A group of 30 large-scale New Zealand dairy farmers and industry representatives are heading to the United States of America tomorrow to see what lessons they can bring home.
The country is increasingly being punted as New Zealand’s major competition in the Chinese market.
The USA’s milk supply is around four times that of New Zealand, according to DairyNZ statistics, 40 per cent of which comes from 800 ”mega-dairies”, with 2000 or more cows.
Fieldays chief executive Jon Calder is going on the nine-day trip, and said lessons in keeping costs down would be a major focus.
”We have got around a 30 cent per kilo cost advantage over them [USA] at the moment.
”The concern is if we don’t get it right, we could make capital investment and we could lose that cost advantage really quickly.”
He said the nine days would be spent in Madison, Wisconsin learning about cow housing systems, large-scale farming, robotics, animal health, production improvements, and managing environmental impacts.
The group would ”swing by” the World Dairy Expo for two days to finish the trip.
Checking out the housed dairy farming systems would be of particular interest, he said.
”The biggest advantage they’ve got in terms of the housed dairy farming model is that their cost of building the houses is about half of what it costs us to do it here.”
He said the information gained on the trip would tie into the information passed onto farmers at the annual Fieldays.
”The intention of this is to feed it back into Fieldays. If you think about where dairying is currently with the reduced pay out, we see this as an opportunity to be better informed about the different options that are out there for farmers.
”It allows us to put forward better information.”
He said keeping up with international trends in dairying was key to New Zealand maintaining its competitive advantage in the global dairy market.
”If we change… without thinking about how we can do it smarter and how we can be Kiwi about it, innovative and efficient, we could eat into that cost advantage we’ve got.
”That’s where on the global scale we’ve got some trouble.”
Milfos and ANZ will also attend the trip.
Source: NZ Farmer
