The Economics of Silage Making

Silage is used to varying degrees and in different ways on NSW and Australian dairy farms, depending on the type of feeding system the farm has. It can be an important component of your herd’s diet and given that producing it comes with additional costs compared to directly grazed pasture, it is important to make sure you do it well to make it economical.

My guest this month is Neil Griffiths, a well-known agronomist who worked for many years with the NSW Dept of Primary Industries as a Pasture Production Technical Specialist and has been heavily involved with the development and delivery of the nationally recognised TopFodder program which aims to develop your skills in successful silage making, storing and feeding. In this episode we discuss some of the key areas that drive profitable silage making.

Useful resources related to this podcast:

Register for Hunter Local Land Services 3 day TopFodder workshop with Neil Griffiths (starts 29/05/2023)

Wrapping Your Own Silage: The Hidden Costs of Owning and Operating Machinery (extensionAus article by Sam Henty includes worksheet and example)

NSW DPI Guide to Machinery Costs and Contract Rates (PrimeFact 2009)

Dairy Australia - Making Silage

This podcast is an initiative of the NSW DPI Dairy Business Advisory Unit

It is brought to you in partnership the Hunter Local Land Services

Please share this podcast with your fellow farmers and colleagues and feel free to contact us with suggestions or comments via this email address thebusinessofdairy@gmail.com

Further NSW DPI Dairy channels to follow and subscribe to include:

NSW DPI Dairy Facebook page

DPI Intensive Livestock Twitter feed

NSW DPI Dairy Newsletter

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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 #24 Transcript – “The Economics of Silage Making”

Sheena Carter: Welcome to the Business of Dairy Podcast. I'm Sheena Carter, Development Officer with the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries Dairy Team. Silage is used to varying degrees and in different ways on New South Wales and Australian dairy farms. Depending on the type of feeding system the farm has, it can be an important component of your herd's diet and given that producing it comes with additional costs compared to directly grazed pasture, it is important to make sure you do it well to make it economical. My guest this month is Neil Griffiths, a well-known agronomist who worked for many years with the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries as a pasture production technical specialist and has been heavily involved with the development and delivery of the nationally recognised TopFodder program, a joint initiative of Dairy Australia and New South Wales DPI. TopFodder aims to develop your skills in successful silage making, storing and feeding. In this episode, Neil and I discussed some of the key areas that drive profitable silage making. 

Welcome to the Business of Dairy Podcast, Neil, it is a great pleasure to have you as our guest this month. You and I have worked together in the dim distant past, so it's lovely to have you talking all things silage with me today. 

Neil Griffiths: Hello Sheena. Yeah, it's great to catch up and it's not that long ago, fair go. 

Sheena Carter: Well, yes, it's all relative. Look, I think silage is… it's an interesting topic and it's interesting how it fits into farming systems within New South Wales, and Australia more broadly, and there's lots that we can talk about around silage and silage making and doing it well, but I guess we're going to try and focus on some of the economic aspects of silage making today. So just broadly, I think depending on the farm system that we're operating; so you know, we've got predominantly pasture based systems where the cows – the bulk of their diet is pasture and then they're getting a bit of concentrate in the dairy; then we move through to our partial mixed ration systems, or PMR systems and hybrid systems, where we see slightly less pasture in the diet and other feed sources being brought in; and then we've got our total mixed ration systems where we've got, essentially, zero grazing for the milking herd predominantly, and all feed is being grown or purchased and brought to the milking herd. So I'm just wondering, Neil, can you describe how you see silage fitting into these different feeding systems in New South Wales and more broadly Australia? 

Neil Griffiths: Yeah look, I think the important thing is the tool and as you said, there's so many different farming systems. Every place is unique in its own way, so it's really a challenge to make sure that the silage is going to fit on that farm, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes there are better options out there. But I guess broadly, the big advantages of silage, if you're in a pasture based grazing farm, then for a lot of people, you know, one of the main reasons for making silage is as a pasture management tool – to be able to manage those surpluses. To be able to fill the short-term deficits with something that can just be slotted straight into the feed program without upsetting rumens and all that sort of thing. 

So, for most people, it's grazing management. It's fill those short term, be it winter or summer feed gaps, where every year we know we're going to be short of feed in July, so plug it in there. Interestingly, one of the things that's happened along those lines is that people are using their silage earlier. What we used to find was that they'd start feeding silage late in the winter – it'd be July/August. The place was bare, grazed out – we're completely short of feed – we've saved our silage till we're desperate, then we start feeding it and they're feeding silage through till October or whenever they'd recover. 

