Managing Well in Wet Conditions

NSW dairy farmers have been faced with some incredibly challenging seasonal conditions over the last 2 years which has seen one in one-hundred-year floods, repeated floods and prolonged wet conditions on many coastal farms and now our inland farms as well. These conditions are not limited to NSW, most states on the eastern seaboard have been affected by the impact of la Nina. Apart from the immediate and devastating impacts of floods on dairy farms, the flooding in inland grain and hay growing regions is creating a future feed shortage for the industry.  

Neil Moss, consultant with Scibus highlights key things to focus on in times of flood, how to manage wet conditions well and strategies to deal with the coming shortage of spring hay supplies.

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Farming Forecaster

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Episode Transcript

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The information discussed in this podcast are for informative and educational purposes only and do not constitute advice. 

Transcript

The Business of Dairy 

Episode #19 Transcript – “Managing Well in Wet Conditions”

Sheena Carter: Welcomed to the Business of Dairy podcast, I'm your host, Sheena Carter, Development Officer with the New South Wales DPI dairy Team. New South Wales dairy farmers have been faced with some incredibly challenging seasonal conditions over the last two years, which have seen one in 100 year floods, repeated floods and prolonged wet conditions on many coastal farms and now our inland farms as well. These conditions are not limited to New South Wales – most states on the eastern seaboard have been affected by the impact of La Nina. 

Apart from the immediate and devastating impacts of floods on dairy farms, the flooding in inland grain and hay growing regions is creating a future feed shortage for the industry. This month I speak with returning guest Neil Moss, consultant with Scibus, who has had firsthand experience and helped support dairy farmers dealing with these conditions. 

Welcome back to the Business of Dairy podcast, Neil, it's great to have you with us again. 

Neil Moss: Well, thank you, Sheena. It's been a pretty wild ride through the dairy industry in the last 12 months. I can't say it's been easy for probably anyone in eastern Australia, you know, we've got some interesting opportunities, but we've got some really serious challenges still ahead of us. 

Sheena Carter: Yes, we do. There's still a lot of management decisions to be made on farms, which is relentless, but we need to keep doing it. So I guess it's been exactly 12 months since you and I last spoke. We did a podcast on managing high fertiliser prices, which was episode seven, and I'd encourage people to have a listen back to that because not a great deal has changed in that space. We're still at historically high levels in terms of fertiliser pricing. What are you seeing at the moment in terms of fertiliser pricing, Neil? 

Neil Moss: Yeah, look, it's a great question, Sheena. I guess there’s probably two things to touch on this point. Look, we're seeing a lot of variation. Our peak pricing, we've certainly moved off that from last year. We're operating in still an uncomfortable range, but it's probably $300 to $400 off the peak where it was last year. But I guess what we're encouraging our clients to do is really ring around a bit and don't be afraid to ring a little bit out of the area for urea pricing. I did a bit of a quick survey across some of my clients yesterday and we saw a range in pricing, pre GST pricing, from around $1200 to $1450 a tonne for urea, depending on where they were buying it. So, you know, if there's $100 to $200 to be saved from a phone call or two here and there and putting a little bit of pressure on your supplier, it's probably not a bad thing. 

I guess the other really critical issue and it’ll link in to some of the stuff I think we’ll talk about later, Sheena, it's probably just as important to keep the pressure on nitrogen use or good fertiliser use, depending on your strategy this year in your home grown feed base, because I think we've got some pretty significant challenges with accessing good quality feed from over the mountain this year, so if there's opportunities with moisture and fertility, in either late spring crop or summer crop, to do better we've improved fertility. We shouldn't be holding back this year because buying high quality forage is going to be a real challenge for us. 

Sheena Carter: Well and truly, and we certainly will discuss that a bit later on in the podcast. In my introduction I've described the conditions that dairy farmers have been faced with over the last couple of years and currently, we’ve got devastating floods, repeated floods and prolonged wet conditions. So you've been doing a lot to support farmers through these challenging times and I'd like to talk to you about this today in order to share with our listeners a few things. Firstly, what it is that you see that enables businesses to recover quickly following floods, and secondly, how they've been managing the challenging and very long wet periods we've seen over the last 12 months. And then thirdly, some of this nitrogen stuff. We'll talk about the coming feed shortage that we’ll be seeing as a result of the recent flooding, particularly in the inland cropping and hay growing regions of New South Wales and other eastern states, and how farmers who are reliant on these regions for their feed supplies might be able to plan around this?

