Over more than 50 years of dairy farming, Julian Benson has learnt one important lesson — a lot of non-farming people don’t know much about farming.
Julian is doing his best to right that wrong, with a YouTube channel, Dairy Farm Life Journal, giving people an insight into what is happening on the farm every month, hosting farm tours, and speaking at this year’s Australian Dairy Conference to debunk misconceptions about how farmers treat their cows.
“It’s a matter of educating people about what farmers do,” he said.
“There has been a lot of negativity about the industry, but if we want young people coming into dairy farming, we don’t want to tell them it’s too hard.
“With the YouTube channel, every month I try to educate people about what happens on farms because a lot of people don’t know too much.
“When school kids visit, I tell them, if you want to look after nature, you want to become a farmer because you do both, and it’s a great life for bringing up kids.”
These are among the positive messages he shared at the Australian Dairy Conference in Melbourne recently.
This was his first time speaking at the conference.
“I was approached to talk about animal welfare,” he said.
“People complain about how farmers treat their cows, but our animals are very important to us — they provide us with an income, and they have to be well looked after.
“A very small percentage do the wrong thing, doesn’t matter what the industry is, but our animals are happy animals.
“If we don’t look after our animals, they’re not going to look after us.”
Now in his mid-70s, Julian and his wife Dianne are retired from day-to-day farming after their son Luke bought the dairy farm two years ago, however, they continue to concentrate on the production and hospitality side of the Apostle Whey Cheese business just inland from the Great Ocean Road near Port Campbell.
Apart from building the well-known paddock-to-plate business, Julian takes pride in his commitment to quality, animal welfare and sustainable farming.
He still takes a strong interest in the farm with the 250 mixed-breed cows supplying Apostle Whey Cheese which makes cheese, milk, gelato and gin.
“We milk off about a cow to the acre,” he said.
“I’m not a production-per-cow person; I’m a grass grower and ever since I started farming 50-odd years ago, I always believed in small paddocks.
The farm is subdivided into five-acre paddocks.
“The part we milk off is 52 paddocks all up — 52-day paddocks and 52-night paddocks.
“The cows will be in a paddock today and another one tonight, but they won’t go back to those paddocks for at least 26 days.
“It means by the time they go back to the paddock they’re being fully fed. Because there’s plenty of feed in the paddocks, and we’ve also done sub-surface drainage, so the water table has dropped by 15-18 inches, when the cows go into those paddocks with lots of feed, they don’t have to walk around looking for feed — they’ve got plenty of it.
“They’re well and truly fed and not doing as much damage to the ground.”
When it comes to high growth over spring, they assess the length of the grass and usually drop a few paddocks from the rotations, allowing the leftovers to be turned to silage.
“It’s a very basic system, but it works and there’s no shifting fences,” Julian says.
“I’ve seen about virtual fencing, but we don’t need that because our paddocks are the right size.”
The farm was basically barren when the Bensons moved to the area in 1981, but they were ahead of their time in tree planting and revegetation works.
“We’ve got trees with birdlife and koalas coming through, and we protect the cows from the heat and the wet.
“It might be 10-15 °C cooler under the shade.
“If the cows are more comfortable, they will produce more milk because they’re not using so much energy to keep cool.”
The farm uses effluent from the dairy on paddocks for good pastures and good soil bugs, and water troughs are placed in the middle of paddocks.
“The cows go from one end to the other and come back to the water in the middle, so the manure is being spread over the pastures a lot more evenly,” Julian said.
“We don’t have to over-work ourselves — all we do is open and shut gates — and the cows are in really good condition and are well looked after.”
Julian said the dairy industry gets unfairly criticised for selling bobby calves.
“For cows to milk, they have to have a calf each year”, he said.
“With that, most of us will have 50-50 per cent of female and male calves. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough land to keep the bull calves, so we have to sell them.
“Before they’re sold, we make sure we look after them. We’ve been through droughts and had trouble with water and it costs a lot of money to keep animals alive, but it’s just one of the parts of farming.
“We spend a lot of veterinary products to keep the animals going, but we don’t have the capacity to keep all the bull calves so we sell them.”
Julian said sexed semen wouldn’t solve the problem on a tightly-stocked farm.
“There’s no use saying use sexed semen because we’d have all females, but we’d have the same problem — we’d have too many and how do we get rid of them?”
In his quest to paint a positive picture of Australian dairy farmers, Julian also hosts international visitors to share his philosophy on farming.
“The first person to do it was from Wisconsin in America. He was a sixth-generation farmer, but he wanted to know how other countries farm. It’s completely different to what they do over there.”
Julian has been silencing the nay-sayers since he was a boy.
“I’ve been hearing negativity ever since I was eight years old when I told my uncles that one day I would be on a farm, and they’d say it’s too hard.
“I love farming because it’s so challenging, but it’s also very rewarding at the same time.”