What we see now is that more people are coming in when they start planting their rye grass in the autumn. They start feeding the silage early so they can take the pressure off the pastures, get the pastures operating well, and then by the end of June they've got more pasture than they can use and they've stopped feeding their silage and usually have fed less silage and got a better result out of it. So that's happened over the last decade or so, particularly, maybe even a bit longer than that, but it's a bit of difference in the way it's being used on those grazing farms. 

Then, as you say, with places that are trying to get bigger production, more reliant on crops, whether that's home grown or purchased, then we're getting more into the larger scale pit silage type situation often, although not always. You know, we have big farms that make a lot of bales and we have small farms that use pits. So there's variation all across the board. 

Then the other way that's, I guess particularly the last few years has really highlighted, is that long term feed security where people want to be, I guess, independent, not reliant so much on the market. So whether it's the floods more recently, or the drought before that, and who knows what's happening next. So we've got the pasture management, we've got short term shortages and then we've got that longer term emergency, sort of, ration, which I guess for some people they think that's a little bit different. They say, oh it’s a drought, the feed requirements are maybe different to our short-term feed shortage, but in reality every time we do the numbers it comes out that the better the quality of feed, the more profitable the whole exercise is going to be. It costs you no more to make good silage as it does to make poor silage. But the returns and the production from that silage is going to vary enormously.

Sheena Carter: Yeah, and I guess that's probably going to be the crux of a lot of our conversation today. And I think you've mentioned two key events that we've seen occur numerous times in probably the last 5 or 6 years, and drought and flood, and I think exposure to some extraordinarily high purchased feed prices has really, you know, it's been a struggle for a lot of businesses when they haven't had that feed there, whether that's as a result of drought or flood, and I think also, sometimes it's a bit challenging and situational in that, you know, when we had the drought, it was a prolonged drought and a widespread drought, so we ended up in a situation where, A, feed was expensive, but B, that quality wasn't necessarily what you might prefer on a dairy farm for your milking herd. So yeah, it is really a tool, isn't it? If you've got that ability to grow enough of your own to manage both the feed gap throughout the year, just normal feed gaps with sowing and season, and then those extreme weather events. When we're looking at our partial mixed ration systems and our total mixed ration systems, we start to see a bit more of a shift, don't we, in terms of what people are actually growing and turning into silage? 

Neil Griffiths: Yeah, and I guess that again varies depending on where you are, and the starting point is always that you grow what you can grow best in your area. From a silage perspective, and in a lot of areas now maize is the standout, big yields, high quality, expensive to grow per hectare, but very competitive on a per tonne basis if you get everything working properly. So for most serious silage producers with a TMR type system, they'll probably have maize in there somewhere. But depending on where you are, there are some very good alternatives with, potentially, grain sorghum in some areas, winter cereals in some areas, so there are alternatives there and basically you grow what will grow best for you on your place. 

Sheena Carter: Yeah, and I guess that contrast within New South Wales, we see the central inland and western… more cropping in those regions compared to what we see in the coastal regions of New South Wales. Not to say that we don't see maize and sorghum and other crops like that grown on the coastal region, but it's predominantly in that inland region. I guess look, when we're talking about the economics of making silage, and a lot of what we're discussing is going to transfer across to hay as well, but, you know, we've got costs. Obviously, we've got the pasture and crop growing costs, then we've got harvesting and storage costs and then the feed out costs, depending on how you're storing it and how you're feeding it out, you're going to have different expenses there, you know, you might have machinery requirements, labour requirements and some sort of feeding structure to feed out this silage or hay. But, we've already alluded to it before, there's a couple of very important drivers in doing silage well and economically, predominantly it's quality, as you've said, and to a degree wastage and losses as well. Can you expand a bit on this quality issue, Neil, and how this drives the economics of the good silage production? 