Neil Moss: I guess if we go back to the first question, I don't think there's really been a business in the state that hasn't been impacted by either flooding or severe weather on-farm and I guess what we have across that spectrum of enterprises is just a huge gradation of impact. It’s anything from these farms that are in the path of some of these walls of water that have been completely decimated. Some of their recovery pathways are obviously going to be completely different to the other farms that have just got extremely wet, inundated with water, temporarily flooded or severe paddock water logging. 

I guess once the water subsides, or as the water’s subsiding, I guess there's probably half a dozen things that we think are really, really important for people to be focusing on. So I guess first and foremost is the stuff around the people and the people safety and just making sure everyone's all right. There's lots of mental trauma going on in this situation, but there's also a lot of physical danger in these situations as well, you know, with power and hooking generators up and all that sort of operational stuff, which I think, you know, people need to be really focused on at the front end is just keeping people well and safe. 

I guess, you know, when we talk about the principles of what allows farms to recover, it's actually going back to some of those fundamentals of what dairy cows need to do every day. So we have to get cows milked as quickly as possible after a severe event, be it fire or flood, and we have to be able to get them fed as quickly as possible. So the farms, I guess, that are less impacted, tend to be those that have got the capacity if they don't have power to milk cows. So I guess where we're heading is that we have to have generators on most farms, I think, as we're moving forward. So the ability to be able to milk, even if we can't get picked up, is critical because that keeps the milk flow through the udder, it provides a physiological stimulus to maintain lactation because ultimately, once we get through the crisis, if our cows have been turned down really low by not being milked, or much higher rates of mastitis, because again, we're not flushing the udder regularly and we can't keep the teat end clean, then we find that those cows just do not recover. And we know that when we do have these disasters, at the other end of them we will have feed generally coming in, or the systems will start to restore – six, eight, ten, twelve weeks time. The key to being profitable then, or doing better then, is to be able to maintain milk and lactation, and lactation momentum, I guess is what I’d call it, in the cows that we actually have. Because if they get turned down it's very, very hard to pull them back. And even if we have good feed in six, eight, ten, twelve weeks time, we can do a lot less with it. 

So on top of that, I think having systems that allow us to feed cows is absolutely crucial. So I guess we start to see a real divergence now in how farms perform as to whether or not they've got capacity to feed well in the dairy in traditional grazing based farms, or if they have good facilities for feeding cattle outside with forage and supplementation. And reality is, that we've seen a big divergence in farms that are highly pasture based in these flat impacted areas compared to those that have got partial mixed ration or total mixed ration capacity. And I guess we're getting to a point where if your herd has probably got a stocking rate of probably more than two, two and a half cows to the milking hectare, the reality is you're going to be feeding something at some time of the year that isn't pasture, and the further you creep that stocking rate out, the higher your exposure is to just normal hand feeding, but these events. 

So the farms that could continue to feed a mixed ration, or a partial mixed ration, or a forage supplement on a hard surface that could be preferably scraped of flood wash, those herds, yeah they drop production, but it might’ve been a 5% – 10% drop in production, during these times, some of them actually went up in production, compared to what they would’ve been otherwise following the flood, because they were feeding better forages than the low quality summer grasses they would’ve been grazing. But the flipside is that the production was maintained, done really well, and when they had grass it was very, very happy days and some outstanding margins were being achieved from those farms. So yes, we have to have feed. We have to be able to deliver the feed safely. And I guess as we're recovering and rebuilding structures, higher stocking rate farms we really do need to be thinking about moving away from feeding out on the ground, I guess, in a more progressive way. 

Sheena Carter: Well and truly. I think that feed wastage issue in general, but particularly in the flood situation when you're feeding out, really needs to be factored in. It can be 20% – 30% wastage at least, feeding out just in the paddock, which adds to the cost of your feed, and it's expensive enough in a lot of these situations anyway, and you want to be making sure that it's also quality feed. So yes, wastage is something that we really need to be able to minimise, and I guess as you're saying, it's those hard feed areas that really help people manage this well or better. 

