Colewin Farms
Ryan grew up on his parents’ dairy cow farms spending the obligatory time milking but never considered milking any other species. The smaller environmental footprint of sheep dairying sparked his interest and his parents agreed to convert 42ha of their 70ha property to sheep milking. Ryan Mcpherson milked 650 Zealandia® dairy sheep in his first season and will have 1,000 in 23-24 season.
- Tokoroa, Waikato
- Location
- 2 FTEs, 2 lamb rearers, 1 relief milker
- Team
- 42 hectares
- Platform Size
- 820 ewes
- Animals
- 42-a-side Herringbone
- Infrastructure
- 2021/2022 Season
- First Year of Supply
Background
The journey into sheep milking happened rather rapidly for Ryan, with his father recommending he go along to the 2020 Spring Sheep Farm Open Day in November to see what it was all about. Ryan liked what he saw, and had Spring Sheep out the next week to assess the property for suitability. Sheep milking was starting to become popular and the appeal of getting into a new industry that had a smaller environmental footprint and hopefully – a big future, had a lot of appeal. "We had purchased an old dairy farm about eight years prior, which we were using as a grazing block, but it had an old dairy shed on it. We identified 42 hectares of that block as the sheep milking platform, and off we went with the conversion. The main areas were fencing, races, lamb rearing facilities and the milking parlour conversion. The conversion started in February 2021 with the gutting of the shed and extension and narrowing of the pit. The bail area was raised to achieve the optimum milking height and the roof was extended and replaced."
Overview
Here is a little insight into our farm operations: The ewes diet throughout the year stays pretty consistent at 3 kgDM/day. We feed around 800g in-shed per day, made up of whole maize, wheat DDG, sunflower pellets and a mineral pellet. The rest of the diet is pasture and chicory. Grazing chicory is best for facial eczema protection and they are performing well in weight gain also. Sustainability is a huge focus of ours; the sheep are a lot easier on the land compared to cows and we are also investigating solar as an option to power our shed and on-farm houses. We are also trialling electric bikes. In terms of managing pasture, we harvest our surplus for silage, and this helps us maintain quality and supplement our ewes and lambs. We bring heifers in when needed to control quality. Staying on top of the grass is a priority for us, as we’ve found that going into covers of around 2,400kgDM/ha is optimal for milk production, and the sheep tend to like it and eat it down to a decent residual of around 1,650kgDM/ha. We herd test at least three times a year and this drives our mob management decisions. We are introducing terminal genetics in the third and fourth cycle of our mating period and hope to sell these at four days old. Our replacement ewe lambs are grazing the chicory during the day and go on to grass at night. We give away our ram lambs. Our focuses for the year are on milk production and achieving the optimum scale for our operations. We're very excited about the future gains in the coming seasons.