Antara Ag Sheep Dairy Farms

New Zealand has a very small sheep dairy industry but surprisingly, its most successful member has one of the largest dairy flocks in the world. Antara Ag Farms (formerly Blue River Dairy) in Southland, runs approximately 14,000 milking ewes across 3 properties.

Antara Ag has its origins in a group of five farmers who started milking sheep and supplying a factory in Balclutha. That business was taken over by farmer Keith Neylon in 2004 and expanded. The Brydone farm was one of the early sheep diary conversions.

AntaraAg has an exclusive supply agreement with Blueriver Nutrition HK from three Southland farms, and is looking to grow its business by introducing contract milking.

AntaraAg milks specially bred East Friesian-Poll Dorset ewes at three sites in Springhills and Brydone. The company is focused on lifting the performance of its ewes, as well as lifting its ewe numbers.

It has 14,000 ewes and is aiming to milk ten to eleven thousand this year as they go through the process of rebuilding and improving the flock. AntaraAg General Manager Jazz Hewitson says the aim is to initially lift its numbers to 20,000 ewes with a target of 100,000 in the next six to eight years.

Most industry observers say the bottleneck for any sheep milk industry is getting the right sheep breeds, developing ways of increasing their output and building up large flocks of them. It can take years for breeding programmes to make improvements. ET and artificial insemination, which is difficult with sheep, is crucial to such programmes.

Another challenge for the industry is finding suitable high quality land that will produce top quality milk. Most sheep and beef farms are on extensive, less fertile country, unsuited to sheep dairying. A parliamentary committee on sheep milking says: “Unless the industry can continue to demonstrate that it can compete with cows and thus generate interest amongst farmers, it could be pushed back to marginal land areas and again the full potential of the industry would not be realised.”

The three sheep dairy farms are Brydone 180ha, and two near Springhills /Hedgehope which are roughly 260ha. Between them is a runoff of about 300ha, which works in conjunction with the milking platforms and is also part of an in-house stud operation.

Brydone milks about 4000 and the other two properties are milking about 5000. Jazz says they won’t be milking those numbers this year as they’re intent on dropping the poorer performing animals from the herds this season.

On each of the properties there are large wintering barns which are capable of holding 2000 ewes. Jazz says the barns were built for the purpose of milking all year around. He says they finished using the barn recently, but next winter they’ll change their policy and winter the sheep out of the region on some drier country. He says the cost of running the barns was huge.

Jazz says all three farms have new managers. In the past the farms have been run as sheep farms and to move forward they need to be running them very much as dairy farms. He says bovine dairy farms get the production they get because they manage the grass and that’s something Antara Ag is intent on getting very systematic about.

Jazz says that it is sometimes difficult for sheep farmers to see the benefits of doing something like measuring pasture on a daily or weekly basis, but when you can measure production by seeing milk in the vat and then working out how much feed you have, it becomes a whole lot more relevant.

This season one of their focuses is on proper rotations and managing the grass effectively and if the farms aren’t getting enough feed through grass, then they’ll look at adding supplements.

Jazz has been offshore looking at other sheep milking businesses. He says most are quite small – with 1000 ewes being a big operation. He says the biggest issue is that there’s no capital and therefore no easy way of upscaling.

Chinese investment in Blue River Dairy has enabled their suppliers to get very serious about the industry.

Lambing is scheduled in batches – in general around 13 batches a year, so although there may be 4000 miking ewes at Brydone, not all of them are coming into the shed for milking.

In the early stages of the development of sheep milking it was a numbers game but genetics is another big focus for the future. The milking ewe flock is based on a Dorset/Freisan cross. Jazz says the industry has to build up the numbers but also build up the performance of the ewe flock.

The Poll Dorset/ Freisan cross has work pretty well. On average the cross bred animals deliver higher solids but less milk than the straight Freisan. Jazz thinks there may also be advantages in introducing other highly productive sheep breeds into the milking flock, offering downstream benefits for other sheep farmers looking for higher milk performance from their ewes.

On average each ewe is delivering 3 – 400 litres of milk per annum. On a per kg of m/s sheep milk returns are way above dairy cattle. Even when those numbers are crunched on a kg per ha Jazz says the numbers are still very attractive.

Brydone manager Joss Smith and her husband have experience in bovine dairy as well as traditional sheep and beef farming. She says they’re both new to sheep milking. This is her first season at Brydone and she is constantly learning.

They are currently milking 2500 of the 4000 ewes on the farm. They start at 5am and finish around 9. She says it is extremely labour intensive in comparison with bovine dairying.

The sheep are milked on a double herringbone shed. The animals are encouraged into the shed with a small feed of barley but otherwise they are totally grass fed.

The farm is “constantly” lambing. A lambing beat is done most mornings, they shed out those ewes that haven’t lambed and move them on. Ewes that have lambed are brought into the colostrum mob. Joss says Blue River prefers if the lambs that have ewes are left in the colostrum mob for four days or eight milkings.

Colostrum milk is fed back to the lambs. All the ewe lambs are raised. Male lambs are an unwanted byproduct and sold to whatever market they can find for them. Joss says just raising the ewe lambs is a mammoth job.

In mid-November they were starting their third lambing and will wean around 800 lambs. The ewes will only lamb once a year unless they’ve dried off early.

Pasture measurement is done once a week. Joss says another of the challenges with sheep milking is managing the feed wedge and overall pasture management. She says one of the other farms is using supplement but Brydone isn’t doing that. They do a weekly pasture measurement towing a pasture meter behind a ute.

Jazz says the industry has a lot of potential and offers itself as a saviour of the sheep industry, but it needs R & D.

He cites the French government funded project for improvement in sheep flocks that supplies the milk for Roquefort cheese. The breed there is the Lacuna, which hadn’t historically been a good milking breed. In the 1990’s a rigorous selection programme was organised by a government agency, which included artificial insemination of several million ewes. A vast amount of government support for recording ewe performance on the progeny – along with improved knowledge of animal management and nutrition – and enthusiastic support by farmers – led to an improvement of over 6% per year in milk yield on an annual basis. Jazz says that example makes a strong argument “for coordination and cooperation in an industry has massive potential.”

A $6M collaboration between AgResearch, University of Otago, Callaghan Innovation, Ferrier Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington and three industry partners: Blue River Dairy, Kingsmeade Cheese and Waituhi Kuratau Trust is looking to improve the local industry.

One focus of the research is “design of feeding systems that increase the net volume of harvested milk and maximise desirable components; improve sheep nutrition and health outcomes over the whole lifespan of the animal; and allow weaning as early as possible without affecting performance in later life.”

Another area of research is determining the environmental footprint of farms so that any statements about sheep dairying in NZ are based on hard data.