In a crowd of dairy farmers Justin Walsh stands out as ‘the young one’ — but he doesn’t feel like an anomaly.
“There are far more young people interested in the dairy industry then people realise,” the 36-year-old said.
“In our area there are so many people who’d try and milk cows if they could ... but they can’t get a start.”
Mr Walsh manages a 280-head milking herd of Holstein Friesians and crossbreeds on the NSW south coast, just two hours from Sydney.
The region has four big processors (Lactalis, Lion, Saputo and Coles) and its proximity to a metro area means milk is in high demand.
Here the biggest threats to dairying are urban sprawl, cashed-up retirees and parents unwilling to leave the farm.
“Our biggest problem is the land prices going ridiculous. If you want to expand it’s really tough,” Mr Walsh said.
“What’s actually happening is less and less people who run the farms own the land they farm now.
“Even within families there is heaps of leasing going on because people can’t afford to buy their own farm right from the get-go.
“Sometimes people are stuck in situations — this is particularly true on family farms, I think — where the younger generation might have some ideas but they don’t get any leeway to implement them.
“We’ve been lucky in that my dad was happy to let me try things, but even we were a little bit in that spot.”
Mr Walsh started leasing his parents’ farm four years ago after 10 years working as co-manager with his father.
In just three years under new ownership, the farm — known as Waljasper Holsteins — has been recognised as one of the most profitable dairy operations in NSW after achieving $3.50/kg of milk solids in 2019, a major drought year.
Mr Walsh credits a driving need to improve for the success.
The high costs on the south coast meant Mr Walsh took on a “fairly significant” amount of debt to get started.
“I think sometimes debt can act as a bit of pressure getting you to improve all the time, and it can be a good thing,” he said.
“The traditional farmers who own everything and have no debt have no incentive to keep pushing things because they are comfortable where they are, whereas we’re at a stage where we can’t afford to run a not very profitable business.”
The first thing the new farmer did once the reins were handed over was look at Dairy Farm Monitor Project data and see what the most profitable farms were doing — then copy it.
The first point of interest was feed.
After seeing the most profitable farms didn’t import more than 40 per cent of their feed Mr Walsh vowed to do the same.
“We have more direct grazing now and the cows are doing the work for us so to speak.
“It’s been a big change and it means we’re spending less time and money feeding cows.
“At the same time we’re milking another 80 cows — a third more cows.
“We’ve become more profitably and we’re doing less work at the same time, that’s the definition of work smarter not harder.”
Next was going from year-round calving to split calving.
“Firstly it increases our efficiency because if we’ve got one cow calving, we might as well check on 10, and when drying cows off we’re drying twice as many and half the year we’re not drying any off,” Mr Walsh said.
Controlling when calves are on the ground also allows him to maximise pasture use.
“Managing your grazing is critical in this area because it can make a huge difference over the course of the year.
“We’ve almost doubled our pasture production since my wife and I took over from Mum and Dad.
“We very closely follow the Pastures for Profit principals, and we use the Rotation Right tool.”
Out of all the upgrades rolling out on the farm, Dairy Australia’s Pastures for Profit (FPFP) program has made the biggest impact.
Mr Walsh credits FPFP with revolutionising his farm.
“It’s ingrained in our whole operation now, we are in the process of completely redesigning our whole farm layout so we can re-design our Pastures for Profit system,” he said.
The redesign includes centralising the laneways and making the paddocks a uniform size.
“The idea is if you can make the pasture feed even as much as possible then you can tinker with the grain in the dairy and see the immediate response,” Mr Walsh said.
“We are a high grain input farm so working out the exact amount we should be feeding each day is super critical to how much money we make, so if we can take out the pasture variable, we can really hone in on the grain side of things.
“Otherwise it is really hard to assess what’s going on and see ‘did I make more money or did I make less money by doing that?’.”
Over summer the farm has kikuyu pastures and every year rye-grass and oats are direct drilled into all paddocks on the 135ha milking block (they also have 100ha of heifer and dry cow blocks).
“We do the whole farm every year. It costs a fair bit of money,” Mr Walsh said.
“We used to only do the rye-grass; the oats are a new thing we’ve been doing.”
He said the crux of the intense farm improvement mission was not to reinvent the wheel, but to bring proven ideas into the fold.
“It was more just trying to transition the business ... focusing on the big settings, to increase the profitability to then re-invest in the farm and lower our cost of production,” Mr Walsh said.
“It’s really easy to get caught up in day-to-day decision making, rather than keeping an eye on the direction of the farm.”
He said farmers could often miss opportunities because they weren’t looking for them.
“There are some fantastic resources out there for people who want to improve.
“I’m mainly talking about the Dairy Australia programs I guess; I sound a bit like a DA spokesperson, but we’ve really tried to use as much of that as possible to help us in all sorts of areas.
“Their employment starter kit for example has been really helpful because my wife and I had never employed someone when we took over, so we didn’t know about that side of things.
“It was an incredibly resource to look at and I still look at it from time to time too.”
Mr Walsh had a word of advice to all dairy farmers out there — don’t get in each other’s way, especially when it comes to family.
“One of the things I see happening is that the transition (succession) takes so long, and is so drawn out, that the business really suffers and struggles to recover,” he said.
“Sometimes the business is going backwards or stagnating, so the transition needs to be quick — but that’s easy to say when you’re not emotionally invested in it.”
In his own life, Mr Walsh had the opportunity to lease a neighbour’s farm early on but didn’t take the opportunity because he wanted to “do the right thing” and stay with his parents’ farm.
“In hindsight we would have been better off personally if we took that opportunity,” he said.
“We would have been further along. If you wait around too long it can really affect you down the track because dairy farming is not the sort of thing you want to be doing into your 60s and 70s.
“I don’t want to be doing this amount of work for the rest of my life.
“I want to get in now while I’m still relatively fit, build up some wealth and retire.”
Another important piece of advice was to take a break from the family farm and come back with fresh eyes.
For Mr Walsh this break came in the form of a four-year ag-science degree in Sydney.
“I didn’t appreciate it (university) at the time but I knew it was the right thing to do,” he said.
“It gave me more insight into the business management side of it, rather than the technical farming side.
“Now if a sales rep comes or there is a course on I’ve got a leg up in the discussion when it turns technical.
“I can go ‘oh that’s right, that makes sense’ or sometimes ‘that’s complete rubbish, go away I’m not buying that’.
“In hindsight, with that break from the farm, I could see where I wanted to improve it.
“If I hadn’t done that I probably would have kept going like before.”