Hamish Galloway participated in Next level Grazing's Pasture Recovery Planning seminar in July 2020 and is sharing how he achieves exceptional pasture quality and quantity on his Takapau Dairy Farm. Read more about his story below and listed to the 1 hour webinar!
Reflections of Hamish Galloway’s Farm, Takapau 24 November, 2021
Hamish has been learning how to improve his farm productivity and soils over the past two decades of ownership. He hosted a Dariy NZ discussion group this week and was showing off some fantastic quality pasture he developed by shifting his herd five times per day for November. Less time in the tractor planting crops has freed up time to grow grass faster on the whole grazing platform with mob grazing. Hopefully come School holidays he will have quality well sorted for the season and can put away the standards and reels and spend time with his family. He was achieving his grazing plan target recovery of 3.5 leaves on the perennial ryegrass tillers in his pastures. With his 530 cows producing a respectable 2.2 Kgs of MS prior to just going to 10 milkings a week he is getting the animal performance he wants. Submission rate was 93% after three weeks of mating. As you can see from the photo’s his cattle are fully fed and in very good condition. All this on 200 HA.
What Hamish’s farm is teaching him:
By dropping out paddocks for deferred grazing he can keep on top of quality better during spring flush and return them to the grazing round while they are still green as soon as his grazing plan “cruise control” indicates grass growth is slowing. This will give him grazeable area to proactively lengthen his round before his silage paddocks have regrown.
40 litres per HA of Fish-it fertilizer works great as a foliar especially with 15 kg of Calcium nitrate (only 3 units of N) and fulvic acid which suppresses seed head formation.
Hamish has been foliar feeding for ten years. He noticed california thistle starting to turn brown and looking weaker.
On my visit last winter the paddock he power harrowed had no soil aroma at all whilst the soil under his permanent pastures had a beautiful aroma of healthy soil indicating an abundance of soil biology. This week not only did his soil smell healthy but we could see carbon sheaths and glomalin glued soil aggregates in abundance. Happy lines were visible on virtually all the cattle. Healthy cows reflect healthy pastures which reflect healthy soils. Well done Hamish.