New Zealand Pt. 4: Goats for Days

November 19th, 2014

On the 4th day, we spent the afternoon at Lemuel Dairy Goat Farm, where we got to talk to Chris Savage, who has been milking dairy goats for about 19 years now.  Now I know very little about dairy (although at this point I was beginning to feel like an expert) and a tiny bit about goats, but I know nothing about dairy goats.  This was by far one of my favorite places, just because it was something that I would not even think of, when I thought of New Zealand agriculture.

 

                      

Now goat milk is kind of a niche market and once again, most of the dairy goat milk produced in New Zealand (95%) is exported to the Asian market, however most of it is turned into high-end infant formula.  Goat milk formula has become a niche market in Asia, because it contains a protein profile more similar to human milk, than a cow's.  

WE GOT TO MILK THE GOATS!!

Just hanging with some does.

The average dairy goat farm in New Zealand is about 750 goats, and in one milking season each one of those does can make anywhere from $1800-2000, and when Chris told us his kidding rate (a kid is a baby goat) is about 200% per year, I started seriously considering milking dairy goats, myself.  There is a lot of stability in the goat milk market, too.  In the almost 20 years that Chris has been milking, he's only seen 2 or 3 drops in price which at most were 50 cents per kilogram of milk solids.

These are 4 month old, weaned kids.  

Chris will keep about 25% of the doe kids, as replacement does, and sell the rest to other dairy goat farms for replacement does.  He'll keep about 5 replacement bucks, and sell the rest who will then fed out and used for meat.

We started to talk to Chris about what our perception about New Zealand agriculture had been before our visit and we had to admit to him that we had not had a clue, which surprised him.  New Zealand prides itself on its "clean and green" image, which was obvious because just about every farmer we talked to, made sure to mention it.  While no one ever came out and said it, you could tell that their perception of U.S. agriculture was pretty similar to the perception that the typical U.S. consumer has.  Factory farms were brought up more than once, which if you know me, you know that factory farm is a dirty word in my book, but I digress until another day.  

As always, there's so much more to come. . . 

  

New Zealand Pt. 3: Blueberry Ice Cream is Where it's at

   

 On our 3rd day, we traveled to Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC) bright and early to watch them collect semen.  Yep, you read that right.  We watched someone collect semen while in Hamilton and I loved every second of it.  

New Zealand is, currently, the only country that sells fresh, sexed semen, mainly because they are such a small country and LIC has a corner on that market.  LIC is a co-op (you have to own shares in the company to buy their products), owned by over 12,000 of New Zealand's dairy farmers and was established over 50 years ago.

There are 3 main differences between LIC and the genetics side of U.S. agriculture:

 1) Obviously, the marketing of fresh semen is one of them, since most of the U.S. uses frozen semen.  

2) When a farmer buys semen from LIC, they are buying a specific "team" of bulls.  LIC's teams consist of 10 "proven" bulls, meaning these bulls have gone through extensive genetic testing and have sired around 80-100 daughters to show that his progeny can produce the desired amount of milk solids.  You can actually visit LIC's webpage here and check out their stats on their bull teams for this spring.

3) LIC handles everything about the semen from the testicle to the uterus.  Meaning they collect the semen, they process it, they ship it, and they have qualified techs that inseminate the cow with that semen.  This approach is definitely necessary to prevent inbreeding since you purchase a team, rather a specific bull's semen.  The AI techs use a Datamate, which they punch in the information of the cow they are about to inseminate and the information of the semen they are using, to ensure that a cow is not inseminated with her own sire's semen. 

Dave, our tour guide for the morning.

The bull sniffing out the teaser bull.  They use pheromones to encourage the bulls to mount the teaser bull, then they collect the semen.

We spent the rest of our day visiting 2 distinctly different dairy farms.

In New Zealand they use a number system to classify their dairy farms, System 1 being a low input system where the cows are all fed on the farmer's own pasture and System 5 being a high input system where almost half of the feedstuffs are imported year round. 

First, we stopped at Pete Morgan and Ann Bouma's farm which is classified as a System 1 farm.  Pete grew up in South Auckland with no farming background at all.  In New Zealand, no one really inherits a farm.  It is a progression where you start milking for a farmer, then work your way up to sharemilking (just like sharecropping), to eventually buying the farm.  It took Pete and Ann about 8 years to buy Morlands Dairy Farm from her parents.  Now they milk 530 cows once a day, all season long.  

Pete and Ann prefer low input because as Pete put it, they "work to live, not live to work".  It works for them because they want to be able to milk in the morning, then take the rest of the day to spend with their family and do other things that they love like hiking or going to the beach. 

The mentality is very different, because many of us live to farm.  We give up a lot of things to put our farm and livestock first, because it requires most of our time and attention.  I don't know if I could honestly tell you which mentality is the healthier one.  I've seen several men work themselves to death on their farm, but they wouldn't have it any other way, because that is their heart and soul.  While their farm is definitely a priority, Pete and Ann just have other priorities that they put ahead of their farm.  This definitely made me think a little about the mindset that I grew up with and question how my own priorities and goals compared to the lifestyle that I want to live in the future. 

This is the view that Pete and Ann have from their back deck.  I definitely would not complain waking up to this every morning.

Pete and Ann's house and yes, that is a pool.  We found that it was actually pretty common for a Kiwi farmer to have a pool or tennis court in their backyard.