Neil Moss: Sheena look, the feed wastage issues are profound. You know, I had a client I was talking to yesterday who basically had been feeding on the ground, is in the process of putting in a feed pad, they’ve moved up the stocking rate to over four cows to the hectare, predominantly dry land farm – you know, the numbers say we should be going down that pathway – but really, he's calculated that he probably used 30% to 40% of his purchased forage last year as mulch. You know, it's not sustainable in those situations. 

I think the other thing, that once we start moving into that flexible feeding system, it starts opening yourself to using a lot of other ingredients, and again, this is going to be particularly important in a year where we're hay poor or forage poor. It means that we can more constructively use some of these novel ingredients like cottonseed, you know, the various by-products that come out of milling, even things in severe drought like palm kernel meal become much more usable if we can mix those into another ration. So again, I think those are really critical things. 

The other things that I think are really, really important in that recovery phase is making sure that we're thinking about some of the key health areas. So the two places where we have found that the herds fall apart, are firstly with feet and lameness and the other is in mastitis and mastitis management. So cell count, as we saw last year on many farms, creeping up above 600, which is obviously not a great place, we saw some really good support from the milk companies in that space actually, which needs to be acknowledged this year, through some very difficult times. 

But when the cows are under stress, the milking has been interrupted, we’re in muddy environments, again, all of these things are highly linked. So again, if we’ve got these safer areas to feed, which can be cleaned or scraped – again, we saw a number of feed pads that had been put in which were just scrape areas rather than flood washable – they became very dangerous for the cattle because once they became saturated you couldn't actually clean them off properly and they became high risk zones for mastitis. So I think in constructing these facilities, it's really important to really think about not just how they operate in the dry, but how they operate in the wet as well. So look, I think all those are important, Sheena.

Another couple of big issues, I guess, that really were interesting to see, is where people had their businesses travelling beforehand with respect to things like reproductive performance and productivity prior disaster. So if the herds had their reproductive performance under control, the herds are relatively fresh, we weren't milking lots and lots of stale cows because the reproduction wasn't being well-managed, when we go into a hand feeding situation, that really feeds us into a situation where the cows we’re feeding are at the more productive stage of their lactation, their feed conversion efficiency is vastly superior, so if you're buying a 50 cent piece of feed on 70 cent milk or 65 cent milk, or whatever the price is, we're getting 1.2 or 1.3 litres per kilo of that feed unit rather than less than a litre per kilo of feed being purchased. And that's what sinks businesses in drought. That's what sinks businesses in any disaster recovery where they have to move into a high purchase feed model. And that's just a reality – that we do have to do that in most of our businesses. So the feed conversion efficiency drivers need to be focused and front of mind at all times in operating business because they become critically important in times of stress. 

The other interesting one that we saw, were issues around young stock and young stock planning, because while we're very focused on the milking herds at this time, we can see big problems occurring with the feeding and the ongoing feeding and maintenance of young stock during these times, and we know that that's effectively a bottomless pit with respect to costs. We're not making any money in the short term from feeding young stock, but we have to do it otherwise they're not going to be available for us when we need them to come into the dairy. 

Having good young stock plans is actually really, really important and one of the things we've seen, and we saw this a number of times going back to the drought, is that there are a lot of farms that accumulated vast numbers of heifers without a real plan as to what to actually do with them. You know, no one had sat down and said, well you know, I’m milking 300 cows, I’ve got a replacement rate of 33% per year or 25% of the year, therefor I need to be retaining 100 or 120 each year to push through the system, but they'd have lots, lots more than that sitting behind them without actually a plan to manage them and actually a direction of what they're going to do with surplus. 

So understanding and planning surplus early, and what you actually need with respect to heifer replacements is really, really important in this space because it means that if a business comes into stress, we're not carrying too many animals or we make decisions early in that space with respect to offloading or de-stocking. And I guess this is going to be one of the challenges we see moving forward with a lot more people wanting to retain male calves in their systems, which can be done very, very well if people are adequately resourced, but all of a sudden we’re in a feed poor situation for whatever reason, and we've got a heap of steers floating around, you know, people need to have really clear plans as to how they manage those bull calves, or those steer calves if they're going to retain them when the system comes under feed stress for whatever reason. 

