Lowri Thomas's diary – 19th September 2008
I’ve been in New Zealand for 10 months now, for a period of a year, and this is the second spring for me to spend here. I’m working full time on a 148 hectare farm near Geraldine town, South Canterbury, on the South Island. This is the farm’s second season as a milking farm, it was a crops farm before this.
The farm began with 400 of Holstein/Friesian cows and some crossed with a jersey cow to calve last spring, and there were another 70 to calve in the autumn, along with 120 that weren’t expecting, with the purpose of milking through the winter – something that doesn’t happen on most milking farms here.
Since August 1st this year, we’ve calved 220 of the cows with about 70 to go. We’ll have finished calving by the end of September hopefully. Herringbone Milfos 32 each side is used to milk the cattle and they eat cake and molasses in the parlour.
At present, around 500 cows are milked on the farm. 60 of these belong to a farm where the parlour hasn’t been completed yet. That farm has 900 cattle in total and they cannot yet milk them.
In the Canterbury area alone, there are around 6000 cows which have not got anywhere to be milked as the farms are not yet ready for them. A lot of sheep and beef farms are being transformed to milking farms as there’s more money in milking cows at the moment. Most farms in New Zealand sell their milk to the large company Fonterra and are being paid $7.90 per kg milk solid.
During the last week, we have decreased the silage that we use to feed outside as the grass is beginning to grow at last. The winter has been dry without being too cold either, but the spring has been very wet. We’ve been feeding maize, silage and palm kernel through the winter as well as grass. We had a fair growth of grass through the winter.
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