We, then, spent our afternoon with Dave Swney, whose farm is classified as a System 5 dairy farmer.  Dave contract milks with his parents, meaning he milks the cows and does most of the labor for a certain rate per kilograms of milk solids.  New Zealand dairy farmers, unlike American dairy farmers, are not paid based on the amount of milk they produce.  Most of New Zealand's milk is dried into milk powder before it is exported to Asia, which means they get paid on how many milk solids per kilograms they produce.  Milk solids are the protein and fat in the milk.  

Next, we stopped at Monavale Blueberries, an organic blueberry farm outside of Cambridge.  This is where we met Richard, who I am convinced is one of the happiest men alive right now, but if I had his job I think I'd be pretty happy about life too.  Monavale is a family business, that Richard's father-in-law began after immigrating from Holland back in the 1970's.  Monavale grows 22 varieties of blueberries on 100 acres and during harvest they produce over 5 tonnes per day.  Fun Fact: They produce more blueberries a day, than all of New Zealand can eat in a week, so they export a lot of their produce to Australia.

Richard just loving life at Monavale.

By far some of the best blueberries I have ever had.

Had to get some of Monavale's homemade blueberry ice cream on the way out and it was by far one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life.

We ended the night with drinks and pizza at Digger's, then ran across the street to have a few more drinks at Honky-Tonk Bar, which was basically New Zealand's version of an American country bar.  Needless to say, our big group of farm kids from America had a pretty good time, some more than others.

                            

   

Still got about 10 more days to go!

Night y'all!                                      

New Zealand Pt. 2: The One Where We Sing the National Anthem in a Bar

So we basically hit the ground running our second day in New Zealand.  At this point we were all feeling a bit jet-lagged, but by some miracle we all drug ourselves out of bed and made it to AgResearch in Hamilton to get the rundown on New Zealand's agriculture industry.

We met with Dave Clark, who is technically retired after 40+ years in extension, but is now a student at Waikato University working on another degree.  Dave grew up in the Waikato region, which is the primary area for New Zealand's dairy industry because of it's low and rolling hills, but he also spent 20+ years working with farmers in the hill country/highlands who raised a lot of sheep, goats and deer.  

Since I'm a history buff, I'm going to insert a little about New Zealand's history.  New Zealand was settled in 1200 AD by the Maori, who were a warfaring tribe.  They are thought to have originated from one of the surrounding Polynesian islands.  The Maoris call New Zealand, Aotearoa, which means "the land of the long, white cloud".  It is said that when their ancestors were rowing their wakas (a Maori canoe) looking for a place to land, all they kept rowing towards a long, white cloud on the horizon and eventually ended up on the shores of what is now New Zealand.  

Anyway, fast forward to the 21st Century and New Zealand now has a population of about 4.5 million people. (Iowa's current population is just over 3 million.)  As a country, New Zealand mainly focuses on exportation.  As one of the least populated countries in the world, most of New Zealand's land is used for agricultural purposes. Therefore, they produce much more food than the Kiwis could ever eat so they send the surplus elsewhere; mainly to Asia, but also to the U.S. and Europe. 

New Zealand's agriculture is all about low input, low infrastructure.  Most of their animals spend their lives on pasture and many will never see a barn.  This has allowed their farmers the ability to switch sectors fairly easily when one market is better than the others.  

However, there is an intense pressure for farmers to intensify production, which has begun to affect the environment.  We quickly learned that New Zealanders pride themselves on their "Clean and Green" image.  As of right now, waterways must be fenced off in pastures so that livestock cannot urinate in them, creating an excess amount of Nitrogen which feeds the algae.  

New Zealand is kind of on the precipice right now.  They are trying to find a compromise so that their farmers can continue to make a profit and expand production, without negatively affecting New Zealand's environment.  Every. single. farmer that we visited mentioned their environmental concerns.  It quickly became clear that their problems are very similar to ours here in the U.S.

We then spent part of the afternoon with Sheryl Brown, who is a reporter with the New Zealand Dairy Exporter, who gave us an overview of her family's dairy operation and what her role at NZ Dairy Exporter entails.

Sheryl's house.  Apparently it is very common to keep livestock in your front yard.  Everywhere we went. front yards had paddocks that contained anywhere from a pig to a full sized draft horse.  You name it, we saw it in someone's front yard, just hanging out.

Our last stop of the day was to visit with Jess Spatz-Shelgren with Vet Focus in Te Awamatu.  Jess was from Massachusetts, studied at Cornell and had her own veterinary practice in New York before she moved to New Zealand in 2004.  She was able to give us an idea of how different the health and care practices, are from our typical methods, mainly because of the differences in production practices, which I will continue to discuss in future blog posts.

We ran across the street and had dinner at the Redoubt Bar and Eatery.  There is no normal pizza in New Zealand that I could find.  It was all artisan pizza with crazy names and even crazier toppings.  My favorite of the trip was definitely the Redoubt's "Don't Go Bacon My Heart".  I know, typical American.

Needless to say we stuffed our faces.  At first, I think our waitress thought we were a bunch of idiots, but she eventually warmed up to us.  Pretty soon, they were playing Party in the U.S.A and Proud to be an American on their jukebox.  I think she really just wanted to get a reaction out of us, and she eventually did.  When the Star-Spangled Banner came on, all 22 of us stood and sang our national anthem.  I'm sure that the other patrons at the bar weren't very impressed, but it is what it is.  

Don't worry there's plenty more to come!! This was only the 2nd day!

Night y'all!