Sheena Carter: You've touched on a lot of points there, Neil, and I guess to me, the key messages are around getting through these flood events successfully, for want of a better word. 1; you’ve people management, as you said, making sure the cows are fed and milked. So make sure you've got that generator on hand – we've been through enough disasters in the last five years for people to realise the importance of generators, I think. Prioritise your herd health with your lameness and mastitis issues and to be set up to manage these conditions well. You need to be on top of your business constantly – it's not something you can pick up afterwards. So, that good reproductive performance and management is key in many, many ways – that is very key, I think, to successful herd production and profitability and performance, not just purely feed conversion efficiency. It's a big thing that I think can be a bit insidious in some businesses where it isn't well managed. And also your young stock – keeping on top of them and keeping your numbers where you need to be. Don't get lazy and blow out in terms of replacement numbers just because it's nice to have. 

Neil Moss: I think that's right, Sheena. And look, one other thing, just quickly to mention is keep your networks open. The businesses and the people that I saw do better were the people that had good communication networks. They were talking to their peers; they had good advisor networks, be they paid or otherwise; they were communicating; they were planning; they were resetting. You know, having those open networks of communication with all your networks, your suppliers, and just keep walking. You can't underestimate the importance of networks in these situations. 

Sheena Carter: That's probably actually number one, Neil, I'd say, and getting a sense that you're not on your own. Everyone else is dealing with very similar situations to what you are so you can certainly lean on each other and learn from each other. 

We'd better move along a little bit. So that's the flood, the immediate impact situations. But we've had an incredible period of not only floods but prolonged wet weather, months and months of above average rainfall across most of the eastern seaboard. It's not so visible, it doesn't get the media attention, but it certainly has a major impact on our dairy businesses, you know, inability to graze paddocks, delayed sowing, inability to conserve fodder, and still the animal health issues. How have you seen farmers dealing with these conditions recently well?

Neil Moss: I guess one of the first things that we often see is there's a bit of a mad panic to try and get paddocks planted and seed in, all that sort of stuff. And I've seen anything from really good success from doing that to woeful failure. And I guess again, in our coastal areas there’s been a lot of people work very hard to get seed on helicopters and all sorts of things in that immediate response because paddocks weren't trafficable and that worked reasonably well in a limited number of situations and particularly where, you know, we had reasonably short grass or no grass to start with, but when people were doing that into longer, deeper grass and there was no ability to get in and control the thatch and the residual pasture, it was a bit of a failure in many, many cases. 

I guess one of the things that we've reflected on with that is we're probably better off, if you can't do it right don’t even bother starting because you’re just going to end up in a very disappointed and messy state. If we can try, and it's very hard if it just keeps raining and raining and raining – so in some situations this didn't apply – but in a number of areas people went in in a mad panic, put the seed on, left the kikuyu eight inches long and came back five or six weeks later and there was nothing there. Had we waited a little longer till we could get on and do the kikuyu control in conjunction – and that was possible six to eight, or even ten weeks later, we'd have had a much better outcome. So I guess drawing breath is really, really important because there's a lot of cost that goes into it. Getting these paddocks prepared, I guess, making sure that when we do go on that we can do the job as well as we possibly can is really, really important, Sheena. And again, there were some situations that didn't apply because it just kept raining and we would’ve never got on and they just didn’t sow. So I guess the next thing is to say, well, if we feel like we're in that position we need to be starting to make pretty quick provisions to finding feed from elsewhere. If we haven't got our feed in by May or June, we know we've got a fairly significant forage gap coming for probably 8 to 14 weeks at best. So I guess some very early feed budgeting is really, really important in this space. And just working with either your own skills base or with a nutritionist or another advisor to say, well look, let's put some presumptive rations up, okay, what we can deliver and feed, but let's get the supply of those ingredients budgeted in, worked in, secured and procured so we can at least have a bit of a plan. And it's a bit like, you know, washing the car. The worst thing that happens is that it rains the next day and you're a bit over prepared. 

So I think those preparations early, when we know that… because we can sort of predict it – if we can sow in March, we’ve got feed in six weeks; if we sow in April, it's probably eight weeks; if it's May, it's nine; if we get out to June or July, it might be ten weeks that we get feed. So we can predict that pretty well in most situations. But being ahead of the curve, if you don't have on-farm inventory where procurement and supply is critical, once people have got stuff up and growing, pushing it as hard as you can when you can, it's going to be really, really important, particularly for trying to build a bit of inventory. 

