Topless Sharemilkers

Taranaki Sharemilkers of the Year, Greg and Hannah Topless have leveraged off their win in the 2010 Dairy Industry Award, to take the next step into farm ownership.

Greg Topless is the son of an East Stratford sheep and beef farming family. After leaving high school, he completed a four-year LIC cadetship and ended up as the LIC sales manager for northern England and Scotland.

He met Hannah at the University of Midlands, where she was completing a museum studies degree. They married and came back to New Zealand to go farming and now have three children.

Hannah had never been close to a cow when they got together. She was halfway through her university training when they got married. She worked at Puke Ariki (the Taranaki museum) for eight months before they started a family. Hannah says it has been a great transition, mainly because of the satisfaction she gets from dairy farming and the great support that is available to farmers.

They worked for wages on a Tikorangi dairy farm, then bought 150 cows and went 50-50 sharemilking for three years.

To secure the contract on the last sharemilking property, they had to own cows more suited to the steep contour of the farm – so their Friesian herd was sold and replaced by 230 Jersey crossbreds.

Winning the Taranaki Sharemilker of the Year Award was a big thrill this year – on their third attempt.

When they won the award they were on a tough hilly block of roughly 96ha. Much of it was too steep for mowing and fertiliser had to be flown on – to some it was land considered marginal for dairying.

Despite that, they lifted milk solids production from 83,211kg to around 96,000 this past season.

The judges said the Toplesses “really set the bar about where they are going”.

In the National Awards they came third . They won merit awards for their leadership, farm dairy hygiene and recording and productivity.

They say the main reason they entered was to benchmark their business against everyone else. There was also the aim of using the competition to make some progress.

The fact they’ve entered the competition three times – and had success at a local and national level has been handy when the time came for them to buy their own place. Greg says there’s nothing like a few awards and a very tidy set of books to impress the bank managers.

The couple say that another benefit from entering the awards is being able to network with other entrants, sponsors and organisers.

Hannah says that it can be very easy to be negative about the dairy industry but if you are around some of the top farmers and consultants etc then you stay positive.

She says entering the awards also helps to refocus goals – and stay flexible – so as not to lose opportunites.

On June 1 they moved onto their first farm at Kaponga. The property is one farm back from the bush – close to Mt Taranaki.

Contours are gentle and rolling, with gullies dropping to the Mangatokiti Stream that meanders over the farm. There is another farm between their property and the Egmont National Park bush line.

Greg says it is colder than the last farm. They expect two or three snowfalls a year.

He estimates about 15ha of the farm comprises fenced-off riparian plantings of mature native bush – ideal spots for summer picnics. There is also a 2ha block of native bush under a QE11 National Trust covenant.

They are milking 130 cows. The farm is 80ha – but only about 55 of it is effective. There are bush blocks, and a fair few creeks.

Performance wise when they took it over wasn’t great – doing only 500kg of ms per ha. There’s also a fair bit of maintenance to do in terms of fences to fix and just basic stuff to look after.

Helping fund the purchase of the farm at Mahoe was a family equity partnership in a sheep and beef farm. The couple also had to sell all 180 of their two to eight year old cows.

The strategies on the Toko farm were low cost, trying to take advantage of the cheapest feeds available, which is nitrogen-grown grass, with palm kernel used to fill the gaps. It’s run very efficiently. It will be interesting to see if Greg and Hannah are taking the same approach to their new property.

It is an all-grass system and the pasture management is tricky. Greg says his aim is to have a target cover of 2300kg DM on the first of June. That can be tough in a dry season – which everyone is experiencing this year.

On the last property they had a feed pad and stand off area. Greg may be missing that this season..

Greg is in the habit of doing monthly plate metering through winter to check things are on track and once they get to about September, after calving, they start weekly metering with a farm walk right through to drying off.

He recommends weekly metering to anyone wanting to do intensive pasture measuring – although he admits that’s tough to do on steeper properties.

Greg says the herd is their major asset and it helped finance them into farm ownership.

He says they’re very versatile. In the spring peak, they are doing close to 2kg per cow and he says in March he can look at milking once a day with no concerns about mastitis.

He does five to six weeks of artificial insemination, usually premier sires with some nominated sires to capture some of the Holstein-Freisian genetics coming through.