The sun is out shining with a cool front coming up from the south to hit at the weekend with a few more showers.

The season can’t decide if it really wants to be autumn yet with temperatures still in the early 20s and only just moving into the cooler mornings. We had 300mm (13in) of rain since the end of February, which hasn’t been seen previously in this area for a long time.

Many soils are already saturated from the last cyclone. This cyclone also led to the removal of around 7,000 stock on the eastern side of the North Island to drier grounds.

Many farms around the Waikato region will have to re-sow parts of paddocks as the grass has rotted away.

My farm wasn’t hugely effected as there has been a large focus on drainage due to the farm being very wet when it was purchased 20 years ago.

Recent cleaning of drains that run on the boundary meant when the massive downpours hit it had nowhere to go once it met the boundary drain. The owners of this farm have another property down the road which had major silt damage at one end of the farm.

Spring weather was abnormal with it being wet for a long time, leading to a big impact on conception rates. Lower energy in the grass and no sun created a dip in production not only on this farm but also on district averages.

Condition

As it is coming to the end of the season and calving is due to start on 10 July, there is a focus to increase condition on cows and to increase the focus on second calvers as they have further impact throughout the season if they start lower at calving.

The cows are reducing in yield but half of the herd were dried off this week and the rest will be dried off by the first week of May.

With production ending at 1,285kg milk solids (MS)/ha on a system-one farm (system one means no purchased inputs except for nitrogen), I have just introduced silage into the cows’ diet this week.

At a likely payout of $6/kg (26.3c/l), there is a sufficient margin to encourage farmers to continue milking cows in the future. The business needs a $4.55/kg (20c/l) payout in order to cover all costs including debt servicing, drawings being a system one farm setup.

Being a contract milker. my pay is fixed per kg of MS, so I’m currently very happy to be in this position and watching how the price is changing.