Grassland systems: Making it work in America’s midwest
ONLY about 1% of America’s milk is produced from grass. Farmers and investors from Ireland and New Zealand are trying to change that.
To see how they are getting on, I chose Missouri in the American Midwest for my study tour, after receiving a travel bursary from the Farm Apprenticeship Board.
I travelled from Ireland to Chicago last October and onto a 10-day tour of dairy farms in Missouri.
Near the city of Carthage, I spent two days with Irish men Niall Murphy and Gary Nolan, who are 50/50 share milkers with Grasslands, a New Zealand group, of investors in grass farms in Missouri. Niall is from Co Cork, and Gary is from Co Westmeath.
Grasslands have 12 dairy farms and four drystock farms. They had only five farms back in 2009. Three of their farms are share milked.
Gary gave me an excellent insight into their business in America, especially the costs of developing a dairy here — $6,000 per acre.
There’s $2,000 to buy land, $2,000 to develop it and install milking facilities and $2,000 for stock.
The cows managed by Niall and Gary were producing 330kg of milk solids, representing 83% of their body weight, one of the measures of efficiency used in Missouri and New Zealand to tell which cows leave more cash in the farmer’s pocket. Their 1100kg of milk solids per hectare also reflects the efficiency of these cows, which have a high percentage of Jersey blood.
Gary and Niall had a very good spring, feeding only 175kg of meal per cow from February to May. But when I visited in October, cows were grazing turnips by day and grass at night, supplemented in their paddocks with maize and grass silage by night. This autumn diet was necessary due to the slow recovery of grass from the severe summer drought in the US.
The 4.5 tonnes of dry matter intake per cow in 2012 is made up of 700kg of grain, 700kg of maize, 400kg of silage cut as surplus earlier this year, and the remainder is grazed grass. It’s a 62% grass diet; going forward, the grazed grass target is 70%.
Gary and Niall have looked at what’s the best stocking rate for their farms. They put down on paper the highest possible stocking rate, then the lowest, and decided half way between was their optimum stocking rate, at 3.25 cows per hectare.
Animal health costs them $35 a cow, including young stock.
Empty rates on Grasslands’ 12 dairy farms for 2012 were running at 9% to 14%.
Bull calves were worth $25 in 2009, and $75 in 2012 (the US cattle herd has steadily declined for years, and is at a 60-year low).
Labour availability is very good in Missouri, mostly through Latin American immigrants. There, wages work on a three-tier wage scale, depending on experience.
Gary and Niall’s focus is on training their staff up to a management level, because their business is growing.
In the US, there’s free market milk production — no milk quotas.
Nor is there annual disease testing. It’s necessary only when trading stock between states — so a strict animal ID system is not required either.
Fly control is a must in Missouri, to avoid heifers losing quarters from a young age. So fly tags are used from their first summer onwards, and cows are put through an insecticide spray mist once a week when exiting the milking parlour.
I visited the university farm in Missouri. Here they have a herd of 82 crossbred cows on a grass-based system. They are comparing ryegrass against fescues in a grass varieties research trial.
In Missouri, fescues are not very palatable for cows, but are better in a drought. Ryegrass is more palatable, and does well in a wet summer. French grass varieties are working well in the Missouri summer, because they have a higher heat tolerance. Over a 12-month period, both ryegrass and fescues have been growing the same tonnage — 10-11 tonnes on average of fresh grass.
Last year was not a great year for grass-based dairy farms in Missouri, because of the worst US drought since the 1950s.
But high milk prices helped — the equivalent of €0.35 per litre of milk. And annual average milk production costs on the two farms I visited were estimated at 22c per litre.
Only 1% of America’s milk is produced off grass.
From what I saw in Missouri (which has only 92,000 dairy cows), American grass-based dairying is only in its infancy, they have a lot of challenges.
Grass farming is not the US norm, confined systems are most popular.
Missouri has huge climatic extremes, from droughts in summer to freezing cold in winter. This challenges grass survival and feed supply.
But Niall Murphy and Gary Nolan are making an excellent job of trying to replicate a North Island, New Zealand dairy farm in Missouri.
*Linda O’Neill, from Castletownbere, Co Cork, worked in New Zealand’s dairy sector qualifying as a dairy herd manager through Clonakilty Agricultural College and the Farm Apprenticeship Board. She managed the Mount Melleray Abbey dairy farm at Cappoquin, for six years, converting a winter milk herd to a low cost spring calving grass based herd. Now, she works for LIC Ireland as a dairy breeding advisor, covering the South East and the Midlands. LIC Ireland works in partnership with Eurogene AI Services.