Neil Griffiths: Let's start at the beginning with what quality we want and we'll say, particularly from a pasture situation, we want the best quality we can. We're always aiming for what you'd put the cows on to graze. So from a silage perspective, not that different, although sometimes we will deliberately let a paddock bulk up a little bit more before we cut for hay or silage, just for the practicalities of being able to handle with machinery and so forth. If we can't bulk it up a little bit, then we probably haven't got a genuine surplus to be conserving anyway. Step one – make sure it's a surplus. How we think of that cost-wise, I guess I've got into a few arguments with the various accountants and economists around the place, but certainly the approach that I would usually take is if we're doing it largely as a pasture management tool to manage a genuine surplus, then we've already incurred most of the growing costs – the seed, most of the fertiliser, irrigation. So I don't tend to allocate that across to my silage. What I will put in will be if I've deliberately gone and, say, top dressed with urea before locking the paddock up, that's a silage cost. Obviously, all of my harvesting costs and so forth, I’ll cost in as my silage costs, although at times you can almost discount some of that as well. If you were going to have to go through and slash or mulch a paddock because it was old and rank and you've avoided that cost because you made it into silage, then how far do you go? Where we don't have any debate is for a crop. All costs go into your silage. So if it's a maize crop, a winter cereal or something, then obviously all of your growing costs go straight into your silage. Then we can go through all the detail as to, you know, what sort of growth stage and so forth we might cut – they’re practicalities. But as I said earlier, it really doesn't cost you that much more to make good silage compared to poor quality silage. What the thing in the paddock is, is that we want to get it done as quickly as we can but get it done right. 

So sometimes people get the “do quick” message, but they rush it and they don't get enough wilting in there. Or they focus on, “aw, we've got to get to 35% or 45% dry matter” and leave it out in the paddock. Those things happen, but if you expect them to happen, if they happen every time you go out there, then really you should sit back and say, well, what can I change to get a better result next time? And that is part of, you know, part of improving what we do all the time. You know, we look at what we've done. Why did it happen that way? What could we tweak, little things that might improve things next time? It'll never be exactly the same, but that's what we're aiming for. So at that point when we go to make our silage, I guess we've already at this point sat back and said, well okay, we're in a baled silage system, we're in a pit silage system. So that big picture type stuff, those decisions have been made, whether we've got our own equipment, whether we're using contractors – they're the big-ticket items that are going to affect the economics of the whole thing. And a lot of it is risk management as well, that sort of, do I want to take the risk of having a poor year and not getting the chance to make silage and having all that machinery sitting in a shed doing nothing, or do I leave the contractor to do that and I'll get the contractor in. If I'm using a contractor, are they going to turn up on time? You know, particularly with pastures, but any of our crops. A week can make a huge difference in feed quality. We can lose a megajoule in a week. That can be a lot of milk. If we make hundreds of tonnes of silage, that's a lot of milk at the end of the day. So, how we manage it to make sure we get that quality in there is, you know, that's a serious consideration. On the flip side, capital management, we don't want to have a whole heap of money tied up in machinery and infrastructure if we're not using it effectively. 

Sheena Carter: Yeah, and I guess before you go on, I think just to touch on that, I think particularly in New South Wales and perhaps other states of Australia, we have seen with… dairies are more, sort of, dispersed these days and the service provision to support them, particularly with contractors, is quite challenging in some areas and we have seen a lot of farms start to invest in some of their own silage making equipment because of this issue that you're talking about – contractors getting there late and the quality being affected once the silage is made. It is a very real issue for farmers, but I guess it is one that needs to be thought about quite carefully and some, sort of, rigorous numbers put around it to justify the expense. But we can talk about the contractors a bit more, I just thought I'd mention that as an issue because I, yeah, I've certainly seen a lot of farmers talking about, and purchasing, that silage making equipment due to challenges with accessing contractors. But sorry, back to the quality. 

