've got a flight to catch in the morning!

56. Speight's Brewery & Five Forks

Last weekend (the Queen's birthday weekend here in NZ) I drove down to Dunedin, mainly to go on the Speight's Brewery tour, which I had been meaning to do for a while. Regular Udder Side Of The World readers will know my beer of choice in NZ is Speight's Gold Medal Ale (My #1 UK pint is Brains SA, best drunk whilst watching rugby).

I had heard good things about the tour and they all proved accurate. Speight's is marketed as 'The Pride of the South', the South in NZ being kind of equivalent to the North in the UK. The South encapsulates Otago and Southland and anyone here drinking a beer that is historically from the North is regarded with deep suspicion and mistrust. Speight's main rivals from the North seem to be Tui and DB Draught. The Tui is a bird native to New Zealand, I have heard a few times Tui beer referred to as 'Bird-flu'. DB Draught's logo is a couple of shire horses which I suppose must have given rise to its nickname 'Horse piss'. My point, is from the moment I stepped into the local pub I was Speight's drinker.

Anyway back to the tour, which was pretty informal, very different from the kind of tour you would get in the UK anyway. We were taken through the actual working rooms of the brewery, past the pallets of barley and hops and within touching distance of all the switches and handles that control it all. They were very trusting. They don't brew on the weekend, so there weren't any tanks of beer to drop cameras, small children, etc into. I don't know if the access is the same during the week. 

The brewery is currently being refurbished. They are replacing the very old genuine museum piece brewing apparatus with the modern equipment. This basically means they are going to put tanks made of stainless steel rather than the ones made of copper that have been making Speight's for so many years. 

Here are a couple of the pictures I took.

It is nice to know that modern products are still being made in what looks like some of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

This mill for crushing the barley is basically the same as the one we use on the farm to roll the barley that the cows eat in the milking shed, except much bigger and about a hundred years older. It probably doesn't break down as much either. 

Here is a fun brewery fact for you: Did you know that the dust from crushed barley is very flammable so traditionally workers used wooden shovels to avoid creating sparks on the concrete floor. They also always put the room where the barley is crushed on the end of the building in case there is a fire, this way they minimise the damage.

That is pretty much all I remember from the 'how they make beer'part of the tour. Although I do recall that there is a fresh water spring underneath the brewery which produces just about the purest natural water you can get. They still have to have an expensive and the only modern machine there, that sterilises it just in case. 

Outside on the street they have this tap giving out free spring water to the public, apparently it is very popular and they make a ton of money for charity from the donations. 

The highlight of the tour was obviously the free bar at the end. They had five beers and one cider on tap and it was all you can drink for half an hour. I didn't keep count, but I definitely drank more than the cost of my ticket. I am not a cider fan so apart from that I had one of each to start off (they were only half pints).

The beers from left to right are: Speight's Apple Cider, Speight's Triple Hop Pilsner, Speight's Distinction Ale, Speight's Golden Pale Ale, Speight's 5 Malt Old Dark and Speight's Gold Medal Ale. That is all from memory too which proves something positive I am sure. 

If you are ever in Dunedin, you should visit the brewery. It is probably one of the most fun touristy things I have done in NZ.

In other news, 240 of the cows are now 8 km (5 miles in proper money) down the road on a newly acquired piece of ground at the hamlet of Five Forks. Five Forks is basically just a junction of three roads with a farm track joining it and what is pretty much just tyre tracks through a field. The latter definitely doesn't warrant a 'Fork' moniker. I appreciate it might have once been a more substantial Fork, but still 'Five Forks' is quite an exaggeration.

It was a long pretty boring walk for them to get there, it took as about two and a half hours I think. There were not enough junctions or open gateways to keep me busy, so I was just sat on the bike going at fat cow pace, which is really quite slow. Although at the one downhill bit with blind corners and a huge lorry driving through them, they did pick up speed a bit.

Here a couple of pics from the journey:

The farm where they are now is an old beef farm. The paddocks we a currently grazing are complete rings around pivot irrigation. With only one gate to get in, it makes for some pretty frustrating times trying to move cattle about. At the moment they are on a mix of Italian Ryegrass (a highly nutritious, short term type) and turnips. I am pretty sure the turnips are edible for humans so I have picked one for me to eat. I am going to forgo the grass. 

To go and move reels for the cows at Five Forks twice a day, it is a bit far to go by quad bike, so I have been driving David's newish farm truck. As 4x4s go, it is not the most masculine or sturdy looking machine. It looks better now that it has some mud on it but still, its no Land Rover.

It is very light, so much so that it floats across any mud etc. If you do get it stuck, you can just pull it out by hand though and put it in your pocket. There is not much room inside, you have to have the window down when driving so there is room for the right hand side of your body to stick out a bit. You can't adjust the window and have your foot on the throttle at the same time though, there is not enough room. And when you put it into reverse, your elbow nearly hits the rear window. I can't complain too much though, when I went down to Five Forks on the quad one morning, my face was so numb from the cold air I couldn't speak properly. I would take the matchbox truck over facial frostbite any time.

