We appear to be bogged down in a rut, with the commissioning of our new plant.
I was super frustrated a couple of months ago – at the spanner throwing, losing my mind level.
When you’re a farmer you can sort of set your own pace, drive progress but now, I am waiting on the right people to come and tinker and then sign me off.
The boiling like a frog phase has passed and what will be, will be.
I know in a few months I’ll never think about it again.
All the construction, electrical and plumbing has been finished for a couple of months.
Dairy Food Safety Victoria has been and given us the go-ahead, and we are just waiting on a couple of final gauges to be replaced, a bit of general fine tuning, a couple of test runs and hey presto.
There has been nothing I can do to speed this up.
For quite some time now, I’ve been entirely at the mercy of others.
The contractors are great – just busy and hard to get.
It’s a quiet time at the dairy – the calm before the storm.
We have around 650 cows to calve in late March early April, so they have gone on maternity leave and are having a holiday at the moment.
The farm team has been cleaning and preparing the calf sheds and paddocks so that once things ramp up and we’re getting 20 calves a day, we can focus solely on the cows and calves.
Water pricing is currently around $450 per megalitre, which isn’t surprising, but it does mean we’ll have to cut back on most of our cropping. We’ll likely retreat to maintaining pasture only on the main milking area.
To help manage that, we will start irrigating a few weeks later, in the middle of March rather than the end of February.
The reality is that under the current water market, we’ve become opportunistic farmers – when water is cheap, we go all in, and when it’s expensive, we tighten our footprint and minimise risk.
In the long-term as water continues to move towards higher economic value uses, managing that risk will be more important than ever.
The disc seeder is getting a birthday, with new discs and upgraded bearings and will be in the paddock sowing pasture within the fortnight.
The 40ft Kelly chain will start running around this week preparing paddocks, and the digger is poking about cleaning drains and channels preparing for the start of the irrigation season.
By the end of the week, we’ll have spread around 3000 tonnes of nature’s gold – better known as dried cow manure – along with a good dose of chicken manure.
My biggest concern is not water pricing, the farm or the factory.
The greater issue is some of my children are now starting to beat me often at pool and table tennis,
I thought I had a few more years as lord of my own lunchbox.
They say a father’s greatest joy is when a child surpasses them – I can confirm that is a load of bollocks!