Neil Griffiths: Yeah look, going right through, we need to do the job properly so when we go to store, you know, get it sealed up as quick as we can, compacted well, get all the air out, get it sealed up. Whether we use inoculates or not, that used to be a debate, I think we've moved past that debate now, I know not everyone does, but I think the results are certainly out there that show that using inoculates will help. They won't make rubbish into good silage, never will. But I guess the analogy I always use is it's the icing on the cake. You know, we want to have a good cake to start with. If we can get another 3% - 5% improvement by putting inoculates on silage, then that's the icing on the cake and that can be very effective. With some of the inoculates, certainly with maize and so forth, there are specific inoculates that do a slightly different job, not just improving the fermentation so we get a better result at the end. When we're thinking about those things, but also we need to acknowledge that not only are there costs, but there are also losses that we can't eliminate when we make silage. We can't eliminate them when we make hay. But when you graze a paddock, you're never 100% efficient either.  You know, to leave sort of 20% or 30% of the feed in the paddock, you know, we can go out there and do our pasture assessments with quads or the rising plates and technology, if people are into that sort of thing, but the amount actually harvested is never what was out there, whether it's, sort of, not grazed… with silage we have a little bit of field losses, nowhere near as bad as hay, but we do have fermentation losses – that takes a bit of energy. There's always going to be some losses, but what we want to avoid is that wastage where we don't pick up the feed in the paddock or when we go to feed it out, that we've got those big wastages. You know, you wouldn't go and leave half a load of grain on the ground. We don't want to do that with silage either. It's just as bad on your economics if you go and waste a whole heap of feed with silage as it is with grain. So it goes right through. So, we acknowledge those things, but we're always managing to be as efficient as we can. I guess with some of those decisions about where do we invest, sometimes it's, do we need more labour or more capital. Some of the times that's why we're investing in capital is to be more efficient with our labour use, and I would always start with making the feed out program as efficient as possible. We can get contractors in to make the silage, they might work for a week or something – it might take us 6 or 12 months to feed that out. We can't get contractors in to feed out, so we've got to make sure that that's efficient from a labour perspective. Feed wastage – just as efficient as we can, and the first part about that is usually that we're going to store it near where we're going to feed it out. 

Sheena Carter: Yep, good common-sense stuff. Now look, I know you've run a few numbers on the cost of energy, or poor-quality silage relative to better quality silage. Can we just have a chat about that? We might work out whether we can share those in the show notes, and I will caveat this by saying, as soon as you start putting some numbers and costs on things, they're outdated the next day, but we'll work through the process. Yes, you run some run some numbers on the quality of silage on current, well, some current prices, can we talk a bit about the impact that has on the bottom line of, you know, feeding your milking herd at the moment? 

Neil Griffiths: Yeah. So what I've used is just a little calculator that Dairy Australia has as part of their TopFodder package, which came off a thing we did earlier for beef producers and varied it around. So this is good that we've got the dairy version now if you like. So those that are listening might want to just pencil down a few numbers, but I've put five options or five columns if you like, and we've varied feed quality starting from nine megs, nine and a half, ten megs, ten and a half, 11 megs – the feed quality that I've put in. I've assumed 400 tonnes of dry matter made into silage, and what the calculator has used is, by changing the feed quality it's making assumptions about intake. And so what it's suggesting is that at nine megs that cattle would be eating just over 15 kilos of dry matter. Now I should say also, that this little calculator is also set at the moment to be, everything is getting six kilos of concentrate grain, 13.5 megs across the board – that hasn't varied. So at nine megs – just over 15 kilos, get up to 11 megs and they're eating about 17 kilos, 17.5 kilos of dry matter per cow. We plugged in, with your advice, $11.50 per kilo of solids as a milk price, so that's a variable that can be put in.

Sheena Carter: Yep, so for the those that speak in cents per litre still, even though you're probably paid on solids, it's around $0.90 a litre. 

Neil Griffiths: And I just put in some costs, which might be a little bit too conservative, but $200 a tonne of dry matter for making silage – that varies enormously – if you're doing wrapped bales, that's way too low, if you're doing really efficient pit silage, chop silage, you might have a little bit up your sleeve there. And I've also just allowed just over $300, $317, I think, for the concentrate cost, which again might be a bit low. Anyway, so that mixture of… we're calling it silage, but in fact it's roughage. So that could be a combination of silage, hay, pasture, they're all in that roughage category. So the numbers really wouldn't make any difference whether it was silage or grazing pasture. At nine megs, cows were expected to be producing 15.3 litres a day, and at 11 megs they're producing just over 24 litres a day. Bottom line, as far as our silage focus is concerned, that at nine megs, potentially you could be making about $595 per tonne of dry matter fed. At 11 megs, you're making $917. It basically came down that every half unit increment that we could improve our silage quality, we could make somewhere between $75 and $85 per tonne more at, really, no greater cost. It costs us no more to… as long as we've got the good feed to start with, we do everything well, then we can make more money out of everything. So I guess for me, the take home out of that is there's never a reason to make poor quality, and sometimes that's a bit of debate people want to have around drought feeding, aw, you don't need good quality, but from a dollar return, a profitability question, the better the quality is always going to be an advantage. You'll always make more money out of it. You'll produce more milk, you'll make more money out of it. So everything is aimed at feed quality from that initial crop selection. Which paddock are we going to conserve? How are we going to manage it? What do we do? We want that good quick wilt to maintain that feed quality. We want to get it into a bale or a pit, compacted as hard as we can get it, seal it up, again, maintain that initial quality, standing feed in the paddock is always the best. What we want to do is minimise the losses right the way through, and when we go to feed out, it comes to feed quality. Again, it's really interesting that when we're talking about losses and wastage when we feed out, we think about what we see out there, but you know, the biggest thing that affects wastage often, particularly on a feed pad, is feed quality, not so much how it's presented, when it's presented, it's feed quality. If you put good quality out there, they'll lick it off the ground. You put rubbish out there, they lay all over it and they'll waste it every time.

