Agroforestry Systems Can Reduce Nitrate Leaching By 50%

Following on from Mike Barton's presentation to Beef + Lamb NZ, about farming under a nitrate cap. I thought I'd look at some less conventional ways farmers can reduce nitrate leaching.

Today I want to discuss Stephen Briggs Nuffield report into Agroforestry.

The report shows how an agroforestry system can dramatically reduce the amount of nitrate leached from a farming system.

It's a pretty radical change, but maybe the pasture based dairy farm of the future will include 100 trees/ha as well as cows.

Transcription:

Glen Herud here again and I'm blogging from my van today because I'm struggling to find time to blog. I still want to blog, but the only time I have to myself is when I'm stuck in Christchurch rush-hour traffic for 30 minutes every morning. 

So, I know I'm a bit weird.

I posted a video of Mike Barton last week about how he farms under a nitrogen cap. Heres the link to the full video on the Beef + Lamb NZ website. I recommend you watch it. 

But this is what he had to say:

"We leach 93% of the manageable nitrogen that's going into the lake. We wanted it to be all the batches and the septic tanks and the town and whatever else you could hope for. It wasn't. It was us."

You know, I think it's just a matter of time before all farmers will have to farm under a nitrogen cap. And whether that's right or wrong, I don't know. I just sense that the movement is towards that. 

When you look at the changes on the Horizons District Council, what's happened in Taupo. Canterbury is talking about it. Southland is talking about it. You know, I just get the sense in 10 to 15 years time, that's where we'll be.

And I don't think farmers are really thinking radical enough about how we could change our farming systems. I'm sure farmers understand how big the effect will be on their farming businesses. They understand that. But I think we need to really think about how we're going to farm under that, rather than spend all our energy on fighting it. Because I think it will happen, as Mike Barton said.

Now, one radical system, I'm going to cover a few radical ways that we could farm cows over the next couple of weeks. 

Agroforestry

And I want to talk about agroforestry. The reason is that agroforestry has been shown to reduce nitrate leaching by up to 50% over a monoculture system. Now, Stephen Briggs is a Nuffield scholar from the U.K. and he released a report on agroforestry last year. And I'll put a link to it, it's really good.

But, what you do is you really combine trees with agriculture. So, they could be nut trees, fruit trees, timber trees and they could be cropping. Could be dairy, whatever. And what you do is you plant them in lines, you have about 100 trees per hectare. And you farm within the alleyways.

Now, the reason it reduces nitrate so much is that the tree roots will grow down deeper. And they go in underneath the alley crop and they join up in the middle. That creates a kind of a safety net. So, any nitrate that drops out the bottom of the agricultural system gets absorbed by those trees. Therefore, you have a much lower rate of nitrate leaching.

So, there's a lot of other advantages. For instance, shelter. Also, agroforestry systems have shown to have 30% reduction of evapotranspiration rates. So that means that you're losing less water out to the atmosphere. Which is probably pretty good for Canterbury farmers that particularly, when you think about our howling nor'westers in the summer. But it's not all plain sailing. Shading is an issue and Stephen talks about how to overcome shading and the research done on that.

I know Lincoln has done some research into agroforestry and they showed that, after 15 years, their pine trees have totally shaded out their alley crop. So, we don't want that to happen. There needs to be a bit more research done into it. But, you know, it's a radical way of doing things. I mean, imagine if your average dairy farm sort of looks like this and imagine just planting that full of trees. Planting thousands of trees in your most productive land. That's a pretty radical thing to do.

Now, these are the sort of things I think we need to start thinking about if we're going to have a dramatic effect on our rate of nitrate leaching. And of course, many people, many farmers, don't think we need to. 

But as Mike Barton says in his presentation, 'If farmers don't come up with the solutions, some bureaucrat in Wellington probably will.' And it's much better that farmers come up with solutions than someone else. 

So, I'm just going to throw out some real wacky, way-out sort of things that maybe we need to consider to reduce our environmental impact.

Mike Barton-Beef Farming Under a N Cap. This Video Will Scare The Crap Out Of Dairy Farmers

Mike Barton gave this talk to the Beef & Lamb NZ Farmer Roadshow in June 2013. 

It is a real eye opener & Mike explains in detail what farmers in the lake Taupo catchment have had to change in order to meet the Nitrogen cap put in place by their regional authorities.

Thanks to Beef & Lamb New Zealand for making it publicly available.



A quick summary

Mike has had to cap his nitrogen leaching & production to 2004 levels.

He can't change his beef farm to dairy for example, therefore he has also given up any real capital gain on his land.