So again, not being afraid to fertilise. We’ve found a lot of the soils that were heavily waterlogged had had a lot of nitrogen depletion and in that situation we’ve had to come back in with much higher rates of nitrogen than normal to get them up to speed. Also not forgetting the other nutrients in the pie in that situation. The next things that are really, really important is that if the surplus is there, be prepared and be networked, and either with your own equipment that's functional and working, or with contractors, if available, to get it off and get it worked in really, really quickly. And I guess, this is the unfortunate situation where we've got meetings that we’re meant to be at, but sometimes we’ve got to say no and actually keep on the silage because that's the job that we have to get done at the time and get it in when you can because the window is really, really narrow between the rain events. The window has also been pretty narrow now on the coast with that actual moisture in the soil running off or running out. 

Sheena Carter: Yeah, it's really something that I think has amped up over the last few years, hasn't it? It is literally feast or famine and you've got to be ready to move quickly when you see, whatever it is, the first signs of… things look like they're improving, let's capitalise on this because it might not last for very long. 

Neil Moss: And it's really difficult, Sheena, when things are going a bit better it's often a chance to sit back and relax because you're out of the trenches, but the problem is if we do that we're minutes away from whatever's next and the opportunities are so easy to miss. So being on top of just mundane things, like repairs and maintenance of machinery, and I guess the thing we're starting to see now, Sheena, is if we look at any of the pasture monitoring of the soil moisture at the moment, we're really seeing that that’s depleted incredibly rapidly and a lot of our farms have been caught without functional irrigation at the moment. 

Sheena Carter: Yeah, and I’ll just mention there that the Local Land Services, particularly here in the Hunter and South East Land Services in New South Wales have a tool called the Farming Forecaster tool, which is a web based resource which is really good. They've got a network of soil probes around the region on farms. You can see what the moisture levels are doing through the soil profile and in relation to rainfall events as well. So it gives you a bit of an indication as to what's actually happening in the paddock. 

I think sometimes people use a bit of gut sense and in a lot of people's minds at the moment would be, we've had a lot of rain, we're sick of the rain, but actually if you look at a couple of the probes, one in particular around Taree on Jones Island, it is really, really drying out. You know, there hasn't been a rain event there in a week or so, but it is really starting to dry out, so people need to be factoring this in in their management decisions, Neil. 

Neil Moss: Totally. I was looking at some Farm Forecaster information up around Gloucester the other day and the moisture in the top 10 to 20 centimetres had dropped down to 14% of where they would have liked it to have been. It's easy to say we've been caught napping but this happens and if you've got a good body of growing feed it just pumps the ground dry very, very quickly. So people are trying to plant summer crops now, and these are being sown, but we actually don't have functional irrigation to get them watered up and out of the ground, even though the moisture is down deeper in the profile, we can’t actually get those plants germinated a lot of the time to go down and find that moisture. 

Sheena Carter: Yes. What are some other good… I mean, I think the Farming Forecaster tool is really handy and we’ll put a link in the show notes for people to access that, but what are other sorts of data that farmers have that they should be making use of?

Neil Moss: It's a great question, Sheena, because we are collecting lots of data on a lot of farms now and one of the things that we can use during stress periods is actually just people's herd recording – very, very actively. There's some tremendous information there that allows us to make good objective decisions about what we do with cows in times of stress. So when we've had severe drought, recovery of flood, 100% hand feeding, you know, we can really look into that data, not just to screen things like high cell count cows that we may want to take management decisions with, but we can plot out on some of the charts that come out of that. Things like the average milk production per cow per day. We can look at the milk solids per cow per day, if we look into some of those charts. We can look then at any particular point in time of the lactation curve, and we can isolate from that the low productivity cows within the population. Those low productivity cows, with respect to their milk solids per cow per day, they can be the first ones that we may consider potentially for early drying off, if we're going to retain them, but even if they're early in lactation and they're low productivity cows, they can be candidates for culling as well, and selective culling and removal from the herd. We've had very, very good cull prices which has supported a lot of the decision making over the last couple of years. 

So sometimes if your herd average production is 1.8 kilos of milk solids a cow a day, and you’ve got fresher cows that are sitting at 1.1, 1.2, and there's nothing wrong with them and they're not sick, they’re probably never going to be any good, you know, the odd one might surprise you in a subsequent lactation, but the reality is those animals are going to be operating at a low level of efficiency right across the business. So they are real candidates to use that data to objectively thin down the herd to an area where the animals that we're feeding are optimising that feed resource that were providing to them. 