Sheena Carter: Expensive bedding. 

Neil Griffiths: Absolutely. So we can talk all we like about infrastructure and management for feed out, but it comes back to feed quality again. Then we start tinkering. All of those things are obviously important, but it's feed quality that drives the profitability of the thing every step of the way. 

Sheena Carter: Yeah. So I guess as a farmer, if you're making your own silage, it's quality, quality, quality. If you don't think you've got the skills or you think your skills could do with a bit of improving to make sure that you are getting that quality, obviously there's, you know, the TopFodder resources and there's a TopFodder workshop coming up in the end of May, is it, Neil, end of May? 

Neil Griffiths: Yeah, over at Nabiac, yep. 

Sheena Carter: Over at Nabiac, which is, sort of, Hunter Local Land Services farmers in those regions and potentially another one a bit later on around Tocal, you were saying earlier. 

Neil Griffiths: Yeah, we're looking at maybe end of June, again through Hunter Local Land Services. So those days will be open to all comers – so dairy farmers, beef producers, anyone that's interested, contractors, anyone that's interested in silage making. 

Sheena Carter: Yeah, and I guess that was going to be one of my points, was around the contractors. You also want to ensure, or make sure, that you know that they can also have the skills, or they do have the skills, to make the quality silage. You've got to provide the product, obviously, but you want it to be a quality, yeah, ensiling process. 

Neil Griffiths: Yeah, very much so. The ideal, when we run those TopFodder workshops, is to have farmers and contractors in there together so that they're all aiming for the same thing, which means high quality. 

Sheena Carter: Excellent. Okay, contractors and, you know, doing it yourself? We have spoken, or you've already mentioned, a few pros and cons when we're looking at those options, and, you know, we've discussed availability of contractors and timeliness of the operation. And I guess that timeliness discussion has already come out in our quality discussion – if you can't get the contractor there in a timely fashion and you're losing that megajoule of energy, up to, a megajoule of energy per week, that that is a cost to the business. But, you know, equally that is applicable if you're a farmer yourself and you can't get on the paddock, isn't it? So it's just a key point – make sure you're timely with your harvesting. 

Neil Griffiths: Yeah look, I think the choice between contractors and owning your own equipment is… we can cost it out, you know, what's the depreciation? Nowadays interest costs are becoming more significant etcetera. What's the labour cost? Who bears those, sort of, things in owning your own equipment? But at the end of the day, the dollars per tonne that it's going to cost me to make it is just one of the factors that we're considering. There's very much that risk management type thing. Have I got the skills? Have I got the labour requirement? If I'm going into a big bulk pit or bunker system, then I need, you know, I need harvesters, I need truck drivers, I need people on the tractor rolling it. I may or may not have those. Obviously, that's where the contractors have the have the big advantage. The wrapped round bale is the cheapest to get into, not cheap, but it's still a lower cost than if you get into big squares or into the chop silage. But at the end of the day, it ends up being by far the most expensive. We've got that cost of wrapping bales, which we don't have with hay, we don't have with the other systems, and then you've got the issue of getting rid of the plastic as well. So, there's a few nuisances involved there. But capital wise, we find that that's probably… that baled silage was the big increase for a lot of years, simply that yes, we know it's more expensive per tonne of silage, but it suits our system. It's convenient. We can go and make a paddock; we can feed a few bales. We've got that flexibility, which was hugely valuable. 

Sheena Carter: Yes, well and truly, and like you say, it's what suits your system, and you might not have the feed out equipment to, you know, be dealing with silage in a bunker. So, you know, your bales are easier. And I guess the other point with that is locating bales. You spoke about that earlier, it's easier to put them closer to where you need them, perhaps, then where your pit is. 

Neil Griffiths: Yeah, just remember, particularly with the floods, we've had people see bales floating down the river, so put them on the high ground if at all possible. 

