Episode 114 - What happened at LUDF this season?

Antoinette, do you want to give us, for those people who don't know much about LUDF, can you give us a bit of a rundown of what the farm is, its farm system, how many cows you milk, the size of your dairy shed, that sort of thing, a bit of a 101?

Yeah.

So the Lincoln University Dairy Farm's been around now for coming into its 26th season.

So we've just finished our 25th season.

And Lincoln University Dairy Farm, it's sort of funded and modelled through CITIC, which is the South Island Dairy Demonstration Centre.

So it's currently a demonstration farm.

So we look to adopt new technology and science and more proven science and to see how that can roll out on a commercial farm.

So our current system at the moment, we're running a three and a half cows per hectare primary all grass based system.

So all pasture fed and grown on farm with imported grass silage.

We target around 450 kgs per cow is the target.

This season we've moved from a 10 and 7 milking regime that we've done for four seasons and we've moved back to what we call a tactical system.

So we milk twice a day for most of the season and this season, or last season I should say now, We moved to three and two milking on the 1st of February, which was a month earlier than what we forecasted.

Peter will talk a bit more about the season shortly.

So we peak milk this year 550 cows.

We were a little down from our target peak milk cows of 560 just because of calf rates from last season.

And also a replacement project we were doing with a limited or reduced young stock, which we needed to have a few more in just with the in-calf rates that we got.

So down a bit last year and maybe a fraction down this coming season.

So we were targeting 487 kgs per cow, which is fair production for a System 2, System 3 or grass-based system.

I think that's Most of our system is fully irrigated, based in Lincoln.

We are a 50-bar row tree as well, with automatic cup removers.

Anything else to add to that, Peter?

Yeah, fully irrigated, you see.

Yeah.

You've got protracts there, don't you, and collars on your cows?

Yeah, all fixed collars.