Sheena Carter: Yep, I think that's possibly an underutilised resource, herd recording, in terms of how people utilise it and I think that that is certainly valuable. 

Neil Moss: Even the farms that don't have the group herd recording that are starting to increasingly have on-farm milk volume recording. You've got to be careful just with milk volume on its own because it doesn't tell you the full picture with respect to solids production, but it can still be indicative, so it’s useful. And I guess if we're seeing individual cows that are producing poorly, we can use that also as a bit of a red flag for health and are we getting our transitions right? Are there other underlying problems? 

Sheena Carter: Yes, you start to lift the rock and you can dig down into all sorts of areas of herd management that will identify areas where you can address to improve performance in the herd, so it's powerful, powerful tool. 

Look, we're running out of time, Neil, but we really must speak about the coming feed shortage. So we've had, unfortunately, incredible flooding in our inland hay and grain growing areas of New South Wales and Victoria and other parts of the eastern seaboard, which, you know, we're coming into the summer, which is, you know, these events are always bad in their timing, these regions that are being flooded, we have, you know, a percentage of our New South Wales industry that relies on those regions for their hay supply, so we're looking down the barrel of a feed shortage for many businesses. Can we just have a bit of a chat about how people need to be managing and thinking about this in their business right now to set themselves up well for the coming period? 

Neil Moss: Look our read, and this won’t be news to most people, is that the quality spring hay situation is dire. There's minimal that's going to be made. There'll be bits and pieces from some of the fringes and various other, Hunter might make a bit of late spring hay. But if you're highly reliant on cereal or vetch hays as part of your total feed budget it's really problematic at the moment. The grain situation, I guess I'm a little less concerned about. I think we've got a lot more grain out there than people realise. 

There's a lot of slopes country in between the river valleys and I was out in the Dubbo region the other day, and while there's a bit of issue on the river itself, you go 500 metres off the river and there's grain as far as the eye can see heading to the north towards Gilgandra and the like, and that'll be repeated in a lot of areas. But again, those direct river valleys and those flood plains, absolutely devastating. But I think there'll be grain. I don't think we need to be too concerned about that, but we need something to wrap the grain in. So I guess where people need to be thinking is, if we come back onto our own enterprises, some review of your summer cropping strategy, if it's not too late, is worthwhile. 

We know there's a risk with summer cropping, and we've seen that with both, flood and with things like maize, they're also dealing increasingly with things like fall armyworm being a real player and we've seen some of it already around Nowra, causing damage to crops, which is relatively early. But I think revising that cropping, maybe doing a little bit more than you thought you might be doing otherwise, if you can, but understanding that there is risk at the other end of that in getting it off. So I guess we've moved a lot of people to short season varieties, bigger areas of them, getting them in faster but hopefully getting them off earlier, you know, a slightly lower yield with our maizes but there’s a bit of strategy there and then we’re into our winter feed a bit quicker at the other end. 

So thinking about, you know, can we do more on our home blocks. If we get the right season, do we push our grass resource harder over the summer and be happy to almost think about things like kikuyu as a fodder crop, not just as a grazing pasture, because we know it's often under-utilised for its potential. It can be fertilised a bit harder and if we think about it as a crop rather than just a pasture, we can actually make some very acceptable forage in that space. Having the flexibility to think about things other than hay, this starts becoming really, really important. Well-designed diets – we don't need ten or twelve kilos of hay in them. We can use other things like mill run, cottonseed, some of the other by-products to dilute our reliance on hay. But again, that requires appropriate infrastructure on farm. 

Thinking about what might be available further into the summer. I do think we'll see some recovery in things like lucerne over the summer. There'll be other forage crops potentially grown because there is a lot of water and some of the dry land areas will still be productive, as will some of these irrigation areas once the water comes through. But again, feed budgeting is really, really important. We're sitting down saying, okay, we need 500, 600 tonne, let’s start getting our hand on some of it. Let's have a look at some of the fodder sale sites like Feed Central, just as an example, and just see what's out there, understand what it is you're looking for. It becomes again, increasingly important that we go over some of those buying skills that we needed to have when we were more reliant on hays, that we don't buy by the bale, we buy by the tonne of dry matter, we start looking at quality. We understand that, lucerne hay for example, has got a very narrow window of when it's really, really good to when it's a little bit more fibrous and it's really, really bad. So getting your head back around some of those skills is really, really important because if you haven't been able to procure your vetch or your cereal hay we might need to look at where these other hays fit in. 