Sheena Carter: Yeah, and look, there's a really good article on a website called extensionAUS, which I will put a link into the show notes for our listeners and I'd really encourage you to have a look at that. That will help you if you're considering purchasing your own silage making equipment, it'll help you work through some of those costs. So, you've obviously got the ownership costs, which you've spoken about, Neil, with depreciation. Depreciation, although it's a non-cash cost on an annual basis, once that machinery is finished its useful life, it materialises as a real cost because you've got to actually replace that item of equipment. So, you know, your depreciation costs, you've mentioned interest costs as well, perhaps registration costs if you're going up and down the road, all those sorts of things, and then our operating costs. So obviously, you know, fuel and oil and repairs and maintenance and labour like you've spoken about. 

Neil Griffiths: Twine and net wrap and plastic and all of those sorts of things, yep. 

Sheena Carter: Yep. So yeah, that article was written by Sam Henty, who's down in Victoria and it works through an example of owning your own silage wrapper and how much that actually will cost you. And there's some really good rules of thumb around costing out fuel usage and repairs and maintenance and all those type of things. So that is a great resource and there's a bit of a worksheet that you can crunch your own numbers to figure it out for yourselves. But I guess with that machinery, I think, Neil, if you've got your own machinery really utilising that machinery as efficiently as possible, if you've got low throughput, it's just going to be very expensive, isn't it, unless you can contract or something yourself? 

Neil Griffiths: Absolutely. And yes, sometimes you've just got to make the choice that you can't make the numbers work. Yes, I'd like to make silage, but I can't do it cost effectively. And if that's the way it works out, well, it's better than spending money where you're not getting a decent return on it. 

Sheena Carter: Okay, fantastic. I think we've had some very good discussions, which I hope the listeners have found useful and we've already mentioned the upcoming TopFodder workshop, but I guess for others in other areas that aren't in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, you know, this is a program that Dairy Australia delivers through their regional development programs so people can reach out to their extension officers in regions if they're interested in doing a TopFodder workshop, but any key messages that you'd like to leave with our listeners today, Neil? 

Neil Griffiths:  Look, I guess to keep beating the same drum, it's just quality, quality, quality. Yes, we need to be sensible about losses and wastage. We need to be sensible about how much labour we've got and what capital is invested, and what the right mix is there for individuals. But at the end of the day, pretty much every time we turn around, it's just this feed quality is so important. You know, we make our money out of feeding animals, so you need to be across the animal nutrition thing, and particularly if we're in a grazing situation, but crop selection, all of it, it's just feed quality is what's going to produce the milk and that produces the dollars every step of the way. 

Sheena Carter: Yep, absolutely. Feed quality, feed efficiency. Turning grass or silage into milk is the aim of the game. 

Neil Griffiths:  I guess if I could, just on one little hobby horse, we've mentioned in passing about, you know, droughts and floods and so forth, and we know that the seasons are changing once again, as they always are, and I think that whole, “how we manage and prepare for those long term variations” is something where I think, potentially, we can see more and more use of conserved forage, at a cost, but it's going to help our resilience – it's going to be there, not for everyone, not for every farming system, but particularly in dairy, I think, in some cases it's probably better than money in the bank because when you can't buy feed anywhere, it doesn't matter what your credit line is like, if you can't buy the feed, then it's not going to help you. 

Sheena Carter: No, if it's not there, it's not there, and yes, we've certainly lived through that in the last couple of years. So, yes, a good point. A good point, Neil, well and truly. All right, well, thank you very, very much for your time, and you never know, we might get you back onto the podcast again. I bet you never thought you'd be doing a podcast, did you? 

Neil Griffiths: Well, not a lot, no. 

Sheena Carter: All right. Thank you very much, Neil. 

Neil Griffiths: Thanks, Sheena. 

Sheena Carter: Thank you for listening to this month's The Business of Dairy Podcast, produced by the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries Dairy Business Advisory Unit. This series is brought to you with funding and support from the Hunter Local Land Services. The show notes to this episode include links to many useful resources mentioned, including links to the upcoming TopFodder course at Nabiac in the Hunter Valley, the extensionAUS article by Sam Henty – farm economist with Agriculture Victoria, a New South Wales DPI Prime Fact titled, Guide to Machinery Costs and Contract Rates, and a link to a Dairy Australia's, Making Silage web page. 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. You can also subscribe to our Facebook and Twitter feed and view or subscribe to our DPI dairy newsletter using the links provided.