Meet three Australian dairy farmers shaping environment-positive farms
Meet three Australian dairy farmers shaping environment-positive farms
These faces behind sustainable dairying are taking steps to reduce their on-farm carbon footprint and leave their corner of the world better than they found it.
This content was originally produced by Guardian Labs Australia to a brief agreed with and paid for by Dairy Australia. This content was first published on 08/05/2019.
In adopting practices that are both eco-friendly and good for the herd health – such as shade barns, solar panels, soil enrichment programs, better grazing methods and reducing water use – these farmers are making a change for the better. The payoff is that sustainable farming delivers a win-win scenario: what is good for the environment usually brings efficiencies and savings to the cost of farming too, while also tackling the challenges of climate change.
Their efforts are having a positive impact on the native wildlife and vegetation on their farms too, as a direct result of tree planting, considerate use of waterways, and a more symbiotic relationship with nature.
Healthy soils, healthy cows
When it comes to feeding Barambah Organics’ holstein and jersey cross cows, what’s on their ‘plate’ is of utmost importance to fourth-generation farmer, Ian Campbell.
Campbell was dismayed by the direction that conventional agriculture was gearing towards when he started managing his family’s farm in 1999. So he converted to certified organic practices and took on the ambitious role of both farmer and processor, giving him control from grass to glass.
He’s also opted for the unique approach of growing plentiful rye, corn, barley and fava beans, so the herd is directly grazing about 80% of its diet. “We found it was just better to do it all ourselves and that way we could dictate the quality,” Campbell says.
He calls it “broadacre” because the farm covers so much land in the Border Rivers Region in southern Queensland, but there’s nothing intensive about these farming methods.
Barambah’s 2000 cows have a vast 5000 hectares (12,350 acres) to roam; 800 are milking cows, with the remainder comprising young heifers (females under two years old) and the bull calves that the family chooses to rear rather than have them meet the bobby calf fate.
Campbell describes his approach as keeping both the nutrients in the soil and the nutrition of the cows in balance. “We really try to feed our cattle as well as we can and that way we don’t get disease,” he says.
At any given point on the farm, you can sink a shovel into the soil and uncover an abundance of earthworms doing their part to increase the amount of water and air that is captured in the soil. Campbell credits both the types of crops he’s planting and his style of farming as having improved the organic matter. “It’s just building all the time,” he says. “It’s like a mattress now. You walk on it and it’s got spring.”
Seasonal variations are extreme on the farm, with temperatures reaching up to 45C in summer and dropping to -5C in winter. The farm has received just 35% of its average annual rainfall for the past two years, so Campbell has planted out water-efficient tropical perennials including kikuyu, prairie grass, and white and red clovers to aid moisture retention in the soil.
“We had a bit of rain the other day and nothing runs off. It just all goes into the ground and we’re going to get yield out of it straight away.”
Campbell is also capturing effluent in the dairy to use as liquid fertiliser and compost on the pastures. “As a business we want to be sustainable, and as people we want to be sustainable. We don’t want to mine the place. We want to leave it in a better state than when we came.
“All our farms are much better than when we arrived. And that’s what our mission is really. The dairy product is a sort of a by-product of what we’re doing. We’re really wanting to be sustainable and improve our farm. And the result is a good, beautiful dairy.”
It’s also resulted in a farm that’s teeming with life, below and above ground.
“We’ve got emus grazing among the cows. You’d never see that anywhere in Australia. Kangaroos. Our waterways have pelicans in them. I love it like that. It’s real Australiana.”
An unexpected bird sanctuary
It’s 9am, but Jodie Hay has already been awake for four hours, milking 400 friesian, jersey and jersey-cross cows on the Cohuna property in northern Victoria that she’s stewarded alongside husband Colin for 25 years.
“Dairy farming is certainly in my blood,” Jodie says of her dairy heritage that dates back five generations on both sides of her family.
The Hays farm 260 hectares of irrigated land, plus 104 hectares of dry land at Mount Hope, 18 kilometres away. Both flood and drought have been perpetual issues in the past decade.
