Dry Hill Country Farming

Simon Todhunter runs 3500 ewes and around 700 bulls on 1100ha of dry East Coast hill country.  His points of difference are that he has subdivided the better country into 3ha paddocks (a big investment) and uses rotational grazing most of the year. He has gone out of breeding cattle and now buys in weaner and 18 month old dairy bulls, many of which are leased or sold to dairy farmers at mating time. About half of the bulls are for trading so he has the flexibility to buy and sell as necessary to match the feed supply.

Another income stream is contract cultivation, drilling and spraying for local farmers, which is carried out by his father.

Coastal Marlborough seems to be increasingly susceptible to prolonged dry spells and droughts in summer and autumn, making management of hill country farms difficult and profitability problematic. Conventional sheep and beef farming, based mainly on capital breeding stock grazing large areas, allows farm managers neither sufficient control of grazing nor flexibility of stocking rate to cope adequately with seasonal variations in rainfall.

Simon Todhunter has adopted management strategies that help overcome these drawbacks. His farm consists of a hilly 1100ha, most of which is steep tussock country subdivided into 8ha paddocks. However, about 350ha comprise pockets of rolling downs that can be accessed by tractor. The major part of this area is fenced into 3ha paddocks and planted in conventional pasture along with 50ha of lucerne and 50ha of brassicas/Italian ryegrass. Stock include a breeding flock of 3500 Romney composite ewes plus 800 hoggets, and 6-800 dairy bulls largely as trading stock. An additional 300 dairy cows are usually grazed over winter.

Subdivision of the property has been going on for decades. Bob, Simon’s father, spent many years fencing to reduce the size of paddocks from the original 30ha to 8ha. At that time it was a conventional sheep and beef farm with a breeding flock and herd.

Fifteen years ago when Simon took over management, he wanted to gain more control over grazing and began further subdivision of the rolling downs, investing heavily in fencing and water reticulation. Paddock size was reduced to 3ha and better pasture species were drilled in. He now uses rotational grazing over the whole property (except at lambing), which allows him to control the feed intake of stock, tailor feed allocation to the differing needs of various groups of stock, conserve feed and control internal parasites.

Summer is a critical time on the farm and from late December to mid-March the paddocks are dry and brown and growth is minimal. To achieve a better match between feed supply and stock needs, Simon has made two important management changes. The first is that he no longer sends finished lambs away in groups as they reach slaughter weight. Instead he aims to achieve a 33kg average weight by mid-December at which point he weans all the lambs at once and sells them unsorted to a large corporate farmer. That means he can use available feed for the breeding flock, getting the lighter ewes and hoggets up to tupping weights.

Last year he made the second major change – he sold off the beef herd and opted to buy in dairy bulls instead. The majority of these are tradable stock, which means he can buy in or sell off as the season and feed supply dictate. Although the new dairy beef regime has not been going long and its management is still evolving, Simon is seeing benefits.

“This year is one that will test the system and I’m pleased that we are set up this way. We have been dry since mid September and there’s not much flexibility with running cows and calves,” he says.

“The beauty of having bulls is that you buy them when the grass grows and you sell them when you don’t have grass any more, and as long as we can get some weight on them we seem to be doing okay. This year because of the very dry conditions, we have locked up mobs of about 40 bulls into gullies where there’s plenty of roughage, but if that’s all they get they can go backwards, so we are feeding palm kernel to see if that’s enough to keep them going forward.”

Bulls suit the farm because of their ability to put on weight on lower quality feed than prime stock. They are also readily available because of the size of the dairy industry and easier to sell, and Simon says there is less fluctuation in prices that in non-dairy stock. However, he points out that his system is more complex than simply grazing them until feed runs out.

“In a normal year we would have about 700 bulls with about 75% of them Friesians bought at 18 months,” he says. “This year we have also bought 150 Jersey weaners as part of a developing relationship with one farmer. He will lease them back as yearlings for mating from October to the end of January. Then they will come back and we’ll graze them on until the following October when the farmer will buy then outright as dairy sires. That means that he will retain his own genetic stock.”

“The balance of bulls are either sold to dairy farmers as sire bulls or sent to the works.”

Simon has found that it is important with leasing out bulls to get everything down on paper so that each party knows where they stand and what their obligations are.

“With sire bulls you are dealing with small numbers going to lots of different farms so it is important to get the timing of delivery and pick-up locked into a contract so that we can manage deliveries and collections,” he says.

“I am reluctant to put more than half the stock under contract because it would reduce our flexibility. The whole idea of having Friesian bulls is that they come and go when we want them to rather than being held to a particular date.”

Adding stock when there is a feed surplus and selling them when the surplus disappears, along with adjusting the grazing rotation length to the amount of feed growing, are the key elements in Simon’s management.

Careful planning in autumn is also essential. Tupping is timed so that lambing coincides with the normal short, sharp spike in spring growth. Sowing of supplementary feed crops also needs to be planned to ensure that feed is available for both winter and summer deficits.

Simon grows 50 ha of brassicas. 10ha are grazed by ewes in February/March to help get them in lamb and the rest is used to carry dairy cows through the winter. When grazed out, some of the area is sown in Italian rye to provide winter feed.

There are also 50 ha of lucerne, much of which is fed to ewes in late pregnancy. The balance goes to ewe lambs over summer and to ewes with their lambs after tailing. Some of this year’s winter feed brassica paddocks will be drilled into lucerne in the spring.

Simon says that despite a relatively high stocking rate they need only modest amounts of maintenance fertiliser.

“On the developed area paddocks are fertilised, cropped and resown every five or six years so we only need to bulk spread 300 kg of Super Sulphur 30 every two to three years. We also use nitrogen at key times in autumn and spring,” he says.

“We can use a truck to get to a lot of the tussock hills too, and occasionally we hire a topdressing plane to fill in the gaps.”

The Todhunter property is managed with a strong family focus and Simon’s father is still actively involved, having a major input into fencing, tractor work and contract drilling and spraying for six or seven other local farmers from January to March. The farm has one other full-time employee, and this season Simon employed a Lincoln student over the summer.

Simon’s initiative with subdivision and more flexible stock policies that help match feed demand to supply won him a place in the final of last year’s South Island Farmer of the Year competition. Overall, he is satisfied with the changes he has made.

“We are learning as we go and what we do will vary from one year to the next because the demands from dairy and meat industries tend to be constantly changing and also because of seasonal variations,” he says.

“I would like to think that we can develop a fairly robust system that anyone can run so that if we expand someone can easily do it without me having to be there every minute of the day.”