Frei Dairy farm owner Adrian Frei makes nearly all of the feed on his organic farm including hay made from nearly 20 pasture species. Photo / Shawn McAvinue
Frei Dairy farm owner Adrian Frei makes nearly all of the feed on his organic farm including hay made from nearly 20 pasture species. Photo / Shawn McAvinue
Northern Southland organic dairy farmer Adrian Frei’s pursuit of happiness differs from others in the industry at his stage of life.
“I’m at the peak of my career, 53 years of age and still have my wife and I’m passionate-as about farming - I call it, the gentleman’s farming system.”
His pursuit of happiness helps him maintain job satisfaction, he said, while hosting a DairyNZ field day on his farm in Riversdale last week.
By the age of 50, many dairy farmers were bored with their jobs, worn down by a continual chase of increasing their herd size and milk production and running a monoculture system.
To stay interested in the industry, he changed to organic dairy farming, running a smaller herd across more land in a system featuring pasture of diverse species, and cattle which did not need to be sent away to a grazier.
“It’s hard to beat a self-contained system.”
The smaller herd and lower milk production targets had removed stress from the job.
The first composting barn was built about three years ago, and another composting barn extension had been built since.
In the composting barns, each cow had up to 10sq m to loaf on.
The original barn sparked a lot of interest, but many people questioned if he would have been better spending the $200,000 on buying land to increase the size of the farm and make more money from the capital gain on the land.
A winter barn was a better investment than buying more land because it solved a problem, he said.
“I hate farming outside in winter. The South is not made for outdoor farming - you pug the soil, you leach nutrients and you give the cows a s..... day - brassicas are crap for dry cows.”
With the barns, he had the potential to milk the cows through winter and make more money, but it did not interest him because that type of intensification shifted away from the basic principles of farming.
“Follow the grass curve and the lactation curve of the cow - one we get away from that we’re f.....”
Staff on a farm milking all-year round got burnt out, he said.
The sawdust in the barns was sourced from Ngahere Sawmilling Company in Mataura for $22 a cubic metre delivered.
He bought nearly 10 per cent of the sawdust produced at the mill, he said.
In a trial, he put about 2000 miscanthus grass plants in the ground a few years ago.
The grass was grown to be used as bedding material during calving in the barns, and had good results so far, he said.
Despite the grass growing above his head this season, the yield was “a bit disappointing”.
His cows were dried off on May 24 this year, putting a stop to their twice-a-day milking, and the move was made to the winter barns.
Although the cows could have been easily been milked from the barns for another fortnight, the decision to dry them off early was motivated by his wife Isabelle’s looming departure for a holiday in Switzerland.
The couple ran the farm by themselves and she was an integral part of the teat sealing process, which they wanted to have sorted before she headed to Europe.
Cows in a composting barn in Frei Dairy farm in Riversdale. Photo / Shawn McAvinue
About seven years ago they moved to establishing pasture that included 17 plant species, including brome, burr medics, chicory, cocksfoot, red clovers, ryegrasses, Persian clover, timothy and tonic plantain.
No one wanted to talk about regenerative farming but it played a part in a gentleman’s farming system, he said.
The aim was to keep the mixed pasture for up to 40 years and avoid turning any soil on the farm.
“No cultivation, no tillage and leave it in grass.”
The only feed brought in was up to four tons of molasses, which got mixed in some hay in spring.
At the field day, the two sons could be seen driving between jobs in an electric side-by-side utility vehicle.
New technology had allowed the family to run the farm by themselves.
A favourite piece of machinery was a telehandler, a piece of machinery which combines aspects of a crane and a forklift, which they used to load hay in their mixer wagon.
“That goes hand-in-hand with gentleman’s farming - I’d stop farming tomorrow if you took the telehandler off me.”
He put Halter smart collars on his cows at the end of September last year.
The collars saved him about 25 hours of work a week, including not having to get cows to the milking shed by reducing tasks such as heat detection and moving fences, he said.
However, he believed the cows learning how to react to the sounds from the collars had been stressful for them and caused a “high empty rate”.
For the previous six seasons, fewer than 7 per cent of the cows in his herd failed to get pregnant.
The cows were wearing the collars at mating this season, and he had ditched detecting the cows on heat by eye and applying a strip of paint to the top of their tails to identify them.
Frei Dairy owner Adrian Frei holds a Halter smart cow collar his herd wears when out of his winter sheds in Northern Southland. Photo / Shawn McAvinue
Despite this season being good in every way, 16 per cent of his cows failed to get pregnant.
If it was not from the stress of wearing the new collars, then he was stumped as to what the reason for the percentage rise could be.
He was not willing to accept an annual empty rate of 16 per cent.
The collars would be kept on next mating, but he would return to tail-painting the cows.
His tip for farmers thinking of investing in the technology was to put the collars on the cows in January or February because it was a better time for them to learn to live with the technology and lose some of their herd behaviour.
The Freis moved from Switzerland to the Waikato in 1995.
Neither of them had any farming experience, but the dairy farming lifestyle in New Zealand appealed, he said.
“It was love at first sight.”
The couple moved to the South to sharemilk 500 cows in Balfour in 1999.
When a new farm owner wanted to increase the herd size to 1000 cows, he found an investor to buy a sheep and beef farm in Riversdale and allow him to convert it to dairy and sharemilk on.
“A passion of mine is having projects.”
He made changes to the farm system in 2009, including halting the use of superphosphate and urea.
When they thought about making a move to producing organic milk, they were supplying Fonterra.
“Fonterra didn’t want to know anything about it.”
When Open Country Dairy launched a programme seeking organic milk suppliers, they switched processors.
The farm had been certified organic for four years.
They have been supplying organic milk with the A2 beta-casein protein type to Open Country for about two years.
Last season was “the best ever financially” for the farm, making $830,000 before tax and depreciation, he said.
The average payout for their organic A2 milk was $11.39/kg last season.
This season the payout would be about a dollar less, but production was up about 8 per cent and they had fewer input costs, so overall he expected to be on par with last season.
“I don’t know if it’s luck - it might not last for long - but at the moment we are going financially the strongest we ever had and we feel quite happy with our system.”