This is probably my last farm related blog post as I finish working here in a few days. I have a lot of bungalow cleaning and jumping on top of my suitcase lid to do, I fly out of Christchurch on the 16th, arriving back in the motherland on the 17th.  I will document my journey home and reflect on my NZ experience in the next week or so. 

For now though, I leave you with an evening wintery view of the mountains from my garden.

55. Drying Off

I heard a story once about a rookie dairy farm worker who was asked to go and fetch some towels because the cows needed drying off!

For those of you not familiar with this terminology ‘drying off’ is the process of bringing about an end to the lactation, not anything to do with soggy livestock. It is basically just no longer milking the cows. The way the mammary glands work is that the process of removing milk causes the cow to produce more. Once she is not being milked, she stops producing on her own. Usually dairy cows are given antibiotic treatment to get rid of any sub-clinical mastitis and reduce the risk of any future mastitis over the dry period.

We dried off the cows in two groups, early and late calvers. They stay in these groups and are grazed in different places over the winter. We dried them off a few days apart which meant there were a couple of milkings with only about 200 cows. It took longer to wash down the milking shed then it did to actually milk them. I could get used to only having to milk five and a half rows!

After the cows have been milked for the last time this season, they have long acting antibiotics applied through each teat into the udder. Often a teat seal, which is a bit like toothpaste is also put in to create a physical barrier for invasive pathogens. We don’t do that here, apparently the benefits do not outweigh the costs.

It is very important during dry cow treatment to maintain a high standard of cleanliness. If due care is not taken, bacteria can end up being transferred into the udder, most likely resulting in mastitis. We used methylated spirits to kill any bacteria on the teats and our hands, which after a few rows causes mild light-headedness! Trying to keep everything clean can be tricky, cows are often not happy with someone poking them in the teat. When a cow is unhappy, the first thing she does is evacuate her bowels. Normally I wouldn’t mind, but whilst I am trying to keep an almost surgical level of hygiene about myself, the gifts from above are unwanted.

I brought my camera down to the shed to photograph the process, I was so focussed on the job in hand that I completely forgot to actually take any photos. Not wanting to go without illustration for such an important part of the season I have been honing my child-like skills on Microsoft paint!

Once the cows are dried off, they no longer graze on the milking platform so are taken to the run-off block. This is a separate farm a couple of miles down the road, shared with the other sharemilkers. The late calvers will go to another block further away in the village of Enfield, where the local pub is too.

Before they are all sent away for their winter holiday, all the stock must get a mineral supplement and an anti-lice pour-on drench. Usually the mineral shots they get are Selenium and Copper, but after some routine liver biopsies found our Copper levels to be high, it was just the Selenium jab they were getting.

(Photo courtesy of Stephie Hauk)

Over winter the dry cows are fed a combination of grass, silage, hay and a load of fodder beet. 

It takes a couple of weeks for the cows to get used to the diet change, so they have to be gently weaned onto the fodder beet. They love it though, it is very satisfying to be in the paddock and not being able to hear anything but chomping. I imagine it is a bit tricky to go from wrapping your tongue around a clump of grass and ripping it out to having to take a bite out of one of these!

No longer milking has its pros and cons. The pros obviously include the lie-ins and being able to wear the same work clothes for longer. The major negative though is really quite distressing. I had to buy milk from the supermarket today. It is a travesty that I had to pay a lot of dollars for what seems to be white water. I hope the Chinese are enjoying all that fat and protein that Fonterra have taken out of my milk.

It has come to the point where I am starting to think about my return back to the UK. My flight leaves in two and a half weeks, so I am now thinking about how I am going to fit all the Swanndri gear I have acquired into my suitcase. I am definitely going to be over the weight limit, I might have to send an extra box home by ship.

See you next time.

54. Drizzly Goings On

I thought I would give you an update of what has been going on on the farm.

It has mostly been raining, not heavily but consistently. The ground is soft, and driving along the cow tracks on the bikes means you end up with a face splattered with mud looking like a Dalmatian. You know the tracks are muddy when there is so much muck on the underside of the quad that the exhaust smokes every time you stop.

Some of the cows have been dried off or culled now, leaving a milking herd of 426, although this puts less pressure on the grazing, the weather really isn't helping.

This picture shows where the cows walked alongside a reel to reach the fresh grass.

I can see this paddock across the creek from where I am sitting now in the kitchen. It still doesn't look very green, even after another few days of continuous washing from above.

The gateways to the paddocks take a beating too, the soil here is at times pretty clayey, which when wet gets very slippy. I have planted myself on my arse more than a few times in the last couple of days. The cows when going down these skiddy exits from the paddocks tend to plant there front feet and try and walk with their back legs. It is a bit like an bovine snowmobile with the skis at the front and the drive at the back.

I took a picture of this gateway before and after the cows came through, obviously I didn't want the cows to mess it up, but the 'after' picture is not as severe as some of the others which was a little disappointing

BEFORE

AFTER

.