He has to farm for cash flow not capital gain.

• 20% of catchment area is in Pastoral farming, 69% is in forest.
• Possible many other regions of NZ will be the opposite! (69% pastoral & 20% forest)

• Farming responsible for 93% of manageable Nitrogen
• 6 farms were modelled for the environment court-Insolvent in 5-9 years
• Production is capped at 2004 levels
• Since then costs have increased by 48%
• Mike assesses his productivity in profit/kg of Nitrogen leached. That is the only way he can increase his profitability.

Mike stated, New Zealand farmers can not continue to sell our product for less than it costs to produce.

New Zealand farmers have not been taking into account the environmental cost of our production. 

New Zealand farmers need to stop being commodity sellers, they need to stop worrying about production and start to concentrate on selling high value products, and more importantly retaining as much of the value as possible.

We need to find low N dairy systems

The reason I am working hard to investigate dairy farming systems that leach very low amounts of Nitrogen is because the day will soon be here when farmers of all descriptions will have to account for the nitrogen leaching out of their farming systems.

I get the feeling it will not matter which flavour of government is in power, the trend is clear.

The Horizons One Plan is the latest instalment and it is only a matter of time before similar plans hit the rest of the country.

I'm planning now, for a profitable farming future. Where my cows will have to leach much less Nitrogen.

Dairy Farmers Spend 66% Less Than The Average NZ Business On Wages

Transcription:

G’Day, Glen Herud here again.

I’m going to carry on talking about dairy farm staff. I’ve got some statistics for you. 

Wage to Revenue Ratio

• NZ Average                             21%
• Dairy Farm (Owner/operator)     7%

Statistics New Zealand have released some data, and they’ve said that the average New Zealand business with a turnover, greater than $700,000 per year spends 21% of their turnover on wages. The dairy industry, on the other hand, spends 7% of turnover on wages. 

If these 2 businesses had $1 million turnover, these guys would be spending $210,000 a year on wages, and the dairy farm is spending $70,000 on wages. 

This backs up what I’ve been saying, is that the dairy industry is under-investing in staff.

I Think a 750 Cow Dairy Farm Needs To Add 2 Extra Staff

If we take our 750 cow dairy farm, which I’ve been using as an example, now we have 3 staff on there, plus the boss, so there’s 4 people on the farm. 

I reckon we actually need 5 staff plus the boss. I think we need to add an extra 2 people onto this farm. That’s not going to be cheap, that’s going to be an extra $70,000 per year on wages. If you look at that from a percentage of turnover, if they add $70,000 to their wage bill, they’re still only spending around 10% to 11% of their turnover on wages, which is about half of what the New Zealand average is. I think that’s still quite acceptable.

How Would I Staff a 750 Cow Dairy Farm

How would I setup this dairy farm so that it could attract and retain good people? This is how I would do it:

I would start with a Monday-to-Friday work week. I’d get rid of these rosters that you have, like 6 days on 2 days off, or 9 days on 3 days off; whatever like that. I’d have a work week from Monday-to-Friday. 

You’d need around 2 people to milk in the morning. That would start at 4:00 a.m. They’d have their breakfast at 8:00 a.m, after milking, they’d go through and have lunch at 1:00 p.m., and that’s the end. They’re done for the day, they’ve done 8 hours. You start early, you finish early. 

You get another 3 staff, and they’d start at 7:00 a.m. Get up, have breakfast, go to work, 7:00 a.m. Have lunch at 1:00 p.m. or maybe 12:00 p.m., and then they finish up after milking at 5:00 p.m. They’re working around a 9-hour day. That’s how I would do it.

Basically, we’ve got 3 people on the farm from 7:00 right through to 5:00. Between the hours of 9:00 a.m, through to 1:00 p.m., you’ve got 5 people on the farm. You can get a heck of a lot of work done. There’s no excuse for not having everything perfect on your farm. 

Of course, you’ve still got the boss, who’s also floating around, out here. You’ve also got to bear in mind that if you’ve got 5 staff, you’ve got to give them 4 weeks annual leave every year, so that’s around 20 weeks. For around half of the year, one of these staff members is going to be on holiday. I still think that’s quite an acceptable staffing ratio on a farm that size.

What about the weekends?

I reckon you only need 2 people to milk. Because you’ve got 2 people milking, all you want to do on the weekends, I believe, is just milk. 

On the Friday afternoon, everyone should be setting up the farm so there’s nothing else to do on the weekends but milk. The effluent irrigators moved, the brakes are moved, I’d even feed out silage on Friday. I’d feed out Saturday and Sunday’s silage on the Friday, and deal with all lame cows, all those things get done on the Friday.

