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A mid-Canterbury farmer describes himself as a cropping farmer – the crop being grass. Mike Salvesen, a former arable farmer, is concentrating on growing different varieties of grass and tailoring its management to suit the hill-country farm. Like a crop, it is a matter of harvesting it at the right quality, using mouths. Mike, who comes from Britain, bought Wakare, a 1460ha Mt Somers farm, two years ago. He has spent a lot of time and money subdividing paddocks, installing troughs and renewing pastures and has still not finished. He has also implemented a stock rotation policy with the aim of keeping fresh feed ahead of stock. The only exception is when the ewes and cows are set-stocked for a short-time at lambing and calving. When Mike and his wife, Nicky, took over the farm, many of the paddocks on the lower part of the property were between eight and 20ha. Subdivision gave them the opportunity to better manage and use pasture to finish all the stock bred on the farm. The farm has a good balance of land with two-thirds steep hill country and one-third cultivatable. It is upon this easier country that stock will be grown out and finished. Already the subdivision and rotation policy has made a huge difference to pasture quality and stock management, Mike says. The stock, including ewes and lambs, get used to being moved all the time and this makes them easier to handle and the lambs become familiar with gateways before weaning, which makes life a lot easier after weaning. Based on previous experience, he is designing paddocks that are long and narrow making them easy to manage and break-fence in winter. There was a good lane system in place when Mike took over the farm and he has gone about extending it to make stock movement easier. The hill is also well-fenced with good-quality fences that don’t need touching. Half the hill has been deer fenced. The farm winters 12000su which include 1800 ewes, 550 cows and 400 breeding hinds.
Mike is building cattle numbers but the limiting factor is the farm’s winter carrying capacity. He believes the only way to make money out of breeding cows and hinds is to winter them on the hill at zero cost. “If you are feeding crop then the wintering costs are too high as unlike ewes they only have one calf.” The ewes are break-fed grass over much of the winter and are therefore a cost centre, Mike says. Young stock, including steer and heifer calves and some 18-month-old cattle, winter on the 50ha of winter feed crops (mainly Sovereign kale) grown every year. Stock on feed crops also receive a supplement in the form of home-grown silage, bought-in ryegrass or wheat straw Because pasture growth is slow to come away in spring, stock need to stay on the crops until the equinox or the beginning of October. An altitude of 500m to 850m is a challenge and winters can be long, so Mike has only a small window of opportunity to get stock grown out or finished. This is why the provision of quality pasture over summer is so important. Lambing doesn’t begin until October 1 and the lambs are weaned in the first or second week of January. The lambs are shorn as soon as possible after weaning. After weaning, the ewes are rotated around the hill blocks to tidy pasture while the lambs get first pick of the new grass paddocks. Cattle are used to open up pastures for the lambs, so by the time the lambs go on to the paddocks the pastures are clover dominant. Cattle then come in behind the lambs to tidy-up the pasture. Over summer, Mike has different mobs of cattle each on its own rotation around a series of paddocks on the lower parts of the farm. A small amount of summer feed crop is grown as an insurance against dry summers and any lambs not finished by autumn are carried through winter on swedes and sold in early spring. Good pasture means no short-cuts Angus steers are sold by Mike Salvesen on contract to Five Star beef and most have gone, weighing over 400kg, before their second winter. Soils on the Mt Somers farm are silt clay loams over clay. The farm can get very wet in winter, but it is relatively summer safe, receiving around 1000mm of rainfall annually. Mike says the wet soils in winter are the biggest challenge; it is a matter of allowing soils to dry out enough in spring before pastures and feed crops can be established. He double-sprays the paddocks earmarked for renewal with Roundup, leaving four to five weeks between each spray. The establishment of good feed crops is critical so he will not take any short-cuts. Depending on soil tests, crops are typically drilled with 200kg/ha of Cropzeal 16P along with selenium and boron. Mike then sprays with postemergence herbicides and insecticides and keeps a close eye on the crops through to autumn. Kale crops are followed by rape crops then by short-term pastures such as Taboo mixed with clover. When these run out, permanent pasture is established. This first grass allows Mike to get on top of weeds so the ground is clean before the permanent pasture goes in and stops Browntop from re-seeding. Because of the relatively high number of cattle, he is mainly using the tetrapolid Bealey NAE2 endophyte ryegrass as a basis for his permanent pasture, but also has paddocks in later flowering ryegrasses including Arrow and Alto. Mike says Bealey benefits from being rotationally grazed, but it is not an ideal sheep pasture because it does not like being eaten to low levels. It is a highly palatable grass and if it is overgrazed the root reserves will run out allowing other grasses and weeds such as nodding thistle to take over. He believes each variety of grass has to be managed differently and because he tries to seek independent advice on the varieties, he buys his seed from the noncommercially biased RD1. He says it is often the person he is dealing with that makes the difference – not the company. The short-term pastures are used to make silage which is used on priority mobs over winter-the weaner deer and R2 cattle. These are stock he aims to finish as early as possible