Addie’s Blog #10 – Making every dollar count

Making every dollar count

Well things are officially pretty grim on the dairy farm. Continuous rain, struggling day to day to
find grass and can’t get on any paddock with a tractor! We are continuing to feed palm kernel to help keep the weight on our cows. They are producing 2.2 milk solids per cow at the moment which is pretty good considering they are only getting roughly 2kgs of PK per day. We are about to run out of silage though and looks like we are going to have to continue feeding PK as more rain is coming. We have had the odd beautiful fine day once a week which lifts everyone’s spirits and makes us think we can get through this wet season so far.

Another 50c increase in the milk payout came at the right time! And we are grateful for a good payout year considering the pretty dismal season weather wise. The payout is allowing us to buy in feed. However, it’s a shame that we can’t really benefit from this good payout as all the
extra money is going to buying feed and paying for the helicopter to fly fert on.

As dairy farmers all we want is to feed our cows as much as they want so they are happy, full
and content but the budget only allows so much. We still have 16ha of crop paddocks out because we just can’t get on the paddocks. As depressing as it all sounds we will keep going like all farmers do. We will get up in the morning and put our wet weather gear on and milk and feed our cows.

With another 300mls of rain on the way I might take that extra 50c payout increase and buy a new set of wet weather gear and a bottle of wine!🍷