While Jodie reflects that it feels like “a long time ago now that anything was ever wet”, it was heavy rain during winter through spring in 2016 that prompted the Hays to build a compost loafing barn so the herd would have shade in hot weather and a dry place to rest when it’s wet.
“We get up to 47C here over summer for extended periods of time,” she says. “They say a cow starts to heat stress at about 28C. But we think it’s lower than that because our cows self-govern when they come in and out of the shade shed. We find once the day gets to 26C, they say ‘we’re heading for the motel’.”
The barn has a “living floor”: a pillowy base of composted manure that’s surprisingly not the least bit offensive in its fragrance. “By scarifying it every day, we make sure the compost continues to break down and sterilises itself,” Jodie says. “So you’ve got this clean, soft surface for the cows, but it also doesn’t cause health issues. They don’t get mastitis, which can be a problem when they’re housed under the trees.
“I didn’t believe it until I saw it. It comes out like this beautiful, fluffy, dry compost. It sometimes smells like a rainforest, which is weird. How can shit smell like a rainforest?”
Over in the dairy they’ve been using a two-pond system for the past 20 years, which captures and transposes effluent as fertiliser over the pasture. With water security an ongoing issue in the region, the Hays also installed an irrigation reuse system, catching any paddock run-off in drains that connect to a storage pond.
“What we’re finding is that they are becoming their own little habitats that so many waterbirds hang out in and breed in now.”
Between the trees they’ve planted, and Gunbower Creek, the Hays have shaped a habitat not only for cows, but for a large number of birds, insects, frogs and turtles.
Jodie says biodiversity and species integration on farms is crucial to wider environmental sustainability.
“We really need to look at the shared benefits of irrigation water – that primary production and native spaces coexist. I think there’s a real benefit if we start to work as a team and empower farmers to take on more practices like planting trees, reuse systems and make them really conducive to bird life.”
A whole-system approach
After studying and working in veterinary science, Stuart Griffin took over management of the family farm 10 years ago. “I’m fourth-generation on the farm,” he says. “We clock up 100 years next year.”
Griffin is grazing 520 holstein, jersey and Aussie red cross cows on 270 hectares of farmland on the family’s Springdale property in Westbury, Victoria.
When it comes to addressing on-farm sustainability, he takes a whole-system approach, addressing environment, animals and people. “Because if one area is not sustainable, then the whole business is potentially not sustainable,” he says.
“It’s ensuring that our people are safe, comfortable and happy. Our animals have to be well treated and healthy or they won’t perform, and we won’t have a social licence from the community to operate our farms. All parts need to be in balance. If one suffers, the whole system suffers.”
With the farm situated on a catchment that leads to the Gippsland Lakes, effluent management in the dairy has been an important environmental focus. “And it actually has a double win: we keep it out of waterways, which can lead to algal blooms, but it’s also a good fertiliser. So we’re saving money on other fertilisers, which are generally conventionally produced fertilisers that have an environmental cost and an economic cost.”
Griffin grows predominantly perennial rye-grass, but also some forage crops such as chicory and turnips for the cows to direct graze, which requires careful management via a grazing rotation strategy.
“We do conserve silage in the spring when grass is growing the fastest,” Griffin says. “But we’re certainly pretty keen for the cows to be out in the paddock grazing. We’d prefer the cows to go out and do the harvesting, than for us to sit in a tractor and burn diesel to bring the food to them. They are pretty good mowers.”
Looking ahead, Griffin says energy usage is the next thing he’ll tackle, adding solar panels to the dairy to reduce the farm’s carbon footprint.
He’s also chosen to milk the cows once a day, instead of the common twice-a-day routine.
“We do that for a few different reasons, but what it does is shift our energy use curve. And then with some other load shifting, we feel we can get a fantastic result out of using solar power. We won’t quite offset all of our usage, but we can go a fair way and that’s again a double win. It’s good for the environment – we’re reducing our reliance on fossil fuels – but we also get an economic benefit as well. There are a lot of these sustainability things that are a double win.”
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