On Saturday and Sunday, the 2 guys who are milking, all they’re doing is milking. Go home after breakfast; wait around under afternoon milking & milk.

Only Work Every 3rd Weekend

You’ve got 6 staff, because essentially, you’ve got 5 staff plus the 1 boss; that means you only work every third weekend. Essentially, you work Monday-to-Friday, a 40-hour week, roughly, have 2 weekends off in a row, then you work the third weekend, and then you have 2 weekends off in a row. Those are the sort of conditions that are going to be appealing and attractive to all workers. 

I think if we offer those terms and conditions, we’d be able to pick the best people and be attracting and retaining great people into the dairy industry, as opposed to scraping the bottom of the barrel, which we seem to be doing at the moment.

That sounds all wonderful though, but there’s a big but: How are you going to pay for an extra $70,000 a year? There will be farmers out there with 750 cows in Canterbury saying, “There isn’t $70,000 sitting on the bottom of my budget.” 

That’s what I’ll talk about next time.

Nitrate Leaching Overview

Today I give a overview of nitrate leaching.

What is Nitrate Leaching?

What type of farming leach the most Nitrate?

How nitrate leaching from dairy farms is different from cropping & horticulture.

Well, gidday. My name is Glen Herud and today I want to talk about nitrate leaching and basically just give you a run-down on what nitrate leaching is about, and then later on I am going to talk about how we can start farming systems that have low rates of nitrogen leaching.  

Weed & Algae need both Nitrogen & Phosphorus in Order To Grow

So basically, if we look at water quality issues we've got two things. We've got nitrogen and phosphorus and what causes algae blooms and sort of algae build ups in our waterways.  What happens is if you have just phosphorus, pretty much nothing happens. If you've got just nitrate in the water systems, then pretty much nothing happens as well. But if you've got the two together, that's when these algae growths take place.  So, I won't worry about phosphorous today but we'll talk about nitrate today.

Who Leaches the Most Nitrate?

So, a few figures are that if you're a veggie grower, if you're a market gardener, the statistics show us that you will leach around 177 KGs of nitrogen per hectare per year.  If you're a cropping farmer, that's weeds and those sorts of things, you'll do 61 KGs per year.  If you're a dairy farmer, you'll leach around 65 KGs a year. If you're a humble old sheep farmer, you'll do 21 KGs of nitrate per hectare per year.  What that means is that basically this excess nitrogen filters out of those farming systems. and it's basically draining out the bottom of the soil.  When you look at cropping and these veggie growers, basically they are as a result of excess fertilizer, basically nitrogen fertilizer. They put a heap of fertiliser on and that fertiliser is going through the soil profile. 

85% of Nitrate Leaching From Dairy Farms Comes From Urine

But the dairy industry is different.  85% of all nitrates or excess nitrate from dairy farms is from urine.

So that's not urine from cows standing in a river urinating

and it's not from the urine in dairy effluent either

But every time we hear about environmental impacts from the dairy industry, that's all we hear about.  But they are not actually the issues. 

The main one is cows standing out in the paddock, urinating

Urine Patch Contains Equivalent to 800kg Nitrogen per Ha

Here's what happens. Basically, here is a cow. This is a bit of a funny cow.  She's a Friesian so what she does is she urinates into what you call a urine patch, which is about the size of a dinner plate. Within that dinner plate, there are 800 KGs of nitrogen per hectare. So there is an equivalent to 80 KGs of nitrogen per hectare. So the way I think of that, to make sense of it is if you take a hectare, which is a football field and let's say we had a way of getting all these cows lined up so they all urinated at once and all the urine patches covered one whole hectare.  If they all urinated at once, that would be applying 800 KGs of nitrogen per hectare at once. 

Average NZ Dairy Farmer Applies 150-200kg Nitrogen per Ha per Year

To give you an indication of how much that is, your average dairy farmer does around 150 to 200 KGs of nitrogen per hectare per year.  They will do that over multiple small allocations of fertilizer.  So, what I want to sort of get through to you is that there is a heck of a lot of nitrogen in a urine patch.  What happens is that if you think about grass. I don't know, what we got? Five, six, seven grass plants within a urine patch? They've got their roots systems that go like that, probably around 30 centimeters deep.  So what happens is the nitrogen comes in via the urine and while it's in the soil it turns into nitrate.  It can be absorbed by the plants.  If you look at this picture here, you can see these dark green patches in the paddock there. Those are fertility patches.  They are either feces patches or urine patches. What's happened is that those grass plants there, have as much nitrogen as they can get and they've bolted away and they are nice and dark and green. 

