Dawkins High Performance Farm

Chris and Julia Dawkins who farm The Pyramid, a 445ha property in the Waihopai Valley about 25 minutes out of Blenheim, and who recently finished three years as the local monitor farm, are all-rounders with lots of interesting aspects to their high-performance farm. “Although we are receptive to all sorts of ideas we have a policy of not wanting to fight nature and looking for the best natural fit with the environment.”

The farm is surrounded by rivers and it’s where the Avon and Waihopai Rivers meet. They have 8.5km of river frontage. They have 100ha of stony river flats, 200ha of heavy clay downs, 100ha of steep hill country and 30ha leased on the northern boundary. Rainfall is 780mm/year.

Chris arrived with his parents in 1954 when he was only a few days old. He’s only ever lived in two bedrooms he says (He’s 54 now). He and Julia – who lived nearby across a couple of rivers – married in 1979. She is a fifth generation Marlburian.

With brief stints away at Massey and doing casual work, Chris’ father dropped a bombshell on him when he was 23, and suggested he might like to buy the farm. So he ended up farming at a relatively young age compared with his peers.

Julia and Chris have four boys: he says he’s a proven sire: They were born from 1981-1989.

Talking about farming, Chris says he loves the job. “I can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning. My job is my hobby and I enjoy it.”

The Dawkins have fantastic growth rates for their lambs – they grow like rockets – and they get 75% of them away before Christmas. “It’s the only thing we seem to be competitive at,” Chris says. Their mild winters and relatively dry springs help enormously.

Chris says their climate is tailor-made for sheep breeding and finishing. They have 1500 Corriedale and Corriedale cross ewes and 500 replacements. The emphasis is on lamb weight, and growth rates average 325g/day before weaning and 300g/day post weaning. They have a 90 weaning liveweight target of 34kg.

The lambs are progressively drafted and this year averaged at sale 17.5kg. There are three drafts before weaning.

They have 40% of the flock mated to Suffolk and Poll Dorset terminal sires.

Chris says Marlborough has some of the earliest and latest lambing dates in the country – and on land only a few km apart. They lamb here quite early at the end of July.

The cattle side of the business is variable. At the moment about a third of the stock units are cattle, but it depends on the season, and there can be up to 500 head. The bulk of these are dairy support.

They trade in heifers, bulls and carry-over cows. They are grazing some dairy bulls at the moment. It is tied in a little bit to their Murchison dairy business.

Lucerne is grown on 80ha of their stony river flats. These flats make up a quarter of their farm. They’ve been growing lucerne since 1978, and some of the paddocks are now 10 to 16 years old. They only graze theirs, rather than mowing or conserving any of it.

The lucerne is grazed by hoggets, by lambs in spring and by ewes rearing triplets. During summer it is used for two-tooths during mating and sometimes also hoggets.

The farm grows on average 7200kg DM/ha, but seven months of the year are in a soil moisture deficit. About two-thirds of the annual production grows in only 10 to 12 weeks in spring.

From late autumn to spring is the best time for the farm, but this year it’s still dry and now cold, so it’s a pretty short growing season.

They’ve also put in arrowleaf clover and balansa clover, which are both annual legumes. Dick Lucas at Lincoln University and Pedro Evans from DLF seeds have helped with this work. The arrowleaf in particular looks very promising and might be able to grow something like 12,000kgDM/ha.year.

They also have later flowering sub clovers Leura and Denmark.

For their work in drought-proofing their farm they won a Grasslands Award last year.

Chris and Julia are one of 125 different monitor farmers over that time. They have just finished a three year stint as the Marlborough monitor farmers.

Chris had wanted to be a monitor farmer several times before, first applying in 1990, but was finally selected in 2005. “I was older than the typical monitor farmer and I thought I had something to contribute. I wasn’t expecting to gain a huge amount from it personally but felt reasonably happy to open up the farm to benefit others.”

They ticked all the boxes by reaching the goals set during the programme. “I knew I was going to come under pressure to run a more productive animal than the Corriedale. I just put some production targets in which ultimately were going to protect my flock. If you change breed you will compromise other situations,” he says.

“We wanted to maintain our lamb growth rates which were quite good to start with. We were able to do that, also thanks to a couple of kind springs.”

(One of their targets during this time was to increase their farming business as a whole by the equivalent of 1000 stock units, and they did this by investing in a dairy farm in Murchison, and helping out their son Tim in Southland who is a dairy farmer involved in an equity partnership.

The Murchison block in the Tutaki Valley is leased and they own the stock and plant. Last year the farm milked 1800 cows and this year 2400 cows are being milked.) Chris says he doesn’t want to focus on the Murchison farm too much because it possibly detracts from his enthusiasm and passion for the sheep and beef sector. But Tim’s situation in Southland is a bit more relevant as it ties in with the family, and succession etc.

One of their goals was to keep a lid on farm working expenses, because Chris had seen the costs on other monitor farms blow out.

There is an 8ha long skinny QEII National Trust covenant over a strip of dryland forest which is regenerating – a great deal of the covenanted land in NZ is all tall forest, so this is a quite different sort of landscape. Chris and Julia have had it protected for about 15 years, so it’s in good shape.

The Dawkins have 40ha of radiata pine trees. Of the woodlot he has sold he has achieved a market premium for wood density. But Chris says that his trees don’t look that good compared with forest trees grown in the recognized higher rainfall forestry regions.

He started with alternative species such as eucalypts and blackwoods, and tried cypresses as well. The Eucalyptus obliqua died in droughts and the cypress got canker, so by default went back to radiata. He says he’s been described as the canker king of the South Island!