Weather still rubbish- I have come to Australia in the coldest spring for years. Should have planned to be north for the weather, but still having fun.
Today Tim has arrived (thats Tim Bennett Chairman of DairyCo) he is here to present a speech at a conference entitled "Issues Management" he's here with Michael Lambert who is a great guy and a director of Worldwide Sires.
The conference was really interesting and on topic for my Nuffield Study (see I am doing some thing towards it) there were speakers from around the world.
It appears that many countries have very similar issues affecting them which the rest of the population (or maybe just pressure groups) have a problem with.
The main ones are
- Environmental issues (pollution and habitats)
- Animal Welfare (including practices such as inducing, de-horning late, lameness and housing)
- Fat in milk
- baby calves-and what we do with them
It was heartening to see that farmer organisations around the world are all working towards helping to support the image of Dairy whatever system or size you happen to be. Mike from Northern Island Dairy Council- you are a star!!
Dinner was in darling harbour hosted by the inimitable Jim Begg from Dairy UK.
An account of the evening is available on his blog
http://www.dairyuk.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=260&Itemid=342
The funniest thing was seeing the big guy lose his glasses off the end of his nose into his fish chowder, his expression will stay with me for some time to come.
The following day Tim had organised for us all to travel south to see some farming in NSW, we visited some wonderful farms one of which had the cleanest milking parlour and yard I have ever seen (mental note for home) the Aussies are really good at mixing grazing with feeding, and are very keen on helping with succession.
Tim Burford, Tim Bennett, Michael Lambert and Karen Wannacott talking triple cropping with Santiago (great name)
The trip also included a visit to the University of Sydney to see work on double and triple cropping systems; it must be nice to grow maize, kale and barley in the same year..... thanks to Tim Burford who must have had matchsticks holding his eyes open by the time he dropped us off in Sydney centre.
On Friday I had organised to see a small version of the Nocton Dairy type of system run by Michael Perich (his family are building a town ?? Why does he farm cows?)
This farm was 2000 cows and if this is how big this type of farm is then Nocton will be amazingly huge. The area this farm filled was amazing.
There were 4 sheds of 500 cows like this with exercise lots between
Michael was very open, and I really enjoyed seeing the farm; the cows were very happy and well looked after, but I have to say the scale of this would be difficult to neighbour. I can see why the little village of Nocton might be worried by something 4 times the size.
Michael let his cows graze when dry and two interesting facts were
- The economies of scale are lost after 1000 cows
- Labour and management time are the hardest parts of a large scale operation.
grazing cows on Perich farm- look at the length of the grass
The Perich farm produces milk for a2 milk which is milk containing only a2 protein. His cows are selected to produce this special milk and he is paid a premium for it. The milk is sold as a "Healthy alternative" to normal milk. This is interesting given that the system of production would be contentious in the UK by a certain group of consumer and in Oz it produces a health drink for a similar demograph of consumer.
Circular quay
Another funny incident straight out of an english sit com was a little R&R that the gang of 4 from DairyCo did on Saturday before we all left for NZ. See that big boat on the harbour above? We thought we'd booked on one of these and it pulled away to reveal a tiny little yellow boat which fitted about 8 people which was actually our boat, we went for a cruise in Sydney harbour and it rained so hard we could barely see a thing- maybe you had to be there but I could only laugh.....
No comments:
Post a Comment