In other news, we will be drying all the cows in the next three or four days. They will each receive intra-mammary antibiotic treatment to reduce the risk of mastitis, and then a nice winter holiday away from milking while the calves inside them grow. We will dry them off in two blocks of late and early calvers over two days. They will then be walked down the road to the run-off block. The return journey to the original 'Big Muster' (see blog post 5). You can probably expect a blog post about all that excitement!

In food news, I liberated Daniel's slow-cooker from his kitchen whilst I was visiting. At the moment, it is cooking some beef stew, it has been on for about four hours, and will probably keep going for another four or five more. I am very excited to eat it tonight, and tomorrow and probably the next day too if there are still leftovers.

In it is a combination of stewing stake and some topside, as well as spuds, carrot, onion and mushrooms and some stock. I am going for the simple but hearty method. Although the weather is fine now, if it turns out to be miserable again, then this is the perfect food.

That'll be it for today. I will leave you with a picture of 1444, one of the personalities I will miss when I go home in just over three weeks.

53. Canterbury Flat Farm

Last weekend I hopped in the car to go and visit my former colleague and bungalow-mate Daniel on the farm near Rakaia, where he now works.

I didn't drive there directly. I took a very out of the way route, for two reasons. Firstly because I wanted to see Lake Tekapo - I had heard it was a lake worth seeing, and secondly because I didn't think it would add three whole hours on to my journey. As photogenic lakes go, I have seen a few now. The ones on the Waitaki were as always, spectacular. As I drove past the crystal clear water, edged with trees of varying autumnal shades of rust, my trigger finger started twitching so I jumped out of the car and took a few snaps. 

As I drove North the mountains got higher and snowier and at Lake Tekapo, the scene in front of me looked decidedly more wintery.

When I eventually got to Daniel's, the 'Roast of the Day' and a few handles of Speight's at the pub did the trick to pick me up from what turned out to be a five hour drive. 

I was very jealous of the woodburner that was dominating his new accommodation. With a free supply of logs he can keep his house toasty, while here at mine, we have just one heater which savages the electricity bill. What was even more impressive was the cage around it, the previous occupants must have had kids, or maybe they kept large predators in it. To call the cage sturdy is a massive understatement, but at a guess I would say it was at least bear-proof. 

The next morning I was taken on the tour of the farm, as is obligatory for anyone who goes to see someone who lives on a farm. It is pretty different to where I work, which is probably one of the steepest dairy farms in New Zealand. The main difference being it is pretty much completely flat. That is due its location on the flood plains of the very wide Rakaia River. Looking on Google maps the area looks pretty cool, and gives you an idea of the scale of the river. You can also see the obvious shapes of dairy farm paddocks, dictated by the pivot irrigation. 

At Rakaia (off the map), the road and rail bridges that span the water are the longest in the country at 1.75 km (over a mile) in length.

Anyway back to the farm tour. Mounted on two-wheeler bikes we set off for a look around. The weather was disappointingly grey, and the country probably didn't look its finest. 

Milking approx 580 cows (mostly small ginger ones), 'Dairy 2' is one of eight or nine dairies that make up a pretty large business of over 2000 ha (Canterbury Grasslands). These numbers and any more I include are partially guessed, I have slept numerous times and also drank alcohol since I was told them, so the accuracy may not be great.

The milking platform had a couple of big pivots on it, these roll over the fences, so the electric wire is kept pretty slack. This is very handy for crossing over a fence on the bikes, using the old 'boot holding the wire to the ground whilst the wheels go over' technique. This is a lot trickier to do on a quad bike, unless of course you are a lanky gymnast. Which I am not. 

So I followed Daniel about the paddocks, keeping a safe distance away to avoid being sprayed with mud from his rear wheel which had a very inadequate mudguard. 

Every now and then we would stop, and I would ask some interesting dairying questions, and then I would comment on how flat it was.

When I was visiting, about half the herd had been dried off, they were eating straw with their grass.

The other half still being milked (also 16 hourly), were getting palm kernel as a side dish. This is a supplement feedstuff that is quite popular in NZ. From what I gather, it is mostly fibre, and contains a fair bit of oil which helps keep milk fat up.

Here is a big shed of it, and then the cows digging in.

The milking shed did not look fun to milk in. Apparently because of the shorter stature of the Filipino workers that are pretty popular in the area, they had to raise the pit floor. Bashing your head on the pipes above became a real risk for those of us of normal height. There was also a ramp down too, I don't know, maybe for wheelchair access? It is a 50 a-side shed, which is getting quite long, at this size they usually bend them in a circle and call them a rotary.

A few thing stood out from this farm, not just the huge stones littered across the paddocks, but the way the pasture was grazed down to carpet length. With no silage, it is a pretty low input system, but the cows seemed happy enough.

The stand out feature of the place was the irrigation though, it can get very dry on the Canterbury Plains and this impressive set-up helps to combat that.

These huge pumps will be able to move a ridiculous amount of water.

There are two types of pivot irrigation used, this is one of the huge fixed pivots:

And this smaller pivot is dragged around by tractor and plugged into one of a number of hydrants in the paddock. It is also perfect to rub against to get those hard to reach itches!

Righto, that is all I have for you today. Keep reading!