UPBEAT MUSIC Captions by Ashlee Scholefield. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 Hello, and welcome to Rural Delivery. Robotic milking is becoming more common in this country, as European-designed operations are adapted to suit our pasture-based production systems. This week we hear about the experience of Waikato dairy farmers John and Margaret Fisher, who introduced an automated milking system to their operation five years ago. We catch up on progress made and lessons learned in the ongoing fight against the invasive weed pest Chilean needle grass and discover the process of making raw-milk cheese from locally sourced milk at Mt Eliza Cheese. Waikato farmers John and Margaret Fisher were early adopters of robotic milking systems in NZ. Their system had to be adapted to work with pasture-based farming, unlike the barn-based operations common in Europe, where the systems were originally designed. They installed four robots in an automated system in 2011, and five years on, John shares his experiences in setting up an ongoing operation. This farm's 78 effective hectares. We have been running about 320 cows the last few years. Cut back this current season to 300, just cos of the economics ` trying to reduce the feed inputs. I first got interested in robotics when DairyNZ predecessor had the Greenfields research farm going at Ruakura. I was looking at refencing this farm, and so I just thought, well, I should see how far away these robotics are and just whether we should think about fencing for robotics, um, and, I guess, through that process, got a bit hooked on them. The three-way grazing was happening at the time, which showed that they could do pretty similar production with the three-way grazing, and just decided it was something I wanted to do in my lifetime. Yeah, there was a bit of a lifestyle thing there. I guess, under a herringbone system, I either had to relieve the staff myself or get relief staff in. I didn't really wanna be doing that. Probably the biggest plus with the robots is we don't need relief staff. I relieve the manager, but it's not such a big task to do that most of the year. We reduced our labour requirement a bit, but not as much as you'd think. There's still all the other jobs to be done on a farm, but the labour you have on the farm probably doesn't do the same hours that you would in a conventional system, like you can start at 7 o'clock in the morning ` sometimes, during the springtime, at calving time, we'll start at 6 o'clock ` and pretty regularly knock off at 5 o'clock. You probably need pretty good pasture management skills and stock management skills as well ` stock sense ` because you're not seeing the cows all the time, and so you just need to be able to watch out for those odd sick cows. It probably doesn't suit a sharemilker-type arrangement, in the traditional sense of a herd-owning, because if you bring a new herd in, you gotta train it for the robots. I guess some sort of equity partnership might work. We have achieved much better empty rates, like around 5% or 6%, since we've been in the robots. It's difficult to know exactly what that's due to. We probably had been feeding the cows better, I would say, because the robotic system does highlight when the cows are being underfed more ` when they run out of pasture, they come back to the robot. But also at mating time, you have very little else to do. We've basically gone back to the traditional` we still just tail paint and observe. And, um, I think that's probably a factor in it too ` that we have the time to put into mating at that time of the year. Well, we've got this new shelter over this feeding, drafting, sorta, holding area. Half of it was to keep rainwater out of the effluent. We got quite a big concreted area here, and that was adding stress to our effluent system in heavy rain. And the other thing was shade for the cows in the summer, to keep them cool. Well, when the cows come back from the paddocks and they first come into the first what we call selection gate here, and that selection gate IDs them, and if they're due for milking, it'll let them go straight ahead to the robots, but if they're not due for milking, it will then draft them left or right, depending on where the next grazing paddock is. Or if they've come back too quickly, it'll actually put 'em back to where they were. We can individualise that for some cows. Like, currently, the freshly calved cows can get in about every six hours, whereas the late-lactation cows are around about every 10 hours that they can get in. The attraction of the robots was to go back to treating cows as individuals. The computer system records each individual cow's production every day, and we can control how often each individual cow is milked as well with the software that's in the system. We put 280 cows in here in the first day. Really, it needed about 10 people, um, to put 'em through. Took 16 hours to put those 280 through the first time, and then we started` had a few hours off and started again. There was a bit of a shift going on, and, um... But by about the third day, we were down to four people, and probably after a week, down to three people. Yeah, the cows in this system can freely move in and out of the paddocks. So we just left the gates open in the paddocks, and they started wandering back when they were looking for some more feed or wanted to be milked. When the cow comes in for her very first milking with a robot, we actually have to teach the robot her teat positioning, and