NZ Dairy Winter 2021

10 | nz dairy DAIRY PEOPLE » Judge Valley Dairies: John Hayward & Susan O’Regan Productive use of Richard Loader P assionate and very excited about the dairy industry, John Hayward is on a mission to evolve dairy farming for the better, looking for opportunities including the productive use of waste. Under the name Judge Valley Dairies, John and his wife Susan O’Regan farm in the Waikato, mid- way between Te Awamutu and Cambridge. Past Supreme winners of the Waikato Ballance Farm Environment Awards, while John and Susan continue to be committed to their environmental work, John says a focus on profit, like any business, is equally as important. “It’s about controlling costs and improving ef- ficiencies, really. The world is changing all the time, and people’s perception of farming is changing all the time. There are so many rules coming out; whether I agree with them is another thing. I hear all these people going on about sustainability. It’s a lovely word to use, but sometimes it can be quite hard to implement.” Rolling to steeper contour, the 240-hectare prop- erty encompasses 130 hectares of dairy platform, 80-90 hectares of drystock area with the remainder embracing plantations and wetlands. Operating a closed system, the heifers don’t leave the property. Constantly shifting and adapting to make things better, John says sometimes the pendulum has to be brought back and the reset button pushed. “At one point we reduced our herd to 350 cows. But we just didn’t have enough and it was the wrong move. Our ideal number is somewhere between 380 and 400 cows.” For a number of years John and Susan had been milking 480 cows in a split calving regime. John says while it was an intensive system the environ- mental footprint was controlled. “We had three staff members, and it just got to a point one day when I said I didn’t want to do this anymore, we can do it better than this. That’s when we went to the all-autumn calving/winter-milking regime and we sold one herd. We’ve done that for two seasons now and we’re seeing progress – it’s just awesome.” This season Judge Valley Dairies will finish at 165,000kgMS from 370 cows. Determined to get back to 200,000kgMS, John acknowledges he has to work out how to get there but believes it will be through diet, efficiencies and finding new opportu- nities. “We supply Open Country and our peak months are when we get paid the most for our milk. So even though we’re producing less milk we’re making more money. We don’t have all those staff members running around and we get paid more for our milk when we produce it.” One of the opportunities John refers to is making productive use of re-purposed food or the by- product from food processing. “It’s about embracing and utilising waste as a resource – the biggest opportunity in our country right now, and nobody is talking about it.” Photos: The 240ha Waikato property encompasses 130ha of dairy platform, 80- 90ha of drystock area and the remainder in plantations and wetland. The farm has been operating under an all-autumn calving/winter milking system for two season. Unwanted kiwifruit is fed to the herd. “The third biggest contributor to climate change worldwide is decomposing food waste. I look at our Government and all the things they’re doing and saying, but there’s such a massive opportunity to change things – in our country, our sector, urban New Zealand and businesses; it’s huge. It’s about embracing and utilising waste as a resource – the biggest opportunity in our country right now, and nobody is talking about it.” Judge Valley Dairies feeds three tonne of ‘un- wanted’ kiwifruit to the cows each day. High in ME, John says the cows love it. The kiwifruit goes into the mixer wagon with brewers grain – the by-product of the beer making process – along with maize grown on the farm, to make a delicious brew that the cows hoover down just before milking. “The public perception is we need to have a perfectly formed, perfect weight kiwifruit and anything that doesn’t fit that criteria is out the door and becomes waste. That applies to all fruit and vegetables. So there’s one of the biggest industries in the country and the suppliers are calling me up to ask when I want the next load. When you look at it, all the effort, energy, water and expertise that has gone into growing that fruit it’s really cool that we can now take it and make it into a product that can be sold overseas – milk powder. It provides energy for our cows, it’s high in sugar.” John also points to the maize grown from his farm’s effluent. “We create a lifecycle of that nutrient which keeps going around the system. The cows eat the maize, they produce milk, they excrete on the pad and that waste goes out in the maize paddock. The maize grows again, sucks it all up and it goes around and around.” John says he listens to the Government saying farmers need to drop cow numbers because of climate change, and really questions those state- ments. “As farmers we need to identify areas where we can become more efficient and get more produc- tion, by incorporating non-traditional methods and systems and harvesting new opportunities. We don’t want to be a society that says ‘just drop cow numbers, that will fix it!’.