This article first appeared in our sister publication, Dairy Farmer.
A Canterbury farming family are finding ways to achieve high production at the same time as enhancing their environment.
Their efforts have seen them named supreme winners of the 2022 Canterbury Ballance Farm Environment Awards.
Phill and Jos Everest, along with their son Paul and his partner Sarah Hayman, milk 730 cows on the 248ha effective farm at Willowby that Phill and Jos converted in 2010.
It’s been a several decades-long journey since Phill and Jos sold their home in Christchurch in the mid-80s to buy a 130ha farm at Willowby, borrowing $300,000 at 28% to complete the deal.
“It was a lot so we really had to keep our eye on the ball,” Phill recalls
He carried on with his full-time occupation as a farm consultant and they leased the land to a cropping farmer, working in with his programme to rear 100 bulls annually as well. Phill finally retired from consulting in sheep and beef, deer and cropping but not dairy four years ago. But it has only been in the past 11 years he began to seriously transition to dairy farming full-time.
“Jos gave me a lecture and said, ‘If you don’t get started soon, you’re never going to start farming’,” Phill laughs.
Born in Methven, his parents were both school teachers and he’s the only one of his family to have gone farming. He studied at Lincoln, graduated with a Bachelor of Agricultural Science, and went on to become a respected consultant.
Jos is from a farming family and on the road she grew up on, in Pukeatua near Te Awamutu, her father and four brothers all had farms. Like Phill, she’s always wanted to go farming but feared they may be leaving it too late.
“It is a physical job. My family are all farmers and my brother Andrew said when he got to 50 he wondered if he was getting too old for it after 30 years,” Jos says.
“Every year we goal set and it’s, ‘In five years’ time I’m going to’, and then, ‘In 5 years’ time I’m going to’, and we got to 50 and I said to Phill, ‘You can’t keep pushing this out, you’ve got to retire and if you’re going to farm, you’ve got to do it now, otherwise you never will.”
When a neighbouring farm came up for sale, they roughly doubled the farm size when they and a neighbour bought the property and split it equally.
Their conversion goal was to have a one-man shed where two staff could each do one milking a day and they travelled around both islands looking at sheds and infrastructure to find the best way of achieving that.
Their new shed came with leading edge labour-saving technology of the time, automatic drafting and automatic cup removers and later heat cameras were added. The shed’s also set up for feeding grain the Everest’s grow but that’s limited to the shoulders of the season.
“We tried to be as water-efficient as we possibly could and put in all the water-saving technologies we could and to save energy we insulated our silos and had a heat recovery unit on the chiller,” Phill says.
“The key things were we wanted to be grass based, with one man milking a day and we set out to have an aesthetically pleasing environment for the guys to work in.”
Since they bought the first half of the farm in the mid-80s they have planted thousands of trees and shrubs, close to 20km of shelter and riparian planting.
But when they bought and converted the second part and put on centre pivot irrigation, they had to make some tough choices about some of the trees they’d planted.
“When we came here there was about 150 metres of trees and we’ve done everything since then. We’ve already sheltered the farm once but when the pivots came we had to pull a lot of those out and start again so I now know what it feels like for the my clients I used to advise.
“What we’ve tried to do is have some internal shelter to provide stock shelter from mainly the southerlies in the spring so we’ve developed different things as we’ve gone along. Toi toi’s been really good, pampas was excellent but we’re not allowed to use that now because it’s a noxious weed.”
Seven years ago their son Paul came home from three years working on cropping farms in Australia, keen to go dairying.
“He started at the bottom which he has, to his credit, and he’s worked up and done his Ag ITO to level 4 and he’s going really well,” Phill says.
Today Paul’s in charge day-to-day and while his parents are still actively involved, Phill has a variety of projects on-farm that keep him busy. Paul’s partner Sarah Hayman works off-farm as an environmental manager for an Ashburton Lyndhurst Irrigation.
Before Paul and Sarah met, she’d actually been on the farm, doing research as part of her university studies. She completed a science degree at Canterbury University, along with a post graduate qualification in water resource management.
“I looked at quantifying the amount of nitrogen that’s in groundwater to how that could be used to minimise fertiliser use,” Sarah says.
She later met Paul through his sister Anna who was in the same hockey team.
