Sheltering from the rain and wind with their cows in a Redpath wintering barn in Kapuka last week are DuoReges manager Sameera Manage (left) and co-owner Justin Koenig. Photos / Shawn McAvinue
Sheltering from the rain and wind with their cows in a Redpath wintering barn in Kapuka last week are DuoReges manager Sameera Manage (left) and co-owner Justin Koenig. Photos / Shawn McAvinue
During a tour of wintering barns last week, Southern Rural Life’s Shawn McAvinue was at the two tour stops in Eastern Southland to hear why dairy farmers were investing in the infrastructure.
A winter barn has many benefits but beware of fat cows, an Eastern Southland dairy farmer says.
DuoReges co-owner Justin Koenig said a Redpath sawdust barn allowed more than 1000 cows to remain on his 800-ha dairy farm in Kapuka, about 20km east of Invercargill.
He and his wife Cheryl Koenig and business partner Jan Marten Kingma own the dairy farm business and are in their 17th season.
Environmental concerns could be curbed by the barn, including winter grazing’s impact on nitrogen leaching and soil damage and compaction.
“Our soil structure doesn’t suit winter grazing down here.”
A barn provides a pad for calving, which starts on August 3.
Other valuable features of a barn were it provided a feeding pad and stand-off pad.
“If we have a crap autumn or spring evening they can all get stood off in here overnight.
“This does everything for us,” he said, speaking to a group of about 60 people at a DairyNZ event last week.
In the barn, the cows were fed silage once a day.
After the barn was built the cows were fed too much and got fat.
When the body fat reserves of a cow were above a condition score of five, it could create metabolic problems, causing cows to go down, which put staff “on edge”.
The overfeeding of cows could easily happen in a barn.
“The rising 3-year-old cows are always our challenge - they are usually the ones who need to get dried off earlier and fed a bit more.”
The sawdust used as bedding material was not composted, but he was intrigued by the concept and would look into introducing it.
However, composting would require his staff to do more work, which he was not a fan of.
Slade Koenig (15) and a tractor and a silage wagon used to feed cows in the sawdust barn on his father’s farm in Eastern Southland. Photo / Shawn McAvinue
“Everything revolves around the team, and if you’re doing a job for the sake of it, I’d rather my guys go home earlier or have a longer lunch.”
The bedding material would be cleaned out by a contractor with a six-ton digger on July 20.
The muck would be pushed into a sludge bed and be spread on paddocks in a spell of good weather from November.
“We try and get it out as soon as possible so everything can dry out and breath.”
He moved from Morrinsville in the Waikato to the farm in Kapuka as a 50:50 sharemilker in 2007.
Cows shelter in a Redpath sawdust barn on a rainy and windy day in Kapuka, Eastern Southland, last week. Photo / Shawn McAvinue
“I’m not a farmer, I’m a plumber, but I tried to come down here and milk some cows.”
A dream of building a barn began after arriving in Southland and seeing “horizontal rain”.
The design of the barn took about three years, he said.
A discovery of a spring on the site increased the cost of the groundwork to about $440,000, about $40,000 over the budget for that part of the project.