so we have, like, a joystick that works the robot arm, and you place the robot arm next to each teat and record the positioning of that teat. And then quite often we'll just cup that cow by hand for that first milking, just so she gets milked properly, and then you just gotta keep and eye on her the next few days that the robot is finding her teats, because freshly calved cows often have swollen udders, and until that swelling goes down after a few days, it can have a bit of trouble. But then as the season goes on, as the cow starts going into her peak production and her udder gets tighter and tighter, the robot remembers after each milking just where those teats are and keeps changing its memory. There's internet connection to the cowshed and cell phone connection, so we get regular alerts, what we call stop alerts if a robot stops, and usually we gotta respond to that and come and see what the problem is. Probably only getting one of those a week at the moment. But you'll get other alerts, like a low yield on a cow, which you don't have to respond to immediately, but you just sorta note it. Often it's just because the robot hasn't managed to cup one of the teats. But the system lets that cow out of the robot and drafts her back in to have a second go at her. So it's pretty difficult for a cow to get away from here without being milked properly, because it` it has this, uh, expected yield every milking, and if it doesn't get within 80% of that expected yield, it'll` it'll put her around again and try and milk her again. We'll be back in Marlborough to hear about the battle to control the invasive pasture pest Chilean needle grass. 1 Welcome back. The invasive pasture pest Chilean needle grass has been an issue for many years in Marlborough, but some are learning how to manage it. And the more people are aware of the grass and its biology, the more likely its spread can be contained. Chilean needle grass has been in Marlborough probably since about the 1930s. It's a serious pastoral pest, really, for a number of decades. The seeds on this plant are very very sharp and can burrow into sheep ` into pelts, into eyes, into the flesh ` and can make sheep farming very difficult, to hold sheep right through and hold them on land affected with Chilean needle grass. So it is the main threat, especially in this dry east-coast country, like Marlborough, um, and also other regions like Hawke's Bay and Canterbury. Um, and there are up to about 15 million hectares, um, of this kind of country that can be affected by Chilean needle grass, and we're sitting at about 3000ha currently, so, um, you know, the potential threat there is quite large. Marlborough and Hawke's Bay have quite substantial infestations. When those aerial seed heads come up ` and they've got very sharp seeds on them ` and that can be sort of through October through to January, over that main summer seeding period. For farms that do have it, that's the period of time when they have to really alter their farm system to work with it. And also that's the main time when there's a risk for those seeds being moved as well, whether it be on livestock, hay, machinery. That's a real focus of the programme ` is to try and keep that spread to a minimum. In 2011, there was a new herbicide that was registered for use in NZ. Uh, it has been used a lot in Australia. Um, active ingredient flupropanate. That is the primary tool that we're using at the moment. It's a residual herbicide. Um, and that is proving to be fairly successful in some of this country here, where you can transform from either Chilean needle grass dominated, uh, dry, pastoral country into a bit more of a permanent crop scenario. But it's a multipronged approach, so the use of competition and cropping in combination with herbicide control is proving to be the most effective. We've produced a couple of short identification videos as part of the Awareness Project. That runs through what the plant looks like, the times of year to look for it, some of the characteristics of the seed. There's a lot of collateral out there to help farmers identify that plant. We are still continuing work to better understand the new flupropanate herbicide. There has been some you would call undesirable impacts on non-target pasture species. So we're trying to understand a little bit better how to use that and integrate that herbicide into farm systems and also, um, improving ways to use that herbicide to get better results in the short- to medium-term. What we have here is a seed ball, essentially. The seed of the Chilean needle grass, with the backward-facing hairs and the corkscrew tails, they adhere together readily; they help them get transported around. So the hygiene of mowers, especially, um, or any farm machinery that can pick up seed or form seed balls like this one, can be picked up and moved long distances... So that's one of the main reasons around knowing how this plant and the seed of this plant can move ` is to try and prevent those long-distance spread and form new infestations. So this little face here, Tim, what are your, sort of, plans with that one? This is gonna be solidly Taskforced. I mean, we've just taken over this block in here, and, um, yeah, this is round the sheep yard, so... Fair bit through here? 