Dairy Australia’s Raising the Roof event has been declared a success with over 200 farmers heading to Shepparton for the three-day event.
The program included two days of informative sessions on systems, nutrition, effluent, climate, energy and managing people, and finished off with on-farm visits on the final day.
Raising the Roof is the only major dairy event in Australia with a focus on intensive farm systems and supporting infrastructure.
It is held every two years.
Development and regional adaption lead Alicia Richters said she was pleased with the event.
“Farmer input very much shaped this year’s program and it was a reflection of the topics and issues farmers wanted to hear,” Alicia said.
She said the climate and energy sessions were very popular along with waste management.
“New technologies are always popular – six years ago we wouldn’t have even been talking about things like bio-digestors.”
Guest speaker Dr Gordon (Gordie) Jones is a globally recognised dairy performance consultant with more than 40 years of experience.
He talked about the importance of looking after workers and how best to go about it.
Calivil dairy farmer Dehne Vinnicombe spoke about the difficulty he had with compost bedding and mastitis which in the end has seen him transition across to sand.
Peter Mulchay spoke about the process he went through installing his effluent and solids separation system.
The sessions included a question and answer period which were informative for everyone in attendance.
Alicia said they made a conscious decision to ensure the crowd included a majority of farmers.
“Over 70 per cent of people in attendance were farmers — we built the program around that and it has been a real success,” she said.