Two floods within four months have forced Deirdre and Brad Smith to make changes to the herd and pasture management on their property in south-east NSW.
They have implemented a footbath at the dairy for their cows and have employed an additional labour unit to help with the extra workload in the wake of the two floods that hit their farm at Brogo, north of Bega.
Apart from dealing with lame cows, they are also trying to work out how to grow winter feed — given the waterlogged paddocks are where they would normally sow that pasture.
Deirdre and Brad milk a 150-head, year-round calving herd supplying Bega Cheese.
In the 2019-20 bushfires, some of their cows died because of smoke inhalation. In November last year and again in February this year, the Brogo River rose and flooded the low country of their farm.
Now 20 of their cows are lame, so the herd is being pushed through the footbath on their way to milking.
It has extended milking by an hour at each end of the day, and means an extra person has to be on hand to push the cows through the yards.
Deirdre and Brad were still recovering from the nearby Brogo River flood in November, when in late February, another 361mm saw the Brogo River rise across their lower country again.
It washed away the seed sown in early February, which was going to be their winter feed.
“That 10-hectare paddock is waterlogged and because it’s been so wet, we’ve been unable to sow other paddocks, so we have no winter feed sown for this year,” Deirdre told Dairy News in mid-March.
They were able to harvest extra silage in spring and summer, before and after the November flood.
They had cut one harvest of silage before the November flood. After the flood, they mowed and recovered an extra 75 bales, although of much lower quality because of the floodwater and rain.
But they definitely don’t have enough hay to carry the cows through winter.
“We only have about 20 bales of hay, but we should have enough silage to get through to spring,” Deirdre said.
“Our safety barrier is 300 bales of pasture silage for winter feeding. We harvested 410 last year, and that should get us through winter and spring.”
In November, Deirdre submitted the paperwork for a $75,000 disaster recovery grant, which will be spent on restoring a key laneway and replacing their foot valve.
The grant is paid initially as an emergency $15,000, with the remaining $60,000 paid on presentation of receipts.
In mid-March, they were still waiting to hear when they would receive the initial payment.
“The rivers haven’t gone down from last year. We lost a foot valve in November and we haven’t been able to get down to check the condition of pumps,” Deirdre said.
“The access road cops a lot of run-off and gets washed out, so the truck drivers have had difficulty because access has been too boggy and slippery.”
Brad had 38 tonnes of blue metal rolled along the laneway, which is their access road into the farm. That laneway has since been washed away again.
Because the milk truck was unable to get in to the farm, they have had to dump milk.
The muddy paddocks have also increased mastitis.
“We’re trying to just treat three cows at a time with antibiotics. We have to dump that milk. It’s a loss of production we just have to bear,” Deirdre said.
“We’ve been using the footbath now for seven days, and we’ve only had to treat one cow with antibiotics. But we’ve had the vets here four times to clean out abscesses and trim hoofs.
“Brad also did a foot trimming course and is able to help.
“We’re trying to keep the cows on higher paddocks to keep them out of the mud.”
Unfortunately the waterlogged paddocks are where they would normally graze the milking herd at this time of year, when they rest the hill paddocks.
“The paddocks we’re putting our cows in now are the ones we sacrifice and use for feeding out winter silage. We’re lucky at the moment, we have so much grass,” Deirdre said.
“Those paddocks are getting puggy and we’ll struggle in six weeks with feeding silage in those paddocks, because they’re already chopped up.
“It means a lot more renovation work for the spring that we were not really planning on.”
In May, the cows are normally fed three bales of silage a day in the paddock. Brad and Deirdre plan to feed this silage beside fencelines along the route the cows come out of the dairy after milking.