'Times are harder for young dairy hopefuls'

Ross Burnett fears he is a relic of a bygone age and that young dairying hopefuls will have to settle for less.

He admits that at one time he would have been considered an ordinary bloke. He worked his way up through the dairy industry system, from Flock House to cadetship to farm worker, to sharemilker and then ownership. But it's different now.

"Sadly, those days are behind us as an industry," he says. "With the size of farms and the cost of cows, and the debt needed to service it all, only those with family help or who are the very best performers can hope to achieve farm ownership."

Good, dedicated young people coming up through the ranks can still make their mark, but in farm management, lower-order sharemilking and equity partnerships.

He fears he is becoming a relic of a bygone age. Farming on sandy soil in Manawatu he is one of the few who hasn't opted to irrigate his farm, or to use loads of supplements, or build feed pads to chase extra production.

"I was brought up on the sand country before these things were available, and I learnt how to spin out my pastures as long as I could. It's a low-cost system, and it has made New Zealand dairying what it is."

However, he is far from being a stick in the mud suspicious of change. In his new milking shed, he has added a meal feeding system to plug pasture feed gaps in early spring and summer. He also grows turnips during the summer dry, and adds chicory and plantain to new pastures.

He is careful with his money, though and admits that he might have looked at irrigation if it wasn't so expensive.

Today, even though he has a new home and a new milking shed, he drives a seven-year-old Toyota. The 44-a-side herringbone shed was built over two years by a couple of builder mates, with his help, for a very reasonable $850,000. He still has his first tractor, bought second-hand 30 years ago, and his "hard decision" to spend $64,000 on a New Holland TS90 five years ago is still fresh in his mind.

In 1971, at 16, he left school and entered the Flock House agriculture course.

Then he joined the farm cadet scheme and started on a trade certificate in farming. For five years, he moved around dairy farms learning his trade.

Twenty per cent of everything he earned was taken from his pay packet and put into a government-backed farm ownership account. The money was locked away until it was needed to buy land or cows. When that time came, the Government added a 50 per cent top-up.

He married Ann – who sadly died four years ago. They got their first big break almost immediately when they were offered a last-minute sharemilking job by Himatangi farmers Alan and Heather Greig. The catch was that as sharemilkers, they had to own the cows. Two hundred were needed. Preferring to keep the farm ownership account for the future, they could only raise enough from the bank to afford 170. In a rare move for the time, the Greigs agreed to lease them the other 30 cows.

That was in 1982. They stayed there for seven years. The Greigs were experienced and supportive, and the young sharemilkers learned from them. "They had come up through the sharemilking system, too, and were able to teach me quite a bit," Mr Burnett says.

After a couple of years, they had a second-hand feed wagon to add to the tractor, and their assets began to grow. They paid off the cow loan, began to rear calves off the farm for extra money, and benefited from several years of a steady milk payout.

By 1989, they had saved enough to afford a farm. They found it at Makowai, a 62-hectare, 160-cow property. Mr Burnett still has the Rural Bank purchase application form which shows that he and Ann paid $593,000 for land, stock and plant. By then, they had built up $205,000 in assets, including $27,000 in the farm ownership account, to which the Government added $14,000. He was 34.

The interest rate on the bank loan was 17 per cent, but their fortunes soon changed for the better. They produced 39,000 kilograms of milksolids, way above the farm's 25,000kg average – and after a tough decade, the economy picked up, the Tui dairy company made a record payout of $3.59 a kg, and interest rates fell to 5 per cent.

For the next 10 years, they made steady progress. As they improved water reticulation and drainage and started a regrassing programme, production lifted. By the end of the decade, it was up to more than 70,000kg. They were also chosen to be a Tui focus farm, and the extra attention from farm advisers and field days also brought improvements.

Then, in 2001, came their next big step, the purchase of an 82ha neighbouring farm.

He put a manager on the new farm.

At the start of the last season, he handed over milking duties to a manager who has since graduated to being a lower-order sharemilker.

Now Mr Burnett's life is less hectic, although he is still on call as a relief milker. His days of working from five in the morning to nine at night are behind him, but the memory is taking time to fade from his body clock.

Fairfax

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