Riley's Dairy

Woodville dairy farmers Keith and Kim Riley picked up two regional awards in the 2009 Ballance Farm Environment Awards.

Keith and Kim won two 2009 Ballance Farm Environment Awards recently for the Manawatu area: the Nutrient Management Award and the LIC Dairy Farm Award. They are equity partners in their dairy farm, along with John and Margaret Young.

The farm at Woodville was converted from sheep and beef and cropping to dairying in April 1999. The Rileys started milking in August that year. Its 340ha, and a very flat farm right on the eastern end of the Manawatu gorge, and prone to regular flooding. It is a serious problem if it floods the whole farm, but that has only happened once in 10 years. It is 340ha, with 290ha effective, and a separate support block down the road of nearly 80ha.

We are pretty keen to make sure we are getting the best economic return and minimizing our environmental impact from our effluent use.

They try to take a best practice approach to effluent management. It was a real concern when we developed the farm that every day we milked we irrigated, sometimes in situations where paddocks were already saturated with rain.

The aftermath of that was seeing dead worms and waterlogged paddocks. Worms are a critical part of the health of the soil; to see we were killing them wasnt very encouraging at all.

We needed some way to store the effluent until we could get the benefit of putting it on a drier soil, which means the pasture benefits from both moisture and nutrients, and also avoids possible runoff of dairy shed effluent into our water bodies.

Now their effluent storage area can store 100 days of effluent, compared to the two days of storage previously.

Its a very emotive issue within our industry, Keith says. It was quite a commitment for us to spend $100,000 to upgrade two years ago.

They met an engineer from Wellington Stewart Reid, who turned out to be very influential, and who designed their new system, the first of its kind.

Some dairy farmers use a two-pond system but regional councils have been moving away from supporting them in favour of other more effective methods.

A problem with ponds is they settle out and a crust forms on top of them. So to be pumped, they need agitation and stirring. This is a big cost, something like 1-2 cents a litre of effluent, Keith says. This is a significant cost when you are producing something like 50,000 litres per day.

What Stewart designed was a stirrer that works in a circle, running around the pond like an arm, which regularly agitates the effluent. All the effluent is pumped in, and when you want to use it, it is pumped out of the centre of the pond.

The resulting effluent is very fibrous and a grill is used to cut it up. Its very simple and produces a consistent effluent for spraying on the pastures.

In one single fine day we can spray up to a weeks worth of effluent.

And its good not having to irrigate every day, as in the past its been an everyday job.

The Manawatu is a significant water body, and two others come down through the farm, all require endless attention for protecting fragile river banks from cattle grazing and meandering water from either shingle build-up or log jams etc.

The principle of fencing by planting and protecting doesnt actually work when you have to allow the river to swell during a flood and then go back into its banks. Fences and tree planting in some situations cause erosion problems by obstructing the floodwater.

We have fenced most of our riverways now with electric fences. We need to be able to repair them quickly and resurrect them after flooding.A conventional fence would be a big mess.

Weve planted mainly willows and in low flooding risk areas planted native trees like pittosporums and cabbage trees.

We used to have just under 1000 cows here. We were crossing water courses regularly, as we only have one culvert.

It was an unacceptable practice, not only from other peoples point of view, but from mine too.

We have changed our farm strategy, and now the young stock, (the one and two year heifers) graze most of the land across the creeks, so it reduces the number of crossings of the cows across the creeks.

Now we have 700 cows and are keeping our young stock on the farm.

We are getting more effective grazing management with the young stock on these areas.

We are partnering with Horizons Regional Council, with our objective to maintain and improve our resources, mainly our water quality.

Right now the Regional Council and a lot of us farmers are at odds, not understanding each others point of view. The One Plan is a lot about consent to farm type principle, with a large focus on Overseer nutrient budgets. That has a lot more questions than answers coming from it.

In principle as farmers we want to make sure we are right up to the leading edge of adopting principles of the One Plan by better managing resources in order to better water quality.

Lucky enough to be part of Massey University case studies on certain farms, worked through different strategies where we could achieve maximum allowable leaching numbers of 19kg/ha. Think the leaching previously was in the late 30s.

By destocking, changing practices we actually comply with that rather stringent One Plan. Cow numbers have dropped from 1000 to 700.

Our change in farming strategy has not altered the profit line.

If cows cant get in calf there is something else wrong with them rather than putting in CIDRs. They run a policy of no inductions, 70 day mating and spring calving only.

We have come up through the dairy industry for the last 15 years but have a sheep and beef background. We are really enthusiastic and passionate about the opportunities within the dairy industry. Theyve seen the benefits by having partnerships with staff. Even when they were 50/50 sharemilkers some of their staff would buy stock, Keith and Kim would lease them back and return the animals in-calf.

It is a great investment and great opportunity for all people from varying levels to gear up and get equity growth.

We have grown ourselves with equity partnerships, and still have one with the Youngs. We have gone from a 50/50 share-milking partnership to an equity partnership where we now have 73% of the shares.

Cow # 569 is the cow who saved Kim from drowning in the 2004 Manawatu floods: Kim wrote a book about her, which was a great success. 569 is still milking and Keith describes her as bolshy and says she will be there on the day in all her glory.

From an internet book review from Time Out Bookstore: In 2004 Cow Power was a runaway best seller. Now here is the sequel to that charming book much beloved by children all around the country. Cow No. 569, the cow who rescued Farmer Kim Riley from the raging Manawatu flood waters, was in fact pregnant at the time. Seven months after that heroic feat she gave birth to her eighth calf - a bull. Baby Cow Power is the story of the birth of that calf and of the events that unfolded after he was born. After being almost lost in a storm, he is looked after by Farmer Riley. He becomes almost as famous as his mother, and is then named in a competition by the local newspaper. Being a bull, he has to leave the farm so, unlike most bobby calves, he is auctioned off in a Plunket charity auction at the local A&P show - very much a star. He goes to live happily ever after at the Owlcatraz farm park in Shannon.

Keith says the book was a very good antidote for quite a traumatic time, it was quite a ride and it was fun.

From a philosophical perspective I am quite concerned about the gap between urban and rural; I think we are getting further apart.

Keith is also worried about the potential for dairying to have quite a poor image in the wider community. I was quite concerned about that and quite determined that an accurate understanding was had by everyone, hence we were prepared to have our business scrutinized and go public about it.

We tried quite hard to showcase the efforts we have put into environmental management, and we are humbled and pleased we were acknowledged.

One of the things we should try and depict in this: there is a question mark over which land use should this land be in. We are right in the public eye, it floods pretty regularly, right beside water courses, should intensive dairy farming practices be carried out on it?

Quite a determination and drive to make sure we are not negatively impacting the environment and secondly that everyone knows about it: the well-being of NZ depends on us producing something from the land.

The other thing we do have is a determination to partner with the community. One of the things we do is host the NZ moto-cross grand prix. The competition has been running here for more than 50 years, always on this farm. There are up to 5000 people here on Auckland Anniversary weekend. (at the end of January). But none of his family ride motorbikes.