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Globally there are two approaches to milk farming. There’s milk from grass/forage and there’s milk from anything else that you can persuade cows to eat.
I recently visited a couple of leading milk farms in South Africa which are firmly in the non-grass category.
Chris Stark and his son Robert farm 1,750 cows, 50km north of Capetown on sand dunes, not unlike Brittas Bay or Donald Trump’s golf course at Doonbeg. All feed is bought in. I repeat, everything the cows and replacements eat is purchased and carried into the farm, but sand for the cubicle beds is plentiful and free.
The figures from the Stark farm are mind-boggling: 1,750 cows averaging 45 litres per day (13,900l/cow/annum) deliver almost 29m litres per annum. This is the output of 76 Irish farmers, each with 75 cows averaging 5,000l/cow/annum. No wonder the Stark farmyard is like a high street with tractors, lorries and tankers collecting and delivering.
However, Chris Stark is as passionate about his cow unit as any dairy farmer anywhere. When I visited him in late 2015 he was also a very worried dairy farmer.
Price drop
“I have just been on the phone with my milk buyer fighting about price. Our South African milk price is being undermined by imports from Europe, especially Irish and Polish milk. In the last six months our milk price has dropped from 4.8 to 4.0 rand/litre (28.8c/l to 24c/l) and would have been worse were it not for the weakness of our currency (rand).
“All in, our milk is costing us 4.6 rand/l (27.6c/l) to produce, so that we are currently losing 0.6 rand/l (3.6c/l). Also, South Africa is going through its driest episode in 75 years, with rainfall running at 30% of normal.”
The Starks sell their milk to Parmalat, which is owned by the French company Lactalis. Normally, their milk is processed for long life product, but because of the current oversupply situation, lately their milk has gone for cheese manufacturing. They have signed a declaration not to use bovine somatropin.
Their milk solids are running at 3.1% protein and 3.41% fat. Chris Stark knows that this is not great for cheese, but it is a consequence of using US genetics to chase yield.
On the other hand, the Stark cows have a healthy shine off them, and have a low average somatic cell count of 160,000 cells/ml.
The fact that the cows average only 2.3 lactations in the herd does not seem to worry either Stark father or son. “Every time a cow calves can mean trouble, so we are quite happy to let cows milk on into 450- to 500-day calving intervals. We only start to consider AI 100 days post-calving and expect to use four or maybe five straws per calf born,” said Robert.
Cow weight is recorded daily and a computerised AfiTag system from Israel is used for heat detection and for sickness checks. CIDRs are used in cows not showing heat.
Sire choice for this 100% AI herd is a major consideration, with the semen salesmen having a big input. Chris has an interesting take on sexed semen, which he sees as facilitating global expansion and thus bad for existing dairy farmers.
A total of 60 people work on the Stark farm. The 1,750 cows are split into nine units. Milking starts at 4.00am, 11.30am and 6.30pm, taking three and a quarter hours through two 34-point parlours. With all cows housed on site, cow walking time is short and energy-efficient.
Killer cost
Feed is the killer cost. Roughages lucerne and wheat straw, supplemented by wet brewers grains, wet citrus and compound feed and other byproducts as they come available, are topped up with a 16% protein concentrate ration which is 50% maize and costs about €288/t.
Chris Stark likes the fact that the ration and cow nutrition is fully controllable. Cows are fed twice daily with a TMR through 24-cubic-metre feeder wagons of Israeli manufacture. Intakes are huge, with cows gobbling an average of over 30kg of DM/hd/day.
Cows are housed in sand-bedded cubicles which are topped up weekly and spray-disinfected three times a week. Feed passageways are scraped twice daily while cows are being milked.
Heifer calves are fed ad lib till five months and then geared towards calving at 24 months. Apart from milk price, Chris Stark sees manure disposal as his biggest headache. A separator splits the liquid from the solids and both are offered for sale. He would consider installing a biodigester, but sand in the manure is an issue.
A decade of herd expansion has stopped for the Starks at the 1,750 cows: further growth involves too much work for too little return, as both father and son said.
40,000 cattle die in South Africa drought
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