The farm gets its irrigation water from bores, not the scheme Sarah works for, but Phill says her expertise is valuable on-farm and she helps with “water-monitoring stuff”.
Sarah says she’s noticed farmers’ attitudes to water management are slowly changing and while putting in soil moisture probes was once something of box-ticking exercise to satisfy regulators, now most farmers are using the data to make better decisions.
“I’ll talk to farmers and at first they weren’t into it and they just did it just to tick a box but now they can see they’re saving water and with expensive pumping costs and water charges on irrigation schemes, that can be a good saving,” she says.
The family are committed to using water wisely and reducing the environmental impact of their farming operation but Phill warns that can come with significant costs. He cites the 190kg/ha limit on nitrogen application as an example.
“We were sitting at about 240 – 270kg of N, depending on the year, and we went down to 190kg a year early and that decision that year cost us $40,000; we grew less grass, put more supplement in and produced less milk,” he says.
“So there is sometimes a cost and I think we need a balanced approach on this thing. There’s always efficiencies you can extract but sometimes there’s a cost to those efficiencies.”
Phill’s also running his own water quality trial on the farm, testing water in a stream at the top of the farm and again once it’s made its way to the other end. Surprisingly, despite high nitrate levels in the stream, in theory at levels where fish can’t survive, both native and introduced species are thriving, he says. Phill believes that could be down to efforts to improve the stream by adding pools and riffles and riparian planting.
“Nitrate levels are too high and we need to get them down, fine. That’s easy to say but hard to do but what else can we do to improve the stream characteristics? We’ve put in the pools and riffles, we’ve planted carex so it’s sheltered on the north side and it’s all those things. It’s not one just one factor.”
Last season, the 730-cow herd produced 360,630/kg MS and they are targeting 360,000/kg MS for this season.
The farm is relatively lightly stocked, around 3.2 cows/ha, but per cow production is high, hovering around 500kg, more than their live weight. The herd has been fully A2 since year four after conversion.
“There’s a premium for it and it was something we were pretty keen to follow through and Synlait were keen for us to do it,” Phill says.
“We screened all our cows and brought some A2 screened heifers in so we got the numbers and then just worked away. It meant you kept everything that was A2 whether she was great or not and it was sad to see some of the others go but that’s progress and we’ve been selecting intensively since then.”
In another effort to add facts and data to environmental debates Phill is working with Synlait, AgResearch and multi-national food corporation Danone to trial a mixed species pasture, as promoted by regenerative farming advocates. He has two side-by-side paddocks, one planted in a conventional, mainly ryegrass and clover mix and the other in species including ryegrass, plantain, Timothy, fescue, meadow fescue, vetch, lucerne, five different clovers and an annual clover.
Cores have been taken already and more will be taken at the end of the study to assess soil carbon, one of the main focuses of the research.
So far the conventional paddock is producing more dry matter, Phill says, but during summer intensive testing will be undertaken, including putting milk produced on the two paddocks in separate vats to see if there are any differences in their characteristics.
As well as looking for new opportunities to improve production and profitability at the same time as minimising environmental impact, the existing operation is set up with the same aims in mind.
To reduce the amount of nitrogen in the cows’ urine, one of the main sources of nitrate leaching, plantain is used in all pasture mixes on the farm and extra seed is sown with fertiliser applications to help the plantain persist in the sward.
Another way N loss is minimised is using Ravensdown’s N-Protect coated urea product that slows down the conversion of nitrogen in urea to ammonia gas (ammonia volatilisation) which is lost to the atmosphere.
Feeding fodder beet rather than kale as winter feed also reduces nitrate losses from the farm. Fodder beet is much lower protein which equates to lower nitrate.
“Less protein means less nitrogen going in in the autumn which is critical, that’s your leaching period, and it flows through in terms of our winter feed as well which is predominantly fodder beet with some silage and a little bit of kale at the end.”
The Everests grow some fodder beet on the milking platform and use it as part of their pre-conditioning for winter.
“It’s an easy step during lactation to get cows on to fodder beet, though it’s got its challenges. We start with 10 minutes and then go up five minutes every second day,” Phill says.