to try to capture spring premiums. To boost silage crop yields Mike applies Cropzeal 16P at 300kg/ha to the paddocks and, if needed, will apply extra nitrogen(N). The paddocks earmarked for silage are grazed in early winter and then left alone. He points out that he is growing silage as a crop rather than just harvesting surpluses and will therefore graze these paddocks only as a last resort. To help drive pasture growth on the permanent pasture about 30kg/ ha of N is applied early in spring – when the paddocks are dry enough to travel on. He admits the temperatures are usually marginal but the N is then available for when soil temperatures rise. Mike works with his Ballance representative to work out the fertiliser requirements of the farm. Soil samples are taken and Mike aims to keep Olsen P levels at about 18. “Capital fertiliser doesn’t increase the value of the farm,” he says. The pH on the hill was, at 4.9, too low and last year Mike flew on Optimise lime pellets at 250kg/ ha along with 6kg/ha of elemental sulphur. He says the response to the lime has been “massive”, over and above what would have been expected given the very good season they have just had. One hill block was deliberately left without lime in order to make a comparison, and Mike says the difference has been extraordinary. The hill blocks have also responded well to being rotationally grazed instead of overgrazed. With a relatively large number of cattle compared with sheep, Mike says the blocks are benefiting from higher residuals. The sheep and cattle are rotated around the same blocks, as are the deer and cattle, but sheep are kept out of the deer blocks as they would compete for feed with the hinds. Mike is aiming to lift deer weaning weights and autumn growth rates so he can sell the finished weaners earlier in spring. Because the altitude slows grass growth in spring, he has not been selling the weaners – finished to a minimum 100kg LW – until November when the chilled market premiums have come off.  A lot of attention is paid to establishing winter feed crops. To try to get the weight on the weaners earlier, Mike is using a mixture of feeding and genetics. He has bought Eastern sires to try to lift the size and quality of the farm’s Red hinds and this should have a flow-on effect in the size and quality of their progeny. Mike also uses Wapiti terminal sires. The weaned deer are grown out on grass in autumn and kale in winter. Having invested so much in stags, Mike also intends running a velvet herd alongside the breeding hinds. The cows are a mixture of Hereford, Angus and Hereford Angus-cross, the latter put to a Charolais terminal sire. The Herefords came with the farm and Mike bought in the Angus and Angus Hereford-cross cows. Hereford bulls are bought off Mike’s neighbour, David Morrow, while the Angus bulls come from Kakahu. The Angus steers are sold to Five Star before their second winter and any small yearling cattle that will obviously not be finished at 18 months are treated as store stock over summer and used to tidy up blocks. Mike tries to finish any cattle not sold to Five Star to a minimum 250kg CW, depending on markets and season. In future Mike is hoping to finish the Hereford steers for the Hereford Prime brand. Yearling heifers are mated and as Mike is trying to build cattle numbers, this year he selected the replacement heifers on size – they needed to be 300-350kg before going to the bull. Last year 156 heifers went to the bull. The heifers’ calves are tagged at birth and Mike checks the calving heifers twice a day, shedding off any that have calved. Replacement selection In the future he will be taking a more scientific approach to selecting replacements and will use data gathered through an electronic identification system to select on summer weight gains and efficiency. He will also use the system for things such as sire selection for individual cows. Mike welcomes NAIT and sees it as an opportunity for him to gather a lot of data which will be analysed and used in management decisions. He has installed a Gallagher system and already has 9000 records from the weigh station. This information will be used for pasture management because weight gains on different paddocks and different grasses will be visible, highlighting pastures needing renewing. Before mating the heifers are vaccinated for BVD and all the cows are given a rotovirus vaccine before calving. The ewes are predominately Perendale, but there are a few odds and sods which will be put to a terminal sire and gradually culled. Mike is happy with the fecundity of the ewe flock as they have been lambing 140-150% on the hill. He buys Perendale rams from his neighbour Blair Gallagher and uses Suftex and Dorset Down terminal sires. Last year the hoggets were mated to a Southdown ram. To stimulate ovulation a teaser ram was run with the ewe lambs for one month before the ram went out. Despite this only 75% of the hoggets weaned a lamb, due to appalling weather at lambing. Mike aims to finish the lambs to 18-19kg CW and these are sold to either Alliance or Silver Fern Farms. Mike employs one full-time and one part-time staff member and uses contractors only for making silage, for shearing and for spreading fertiliser and lime. Everything else they do themselves.
Kellogg programme project Mt Somers farmer Mike Salvesen is making the transfer of agronomic information to farmers the subject of his Kellogg Rural Leadership Programme project. Since arriving in New Zealand from the UK, Mike has struggled to find independent information on different pasture varieties and their specific management requirements. He says that while he is swamped by advertisements, independent, scientifically-based information is much more difficult to find. Mike would welcome feedback from farmers on this subject and can be contacted on (03) 303-9173. Published courtesy of Country-Wide March 2010 http://www.pasturerenewal.org.nz/cgi-bin/article.cgi?cmd=show&article_id=100&view=view_printable&border=none |
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