'Pretty much the first day we came into the district, 'we got involved, we got involved in a vineyard development, and we knew it had the needle grass.' Um, I rung one of the council guys who at the time I knew, and he came out to show me it, and, uh, yeah, we could see it from day one. It was everywhere. From a farming point of view, it limits what you can do with the country. Selling stock, store stock, sheep ` it plays nightmares with the sheep, especially through the summer periods. The long seed head on it, uh, it's very sharp, um, and the long tail, and when it, um, gets wet and damp, it contracts and corkscrews into the fleece, and then it goes straight into the meat. And it can get in pretty quick, like, within a couple of days, a day. Uh, I've even seen it in, uh, sheep's fleeces within, um` into the pelts within an hour. So it's nasty stuff. Certainly need to check your dogs every night, especially movin' them off the place ` on and off the place ` if you're going other places. They certainly do pick it up. I wouldn't run a beardie here. There was not a lot you could do. Um, you had your hands tied. And that's why people have struggled here in the past. But, um, with the introduction of Taskforce five-odd years ago, yeah, we started to make some headway, and, um, you can keep on top of it. There's a three-month withholding period with the Taskforce chemical, so you are limited to what you can run and where you can run things. Um, so you've got to do a lot of, um, background work, working where you can put stock and that sort of thing. The guys who were in here previously, they'd made a crack. There's some crops they'd drilled and grasses and species they'd used, and it was evident what was working amongst the needle grass and what wasn't. And with the introduction of the Taskforce, we could see volunteer grass coming through, and these are the species that, sort of, we've been concentrating on. But it just` it's working into a summer fallowing programme, and it seems to be working really well, going through a cropping phase ` um, Taskforce with Roundup, crop and then, um, summer fallow the second summer, and then, um, straight into a permanent pasture. Well, the challenge of a vineyard is obviously you can't use the Taskforce herbicide. The, um, needle grass inside the vineyard itself has no bearing on the production of the vineyard, so it'd be easy to sweep it aside, but, morally, it can get away big time. On the blocks we're looking after, we have a select number of contractors. We're washing all the vehicles that are coming out of there. Uh, all the machinery, it's inspected by the Council. They have contractors that come around and inspect it. 24-7, you just pick up the phone and they'll come and inspect it. Uh, but, I mean, looking at a bulldozer, we're sort of` to clean a bulldozer out, you're sort of looking at six to seven hours. So I personally did all the machinery myself, and then it was inspected, and then it went. But, um, yeah, that's about the best we can do. Stock are great in the vineyard, and I'd recommend the stock in the vineyard. They do a great job. And it saves a lot of time, management-wise. Um, the needle grass is an issue, but we mainly stocked it through the winter, when the needle grass seed was not evident, and all stock that came off the place went straight to the works. It was all finished, and through the winter here, we got some really good lamb weights and, yeah, got some good stock away by August. You don't want it. You just don't want it. No. From a farming background, you certainly don't want it. Um, the vineyards, I mean, it's a pain, but it doesn't affect on production. But, yeah, certainly from a farming perspective, in terms of sheep, especially, um, yeah, it's not good at all. We'll return soon to find out about the production of raw-milk cheese at Mt Eliza Cheese. 1 Hello again. Katikati company Mt Eliza Cheese makes raw-milk cheese from locally sourced milk. Jill and Chris Whalley decided to specialise in traditional Anglo-European-style cheeses, inspired by farmhouse cheddar, Red Leicester and Stilton. Mt Eliza was conceived about 10 years ago. We were on holiday in South Wales, and we visited a small cheesemaker there, Llangloffan Cheese. Yeah, a very small operation, uh, very similar to Mt Eliza, and, uh, that was our inspiration, really. So we emigrated to NZ shortly after that ` uh, I'm English, but Jill's from NZ ` and, uh, we decided to set up Mt Eliza. About 18 months ago, we moved over to using the raw milk from the local farm. When we looked at the NZ market, we found that there were a lot of people making soft cheeses and the Gouda styles, but, uh, there weren't very many people doing the traditional English styles. So we started off with Cheshire, and then we started the Red Leicester, farmhouse cheddar and then our Stilton-style blue, with the Eliza Blue, and then recently our soft blue. We do a couple of local farmers' markets ` the Tauranga Market and the Katikati Produce Market and then also Tamahere once a month. Um, but this last couple of years, we've, uh, moved far more into delis, so a lot of our cheese now is, uh, distributed, you know, out through specialised delis. Making raw-milk cheese has really changed the dynamics of the business. It's improved our product. The demand has really gone through the roof. And the MPI and ourselves, we're both learning the process, trying to figure out exactly what is necessary. We have a lot of extra controls in place, but my background is industrial chemistry, so a lot of the process controls are sorta second nature to me, really. We have to sample every batch of milk and every batch of curd and every batch of cheese. We send that away for sampling for a