Not your usual dairy farm business model

Guy and Leanne Gallatly spread their dairy farm operations across two properties in Maffra, one owned and one leased.

But, in their case, it’s not your usual mix. The leased property is the home farm, and they own the outblock they use for fodder harvest and to grow-out heifers.

As well as Guy and Leanne, their workforce includes one full-time milker, a casual worker (retired dairy farmer) for tractor work, and a casual milker.

With the 315-cow milking herd running through a 44-unit rotary dairy twice a day, it’s an intense business operation.

They recalibrated things in the past year by devolving themselves of two outlying farms and buying the new one closer to home.

“We really need to be down to 290-300 cows, because it is only 103 hectares, including 20 ha of laneways and billabongs,” Guy said.

“We’ve fenced off the billabongs and revegetated with trees and shrubs.”

The two farms — irrigated out of Glenmaggie Weir, a bore and reclaimed water from the nearby milk processing factory — are eligible to use 670 Ml, "but we often don’t use this water, so it’s an asset we can sell as temporary to other people”.

The reclaimed water is shared between three dairy farms that surround the factory, with the Gallatly farm receiving the right to use 175 Ml.

“We need to have soil tests and the processor installed two test bores. We have to shandy the water with other irrigation water,” Guy said.

“We also catch town stormwater run-off from the east side of town, guttering into a drain and into the billabong system. The billabong system is entire and enables us to recycle their water.

“We can also transfer water to our other property.”

The washdown and trough water all comes from the bore.

The entire farming operation runs on a pasture-based system, with a centre pivot on the dairy platform, supported by lateral sprayer on the billabong country.

“We oversow 12 to 20 ha each season, with perennial or biannual rye-grass. That way we’re assured we’ve got good paddocks coming on all the time,” Guy said.

The 57 ha irrigated outblock was a functional dairy farm and is where the heifers grow out. This farm is stocked with 80 rising two-year-old heifers, and 80 to 90 calves.

It’s also where they use flood irrigation to grow pasture that harvests into all the silage for the dairy farm — annually about 1000 rolls, harvested from August to February.

“This year, because of wet weather, we couldn’t get machinery on and didn’t start harvesting until late September,” Guy said.

“We’ll finish in February with 1000 rolls. We usually start taking the rising two-year-old cattle off in July and this year we started a little bit later because of the wet conditions.”

Silage is fed from March through winter.

Agronomists help them determine feed requirements, and when to use pasture booster and fertiliser to meet their targets for grazing and harvest.

“We try and feed our cattle as much grass as possible, because that’s the most profitable system here,” Guy said.

“We do feed grain, at 4 kg/cow/day, year-round.

“This season, the grass has been going mad because of the rain and the weather conditions we’ve had, but it’s been hard to maintain quality.”

Lateral sprays across half the area of the home farm takes up a lot of time with maintenance and moving them.

“That’s one of the main reasons we have an extra milker in. When we’ve got half the farm under sprays, you grow good grass under them, but they are hard work,” Guy said.

“We grow the silage to feed the cows during autumn and winter. We’ve still got to feed them. Most cows get into calf. It appears to be a profitable system for us.”

Everything receives Friesian semen by two AI joinings over six to eight weeks, followed by a Friesian mop-up bull.

“We used 150 sexed semen in the first round this year,” Leanne, who rears the heifer calves, said.

“We joined most of our heifers to sexed semen and now we’re waiting for the outcome.

“It was a lot more work than I expected it to be, but if we gain more heifers out of it, it’ll be worth the work.”

The change was clearly aimed at increased supply to the export heifer market and varying the farm’s income streams.

“I try to have my calving finished by the first week of October,” Leanne said.

This year they calved down 80 heifers, and it was an opportunity to cull the herd for mastitis, temperament, age, missed calf, and all other usual reasons.

“I also bought some Jersey cows, to increase the components,” Leanne said.

“We’re joining Jersey to Jersey, Friesian to Friesian, and 10 Fleckviehs as a first-cross, also as a way of increasing components. This is our third calving using Fleckvieh.

“Our decisions are based on what’s profitable for us and what we’re getting paid for.”

Production is maintained at 27 to 28 litres/cow/day, including extended-lactation cows and autumn-calving cows.