The Few Grass Plants in a Urine Patch can't Absorb all the 800kg of N

The problem is that there are 800 KGs of nitrogen being applied. Well, a heck of a lot of nitrogen will be applied and those few little plants, there is absolutely no way they are going to be able to absorb all that nitrogen. There is far too much.

What happens is the nitrate attaches to water molecules, H2O, because nitrate is soluble in water.  Those water molecules filter down through the soil profile and drain away and they take the nitrate with them. Once they get below the roots’ depth of the plants, they can't get absorbed.  It keeps on going, all the way down, until it gets into our groundwater. Then it ends up in our waterways.  So that is very simply how nitrate leaching takes place.  Essentially, excess nitrate that isn't absorbed by the plants ends up filtering through the soil profile and getting into our groundwater. 

There are a couple of things that affect the rate of nitrate leaching.  One of them is your soil profile. If you've got nice, well I shouldn't say nice, if you've got free draining soils that are kind of rocky, the water flows through those soils much more quickly.  So, obviously the nitrate flows through quicker. If you've got heavier clay soils, then the water sort of sits there more and therefore the nitrates sits there more.   The amount of water in the soil profile affects the rate of nitrate leaching. What happens generally is during the summer lots of nitrogen is sort of applied and it sort of sits there in the soil and then winter comes along and we get all this wet weather and it all sort of leaches out through the winter.  What's the other thing that affects nitrate leaching? Oh, your plants, your root depths. If we can get plants that have twice the root depths, then there are obviously twice as much time for them to absorb nitrate. That's a very brief rundown. It will probably horrify a few scientists but that sort of serves the purpose of what we need to explain today. 

So the next little while I'll start talking about how we can farm differently in ways to reduce our nitrogen leaching cap or nitrogen leaching rate. If you have been following the news you'll see that regional councils are starting to sort of propose nitrate caps, so saying that you can only leach around 25 KGs of nitrogen per hectare per year.  Obviously, if you are a potato grower, they would horrify you and dairy farmers are equally worried about how they are going to be able to farm and meet that sort of a target. That's what I want to talk about in the next couple of weeks.

Dairy Farm Staff And The Shocking Rate Of Employee Turnover

In this video I continue to discuss dairy farm staffing issues. I reference three reports into dairy farm employment.

The first is a report by Dairy NZ called Smarter Not Harder, Improving Labour Productivity in the Primary Sector

The second is a report written by Gillian Searle in 2002 called The Reality of a Career in the Dairy Industry, An Employee’s Perspective


These two reports found that:

• 50% of dairy staff have been in their current job less than 1 year
• The average length of service for a dairy farm employee is less than 1 year
• 1/3 of dairy staff leave the industry every year!

The third report written by Richard Kyte's "A different approach to staffing in the dairy industry" attempts to show that increasing staff numbers actually increased his farms productivity and profitability.

Transcript:


Well, gidday. Glen Herud here again and I am going to carry on talking about dairy farm staff. Last time I said that only a small percentage of New Zealand population are prepared to work on a dairy farm simply because of the long hours involved. 

Today I want to talk about a report that was released by Dairy NZ in 2009 I think, called “Farming Smarter Not Harder.” They had some interesting figures.  

• They said that 50% of staff had been in their current job less than one year.  

• The average length of service, so that's the average time people stay with an employer was less than one year. 

• 1/3 of dairy staff leave the industry every year.

These figures are also backed up by a report written by Gillian Searle way back in 2002, and she found that 59% of staff that she surveyed had been in their current job less than six months. 
These are figures from the dairy industry. These aren't figures from an anti-dairy group. These are their own figures. This shows a horrendous amount of staff turn-over. I can't even imagine trying to run a business where the majority of your staff aren't there for a full year. There is no continuity or anything.  So, these figures surprised me quite a bit. 

Average Staff Turnover in NZ is 20%. NZ Dairy Turnover 40% 

Now, take a look at this graph. This is from the “Working Smarter Not Harder” report.  If you look at the bottom line there that's the New Zealand average around 15 to 20%. This is for staff turn-over.  The blue line at the top is the staff turn-over for the New Zealand dairy industry. As you can see, it fluctuates wildly from down 25% up to 40%, and it's exactly the same every single year.

If look there, September seems to be the time where everything peaks and it's no surprise to me that September is right at the end of calving after people have worked for two months, doing 60-70 hour weeks; they leave.  

