| 61 nzdairy Building on three decades of greatness Being the third generation to farm the land has been a big driver for Andrew Booth of Jade Dairies to be a kaitiaki to pass the environment to future generations in good condition. With wife Vicky the couple are sharemilkers on the farm of Andrew’s parents, Richard and Sharron, and have just taken out the Northland Regional Supreme Winner Award for the 2023 Ballance Farm Environment Awards along with four merit awards: Rabobank Agri-Business Management Award, NZFET Climate Recognition Award, DairyNZ Sustainability and Stewardship Award and the Northland Regional Council Water Quality Enhancement Award. “We’re aware of the environment we’re farming in and making sure we don’t do anything that is detrimental to it,” he says. They first entered the awards around five years ago and Andrew says it has been good to be able to build on the feedback they got back then. “The judges who judged us first round then were the second round judges this year. So they saw a big progression and that a lot of the stuff we had said we would do back then we’ve done,” says Andrew. The farm at Titoki, around 30 minutes drive Karen Phelps Andrew Booth and wife Vicky. DAIRY PEOPLE » Jade Dairies west of Whangarei, totals 220ha with a 173ha platform and milks 400 Friesian cross cows through a 36 aside herringbone shed with automatic drafting and teat spraying. It is supported by three run off blocks totalling 70ha where young stock are raised and they grow maize and grass silage. The Mangakahia River runs along 5km of the boundary on the platform and run off and Andrew spent a lot of time playing in the river growing up, which has been a big incentive to protect it and the Kaipara Harbour it flows into. They have fenced it off and completed riparian planting. Two seasons ago they constructed a big wetland on the farm totalling 1.5ha in partnership with Northland Regional Council. “It used to be a swamp and as a kid I would catch frogs there. It got drained and turned into farmland but it was never very productive so I wanted to revert it back to swamp.” Andrew says frogs have already returned along with matuku (native bittern) and moho pereru (banded rail) which is at risk of decline. The farm also has another swamp and both of these areas now filter water running off the farm before it hits waterways. The Booths also plan to plant a native bush block to match another in the area with kahikatea and puriri trees to create diversity. Sharron has propagated these from seeds collected from these species already on the farm. Critical source areas – boggy parts of paddock – are also in the process of being fenced off and planted. “You don’t lose a lot of pasture but what you gain in terms of aesthetics, biodiversity and water quality is massive.” Andrew is a DairyNZ Climate Change Ambassador, and is involved with the Dairy Environmental Leaders Group and Northland Dairy Development Trust. He says he got involved initially as a learning experience. “I wasn’t overly clued up as to what’s happening in the climate change space. For us it’s been about adaption in our farm system. Dargaville 09 439 8415 Wellsford 09 423 8674 Whangarei 09 438 7038 We used to be a full spring calving system and struggled to milking the cows in the increasingly hotter, drier, longer summers. Now we grow more grass through winter than summer so we thought we might as well milk our cows while growing grass by winter milking. Also we are making sure we are breeding the most efficient cows possible to reduce wastage of feed inputs and using grass to the best of our ability. It’s also about having conversations with peers to help people understand what’s coming at us to grow awareness so people can start to see how it might affect their farm, what their options are to adapt so they can prepare their business.”
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