And I guess looking at price, it's probably important to recalibrate what's likely to be a higher price back with what's a more favourable price, as well. Where if we're buying $450 a tonne or $500 a tonne lucerne hay to 50 cent milk, that would be ridiculously marginal. If we're paying for $450 to $500 for lucerne hay for 75 or 80 cent milk, or even higher than that as we move into summer, you know, some of those margins can be quite acceptable. So just having a reality check on that gap between that feed price and milk price is really, really important. And recalibrating just how we think about that feed price is really, really important. 

Sheena Carter: Yeah, it's always a matter of balance and realising where you are in the big picture. Yes, it might be high priced feed based on historical values, but we do have strong milk prices at the moment. So while you might like a larger margin, the reality is if you can't grow enough of your own feed and you are reliant on that other feed source, well, do your numbers and maybe it's not as bad as what you might think. And I think you've mentioned some good things about purchasing feed. And I think purchasing feed on quality and understanding what it is that you're feeding if you can get it. But I guess can we just have a bit of a… and coming full circle, if we've got the right conditions, we've got good soil moisture, we've got great temperatures, it's still that opportunity on-farm to push your grass production, where we still have got high nitrogen prices, but when we do the numbers I think it's probably still beneficial to be applying that nitrogen and getting that high response rate and conserving that excess feed where you can, Neil. 

Neil Moss: Totally, Sheena. And just again, focusing on detail, you know, not just ripping seed in without controlling the grass and weeds around it. Do it right, slow it down, get it right. You're spending money on seed and sowing, spray the rubbish grass out the side because if the moisture has become a bit marginal, it’s just going to eat all that moisture and fertility and not grow the crop you're actually going to grow. The attention to detail on the cropping stuff is really, really important and quite often what we see is the little last bit of detail failing that can just sink or swim some of these crops as they go in. So, slow it down, get it right, do it once. 

Sheena Carter: Yep, it's attention to detail. The one-percenters that make the difference, you know, add up ten one-percenters and you've got quite a bit of a difference in the outcome that you might’ve had otherwise. 

I think that's been great discussion, Neil, and in the interest of time we better wrap it up there. It's been wonderful to have your insight and perspective around how you've seen farms deal well with really challenging flood conditions. And there are a lot of farmers that have been in that situation, and the majority of our farmers in New South Wales have been dealing with the prolonged wet conditions and had to manage those as well. So we've had some good tips around how to manage those and a lot of it is around running those efficient businesses and whether it's pasture production, cropping production, herd management is central to a lot of it. Make sure you're managing your herd well, feeding them well, milking them well and getting their reproductive performance under control. So, thank you, Neil. Any final words before we sign off? 

Neil Moss: Oh look, Sheena, again, it has been extraordinarily challenging and we can't underestimate the impact of this on people. I think as we go into Christmas, the people listening to this, I think it's really important that we keep the focus on each other and our dairy community and our families. And if we do that, it's not going to fix everything, but it makes it a lot better. 

Sheena Carter: Yeah thanks, Neil. And I think the dairy community is a strong and a really good community, and it is well networked and there’s wonderful people in there, so yes, keep in touch with each other. Thanks very much, Neil. 

Neil Moss: Thanks, Sheena. 

Sheena Carter: Thank you for listening to this month's The Business of Dairy Podcast, produced by the New South Wales DPI Dairy Business Advisory Unit. This series is also brought to you with funding and support from the Hunter Local Land Services. The show notes for this episode include a link to the Farming Forecaster website. This tool gives you real time data on soil moisture levels, soil temperature and local weather data which can assist you in making decisions on things such as irrigation scheduling and nitrogen application. The information comes from a network of probes in the Hunter and South East Local Land Service regions and also Tasmania and Western Australia. It is a resource that is supported by many organisations with funding through the National Landcare Program. We'd love you to share this podcast with your networks and feel free to send any feedback or suggestions for future episodes to thebusinessofdairy@gmail.com