48 | nzdairy Adding heat detection Russell Fredric “We probably purely looked at them from a mating point of view originally, but the health bene ts have been unbelievable as well. It all helps to lighten the load after being tied to the farm with no time off over the spring time.” DAIRY PEOPLE » River Edge Dairies: Pam & Jason Brock Nearly 12 years after her husband, Stephen, died at the age of just 53, Pam Brock is generally happy about how her 295 hectare dairy farm is now running. The property runs alongside State Highway 99 about 15 kilometres northwest of Invercargill and following a dif cult decade, Pam is starting to think about retiring and what form a succession plan might take. Her son, Jason, is the farm’s contract milker and could potentially become a 50/50 sharemilker. Pam rears the calves and feeds the young stock on the farm’s run-off block as well as helping Jason when needed. “The farm is doing really well, we are getting more to the stage now where it’s minor stuff; what we are doing is improvements. Jason’s done an excellent job and, talking to people, it’s really positive to hear the farm’s looking really good.” “We’ve done a lot of planting this year along the roadsides and round some of the wet areas and we’ve planted out the tanker track. Milking is going well and the cows are in good condition, it’s been such an awesome spring.” The farm has good infrastructure and peak milks 730 cows twice-a-day through a 50 bail rotary shed with automatic cup removers and Protrack drafting, however after having the farm leased out for nine years a lot of maintenance jobs needed attention. “Things had gone backwards so we’ve been doing a lot of xing electric fencing, water lines and lane work. We’ve been doing maintenance around the milking shed, including putting in a new backing gate and sump, just to try and get things more consolidated.” A game changer was putting heat detection collars on the cows three years ago, despite Pam and Jason initially being unsure about them. “We’d seen them around and talked about them for a couple of years previously, but we thought the Jason Brock (top) is the farm’s contract milker while mum Pam rears the calves and feeds the young stock on the farm’s run-off block. expense of them, we just thought was too much to justify.” However, their experienced second-in-charge unexpectedly became pregnant, creating an impending gap among their skilled workers. With a good amount of notice and time on their side, the pair gave the collars a second look. “Jason and I did a very quick budget and worked out it’s not as expensive as we thought by the time you account for all the savings. We have no bulls, we’ve AI’ed right through, we didn’t have that extra person on the AI stand for those six weeks. It did just free everybody up.” It wasn’t easy in the beginning to trust the collars, but following the $150,000 investment they were not only extremely pleased, the in-calf rate and calving spread improved signi cantly in the rst year, plus they also became aware of signi cant additional bene ts to the cows. “We probably purely looked at them from a mating point of view originally, but the health bene ts have been unbelievable as well.” This includes having data on rumination patterns, cows in distress, lameness and mastitis which allows detection of problems up to two or three days sooner than might be physically seen. “ It all helps to lighten the load after being tied to the farm with no time off over the spring time” Effluent Ponds Farm Drainage Dairy Lane Maintenance Muck Spreading General Farm Earthworks Crushed Rock Bulldozing GEORGE’S HILL ROCK SUPPLIES All Sizes Available 100 Hedgehope Hall Road DOUG HORRELL CONTRACTING PHONE DOUG MOBILE: 0274 331 335 03 214 4467 ean@southernsuzuki.co.nz Suzuki DR200SE Trojan Price $5749 + GST 6086
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