750 Cow farm has 4 staff

If we look at what it looks like at a current dairy farm, if you've got 750 cows here in Canterbury. I've said last time that you have about one staff member to 180 cows. So that equals four staff.  Another way of looking at it is one staff member to 75,000 KGs of milk solids. If you have 750 cows doing 75,000 KGs of milk solids that equals four staff. That equals 300,000 KGs divided by 75,000 equal four staff. Essentially that is three employees and one boss. 

So what does that actually look like actually on the farm? 

I am assuming we've got a 60 bale rotary with automatic cup removers and centre pivot irrigation.  Two staff are going to be required to milk and they'll start at 4 am. They go 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12pm, 1, 2, 3, 4. They'll go through to 5p.m. 

They will have lunch at one and breakfast at eight for an hour.  So that's an 11 hour day. Essentially, one person is always going to be off because they'll have their rostered day off. Depending on what the roster is, it depends what part of the week you have a full complement of staff, but generally speaking you're only going to have two staff plus the boss. Maybe the boss starts at seven and this will probably rotate around. But anyway the third person starts at seven and they'll go right through to five p.m.  So, basically they've got to milk twice a day and they've got to do other jobs.  

750 cows & 4 staff is fine, as long as nothing goes wrong

So having three people on the farm with maybe a relief milker helping out, that sort of works when everything is going well, when the weather is dry, when nothing is broken, where everything just goes according to plan. But as soon as something happens, like what if one of these guys here gets sick? All of a sudden that puts pressure on everyone else. Or if they just don't turn up which is often the case. As we've just seen, the massive staff turn-over rates, you can see that people are leaving all the time within the dairy industry. When someone leaves and you've got this staffing level, it puts pressure on everyone else. Everyone else is already working hard. They are already doing 11 hours a day, and if someone leaves all of a sudden that just puts a heck of a lot more pressure on them.  

Richard Kyte, "A Different Approach To Staffing In The Dairy Industry"

So, I want to talk to you about this report.  Richard Kyte, he was a sharemilker in Southland and now works for the Dairy NZ and he's also a consultant. He wrote this report called, ”A Different Approach to Staffing in the Dairy Industry.” His introduction says, "I believe that the New Zealand dairy industry is being compromised by understaffing on farms especially larger units of 600 cows or more. This has become a significantly greater problem in the last ten years and specifically on the South Island with larger farms." 

He goes on to say, "As the dairy industry grows, to maintain this growth it must attract and retain people within the industry. To do this, the dairy industry must compete with other industries". 

And that's what I was saying last week, dairy is competing with other industries. He goes on and he references Rupert Tipples from Lincoln University and Rupert says that 64% of dairy staff work 50 hours plus.  That's compared to 17% of the general population who work 50 hours plus.  

Richard also talks about Peter Sheehan who is a gen Y specialist. You should Google him. He's got some videos out there. He basically made the comment, "If the dairy industry thought 12 days on, two days off was a good roster it needed to get real. As five days on, two days off was the benchmark." He went on to say, “He's extremely surprised that dairy workers even accepted this.”  Richard goes on to say. “If five days on and two days off is the benchmark then 40 to 45 hour week is also a benchmark the industry should look for.". This comment is interesting. "The drive to reduce hours to date has been mainly from professionals looking in at the industry not from farmers themselves." Ain't that the truth!  

Richard added staff which cost $50,000, but increased turnover by $91,000. $41,000 more profit

So, the gist of what Richard was saying was that he went on and he decided he's going to spend an extra $50,000 dollars. When he was sharemilking on a 600 cow farm, he added an extra labor unit which cost him $50,000 dollars.  As a result of that, he had more time to manage his pasture, so he used the pasture plus system. He had less culls, less lame cows, less mastitis, and as a result of that he brought in an extra $91,000 dollars in extra income and savings. So $95,000 minus $50,000 equals $41,000. So he's still ahead by $41,000 which is about a 80% return. So he spent 50 grand to make an extra 41 grand profit. He spent more money to make more money. 

This is the whole thing, I think the level of staffing we've currently got is a false economy.  I think people think that four staff working on a 750 cow farm is the standard, it’s the benchmark.  But I think that you are losing money in all other aspects of your dairy industry. 

So, the interesting thing about Richard's farm is that he has a staff turn-over rate of two and a half years. So that means that his staff stays with him on average two and a half years and they move on basically because they want to progress in the industry, not because they want to leave dairying.  

So next time I am going to talk about how I would run a 750 cow farm and how I propose to pay for it.