“We split the herd in half and there’s usually three or four of us out there for the first few days so that if something goes wrong you can get them out of the paddock in a hurry. If you get it wrong, they get a guts ache and you’ve ruined them for life.
“We’ve got a regime we’re happy with, it works well for us and is good for the environment as well. They’ve got to be on 5kg (dm/day) when they leave here so when they go to the support block they are actually already going.”
Calving for the heifers begins on July 25 and the main herd on August 1. This year they have reared 340 calves, comprising 160 replacements and 140 white-faced beefies. About 40 of the Hereford-cross calves are part of milk-fed veal trial and they’re being kept well away from the other calves.
“They get milk out of the vat and grass so we keep them at end of the farm in case we have a breakout and they get into the meal or anything up here so it’ll be interesting to see how well they grow.”
The aim is to grow the trial calves to 300kg live weight, feeding only grass and milk with no meal.
“We’ve pushed the envelope as far as we can with the Herefords in terms of selling those and to reduce our bobbies and this might be another opportunity.”
It costs more to feed milk from the vat than it does to use powder, along with meal, to rear these calves so the trial’s success depends getting the calves up to weight quickly enough and for there to be premium for milk-fed veal over standard beef. Hereford cross calves are being used in the trial but Phill says he’s open to using other breeds, depending on results.
Mating started on October 23 and ran for nine-and-a-half weeks, all AI with no bulls. Short gestation semen is used in the final two-and-a-half weeks to shorten calving by 10 days in an effort to give cows longer after calving to get in calf again.
“I’m less focused about the milk, it’s actually more about getting them in calf because one of the challenges we’ve got as an industry is our empty rate,” Phill says.
“We want to try to bring the number of replacements back down because they contribute greenhouse gases and no milk and so you end up having no ability to cull if your empty rate’s too high and your replacement rate is too low.”
They use sexed semen from A2 bulls over the top 30% of the herd for replacements and then gene test the progeny to make sure they are A2. Hereford semen is used over the remainder of the herd to generate another source of income and to minimise the number of bobby calves.
There are two staff on the farm, Filipino Dennis Dacquel and Kaji Sherpa from Nepal. Dennis, 54, has worked for them for nine years, supporting his family back home.
“His wife has since died, his kids have all had covid and he says, ‘Five more years and then I’m going home’. His youngest has just finished design school over there so they’re all out and working now which has been his goal.”
Phill and Jos met Kaji Sherpa in Nepal when they took the opportunity to go there when some tickets became available after friends had to pull out of the trip. They went to base camp where Kaji – who has climbed Mt Everest six times – was their guide.
“We said, ‘If you’re ever in New Zealand, look us up, come and see us’,” Jos says.
“That was in April 2015, the year of the Nepal earthquake and he turned up in September, ‘I have come to see you’. We thought he may stay for a week, well that was seven years ago.”
Kaji has since brought his Gelmu Sherpa and their children to New Zealand, and, like Dennis, they now have the security of NZ residency.
“We’ve been lucky with those guys and Paul and the two boys get on really well. They are like family. We know each other pretty well.”
As a consultant, Phill didn’t have much to do with dairy farming but nevertheless he’s been able to use his wide knowledge, along with talking to a neighbour who happens to be a dairy farming consultant, to achieve high production and meet ever stricter environmental constraints, including a requirement to reduce N-loss by 36% by 2035.
He and Jos are now relaxing their hold on the reins. Last year Paul and Sarah bought the original block from them and this year bought into the farm’s operating company. The other half of the farm is in a family trust, providing for daughter Anna and son Mark who is a consultant with Macfarlane Rural Business in Ashburton.
“In terms of cows, Phill’s experience in consulting is not dairy, it was everything else, deer, crop, sheep and beef so I feel like Paul and Phill have grown up with the cows together,” says Jos.
And Phill is enjoying seeing Paul blossom on the farm. “It’s great, it’s really good. There are challenges with fathers and sons but we work together and he’s running the cutter now.”
Farm facts
Owners: Flemington Farm – Phillip and Jocelyn Everest, Paul Everest and Sarah Hayman
Location: Flemington, Canterbury
Farm size: 248ha
Cows: 730 Kiwicross
Production 2021-2022: 360,630/kg MS
Production target 2022 – 2023: 360,000/kg MS