whole raft of different tests. But there's an awful lot of process control that happens here in the factory, and that really is where the safety of raw-milk cheese is built in. It's what's happening on the farm and in our factory. The final product testing, really, is just a confirmation that what you're doing is working. Hard cheeses have been made from raw milk for centuries. They are intrinsically a safe product. Making cheese was a way of preserving milk over the winter. And, uh, the hard cheeses with the high acid and the level of salt and the low moisture, they're designed to be safe and they're designed to keep for a long time. One of the crucial aspects of making raw-milk cheese is to have a good supply of milk and to have a very good, close relationship with the farmer. So we've been very lucky in Carl. He's, um, been very happy to put the extra procedures in place to ensure that the quality of the milk that we're getting is absolutely top-notch. 50/50 sharemilking on family farm. Milking 340 dairy cows ` mixed breed from Friesian, a few crosses and Jersey ` on 117 effective hectares just 10 minutes south of Katikati in the Bay of Plenty. Chris and Jill approached us, oh, probably a bit over 12 months, 18 months ago now, and just, yeah, bit of a knock on the door, sort of thing, and, um, 'We're producing this cheese, and we're interested in, um, you know, a supply of raw milk.' And, uh, yeah, it sort of started from there. I didn't know a lot about it at all, because, you know, most of the stuff we supply, it's all pasteurised. I've been farming for a long time, but the raw milk thing is very new to us. So it's been quite a learning curve, the last 12 months. We do the same thing as we are doing, but just making sure everything's clean, checked properly. But it's good for the staff, you know, just in the hygiene, cow health, just recording and being a little bit extra cautious on everything, sort of thing. We pretty much know what day of the week he's coming. Certain feeds, silage we'll stop three days prior to his pick-up, sort of thing, and we just feed hay if we're feeding out. Um, but lots of little things like that. But, yeah, Chris keeps us informed on what we sort of, um` feed-wise and that. But basically we're in an all` pretty much all-grass system anyway, so not a lot sort of changes. We just sorta have to be careful where we spread our effluent, how we graze. Gotta have a 21-day stand-down period before the cows can be back on that pasture after spraying effluent. It's quite interesting knowing where our product's going and what Chris and Jill are turning our product into to make their product. Yeah, it's quite rewarding knowing what they're doing with it, the awards that they've just recently won, and to taste it and know where it's, sort of, come from, you know, from the cows and the paddock. It's` Yeah, it's very rewarding. We're making Red Leicester cheese this morning. So it's and old English recipe that we have. Dates back hundreds of years. It's a very smooth-textured cheese. It's a very slow make, is Red Leicester, so we let the acidity rise just very slowly and gradually, and the cheese is scalded a little bit. So it gives a very smooth texture but a nutty flavour. We use annatto, uh, to give it the colour. Again, that's very traditional in Red Leicester. It comes from a South American berry, from the achiote tree, and it's there mainly for the colour. We just warm the milk, um, to around, you know, mid-30s to make sure that the starter is working and doing that low scald. The heat is not actually killing any of the bacteria, so all the natural fauna in the milk, we're retaining all that, we're not destroying any of the enzymes. And that all comes through in the final product, so we end up with a much richer, much more complex cheese. All our cheeses come in here to mature after we've made them, and they're in here for anything from about sort of three months to a year before they're ready. So cheddars are ready from six months. Um, the Red Leicester's a little bit younger. They're ready from about four months or so. And then over here on the other side, these ones down here, they're very very traditional Mt Eliza Blue. They're made with raw milk as well. Those ones are ready from about` roughly about 75, 80 days they'll go out. The only ones that are pasteurised are these Blue Monkeys, and at the moment, the regulations say that we have to pasteurise those ones because they're fairly high moisture. Having had some success with the, um, take-up of the raw-milk cheese at the markets, we decided we'd enter the awards this year. Um, we entered three classes with two different cheeses, and we came back with three medals, so we were very happy. A gold and, um, two silvers. For more information on these and other stories we've covered, feel free to visit our website, which you can get to via tvnz.co.nz Or if you missed an episode, you can watch it on TVNZ ondemand, using the keyword Rural Delivery. Next week we hear about efforts being made in the search for consistent annual crop yields in avocado orchards. We meet Scott Newman, whose business is providing solutions to cleaning out those hard-to-reach spaces under woolsheds around the country. And we find out the secret to making a great pie, learned over three generations of pie makers at Maketu Pies in the Bay of Plenty. Thanks for stopping by. We hope you can join us again next time. Captions by Ashlee Scholefield. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016