Mike Van Der Aa moved from New Zealand to Australia 25 years ago with a five-year plan. He liked it so much he never left.
As he walks across his well-developed farm near the ocean at Yambuk, and as he hosts mates in his renovated 1840s stone ‘Gentleman’s Club’ and sees his family at home in the local community, it’s easy to see why Mike thinks he’s blessed.
“This was the first farm we bought and we liked it so much we stayed put,” he said.
“We like the people around us, the area we’re in and it’s not so intensive out this way.”
At 54, Mike and his wife Clare and their children Jack, 19, and Hannah, 16, are all about enjoying the good things in life — and dairying in Australia has given them that opportunity.
“We worked hard when we were young, now we can enjoy the fruits of our labour,” Mike said.
“I like it here. To me it’s like an adventure. I got here at 29. The house and farm needed a lot of renovation but Clare and I decided stay and we got married in 2000.
“I love the wide open spaces. I never dreamed I’d be living on the coast and involved in the footy club, the surf club and the local hall committee.”
Clare has worked with Moyne Health Services in Port Fairy for more than 20 years and they are both volunteer members of the local CFA.
Mike keeps close contact with his family back in New Zealand and will be returning three times later this year for weddings.
“We stayed here on the proviso that we could regularly go back to New Zealand, because I’m very family orientated.”
Like so many unable to break into farm ownership in New Zealand due to high land prices, Mike bought the Yambuk farm with his brother Pete, now semi-retired in Warrnambool.
They had looked at farms in the Heytesbury region but didn’t like them. They fell in love with the Yambuk area where they could farm the way they wanted and enjoy the limestone-based soils that don’t get too muddy over winter.
“I’ve never wanted to be an intense farmer,” Mike said.
“I like to grow everything we can on the farm and do well with the cows we’ve got. I could milk more cows here but I don’t want to.
“What we do now suits the staff we’ve got and our lifestyle.”
The farm is 220 hectares and they milk 280 to 300 cows depending on seasonal conditions. They had two small additional farms used as out-paddocks but recently sold one of the properties.
Two long-term workers do the milking, with the 30-a-side dairy set up as a one-person operation.
Some bits of New Zealand have stayed with Mike; he still uses New Zealand-bred Friesian genetics from LIC.
“I like the way they attack the grass,” he said.
“We’re predominantly grass-eating. I’ve learned a fair bit about nutrition and it’s about keeping the outside costs down. We don’t feed more than four kilos of pellets.”
He also uses some lines from Genetics Australia, but in the same vein of strong grass-eating cows.
Mike worked in AI for about 20 years after arriving in Australia, which was as much an education as it was a job.
“It was like going to a discussion group every day — you’d go around and see how different farmers do things,” he said.
The property has been transformed since 1997 and the results have been worth it.
The herd now achieves about 500 kg/MS per cow, protein is 3.6 to 3.7 and fat is 4.6 to 4.7, peaking at around 24 litres.
“When we started, we had cows doing big litres but they didn’t suit what we were doing,” Mike said.
“They demanded a lot of grain and when we came in, we had to shave costs because of the size of the mortgage.”
The whole farm was renovated. It was re-fenced, water added to every paddock and the sprawling paddocks reduced to five-hectare lots that were easier to manage. The laneways were designed to split the farm and make it easy to access all paddocks.
They re-grassed everything, used plenty of fertiliser and brought in a rock crusher, improving the farm-able land from about 50 to 95 per cent.
“It paid off,” Mike said.
“People are willing to pay for good land like this. When we worked up some of the paddocks at the back of the farm, it was so sandy we wondered if grass would come back but it did.”
Recently there was a shift from rye-grass to cocksfoot.
“We’d have a flat patch from the end of September. We put in rape but it wasn’t quite ready to bridge the gap until the irrigation kicked in,” Mike said.
“Everything went to seed so we planted cocksfoot, which was a bit slower through winter but it lasts longer into spring and can handle the dry. The rye-grass we couldn’t keep past two years. Now it’s like carpet with the cocksfoot.”
In 1997 the farm had a bore but no water licence.
Mike and Pete applied for licences and the farm now has a 20m x 20m x 7m deep hole holding one megalitre where water runs in during the day and is pumped out at night and a four-metre deep bore that can pump 50,000 litres an hour, 24 hours a day.
It’s used every night through summer.
Mike’s priority today is to improve herd quality and health.
“I’m happy with production,” he said.
“I believe that if you try to get too much out of your cows, you have to counteract it with speciality feeds and it gets too hard to get heavy-milking cows back in calf.”
Any cows with feet or health problems are sold to cash in on good cull prices.
“It makes it easy to manage,” Mike said.
“When I was doing the AI run, I’d see so many farms with a sick paddock and it’s a lot of work.”
He has split calving, with more than 60 per cent in autumn and the rest in September.
They looked at buying a neighbouring farm a few years ago but it didn’t eventuate. In retrospect, Mike’s happy.
“I’ve got to the stage in life when I want to kick back and do a bit of travelling and spend time with my kids. I work to live, not live to work and I work smart.”