Building economic relevance - episode 1

Let's view the little green square in the bottom corner of this graphic as the value of production from an agricultural enterprise based at Moora circa 2005.

As noted in this blog a few days ago, it came from producing (say) 3,285 kg of beef pa which was sold at $1-80 / kg. So the little green box represents $5,913 in gross value derived.


I've set the challenge as how to increase that gross value derived to $250,000. This is represented by the 42 squares in the larger grid - 42 times $5,913 = $248,346 which is close enough!

Over the next few weeks I'm going to try and work out how I can fill the empty squares with additional value derived. At present this is mainly a mental game - and not something I can actually implement from my present location in Jakarta. That said, bits of the program are underway ....

The first obvious place to start is with more meat. As soon as we arrived at Moora in the autumn of 2005 we hooked up with Matt Cleeve from Havelock Ag Services. We started an program of pasture improvement - following a conventional model.

First we sprayed and mulched the gorse, briar rose, blackberry and bent grass. We cultivated and planted new crops - year one was Winifred Brassica - year 2 was oats - year 3 was either annual ryegrass or into permanent pasture.

Along the way we have changed the layout of the farm - turning 5 paddocks into 14 and adding a central lane way system and reticulated water. We've fenced - and we've resurrected and modified an electric fencing system.

This is really only half educated guesswork, but I think we've already increased the amount of grass we grow by a factor of maybe 3 - which gives us 2 new squares to add to my little graphic. One of those squares I'd put down to better grass - and one to the better grass utilisation possible with the smaller paddocks. We're part way to a system of cell grazing - vs the more traditional 'set stocking' method.

I think we can add a couple more squares as well - one for the as yet unrealised potential of even better cell grazing management when we're on the ground every day - and another for the capacity to grow fodder crops like Mangels. Last year I grew a small crop - and it worked.

When I was a boy we grew Mangels as feed for our pigs. There are some friends in my old home town who will still remember weeding and thinning what we called fodder beet under a Marlborough summer sun.

While we've been pasture renovating, we've bought in hay from a guy called Chris Rinaldi who comes from up near Maryborough. A little bit of supplementary feeding adds another square - and we have 6 in total for a whole line! And only 6 more lines to go ....

But hey - can we really produce 20 tonnes of meat from Moora? That is 6 times just over 3 tonnes now? Joel Salatin talks about the 'cow days' he gets from his pastures each year - and how he manages everything to optimise his cow days. We've already substantially increased our cow (and sheep) days - even as we've been doing the pasture renovation. Salatin talks about achieving nearly 3 times (from memory) area averages!

If we did it solely with cattle we need to sell 33 steers at 600 kg - and have bred them ourselves. In fact its quite a bit more complicated than that as cows don't have only bull calves. Turning off the equivalent to 33 steers as steers, vealers, breeding animals and cull cows will be quite a challenge.

One way we'll do it is to diversify back into sheep - so perhaps a third of that meat will be in the form of prime lamb. Different animals on the same farm, at least to the extent that I think we will be doing it, runs very much against the conventional farming wisdom of focussing on one thing and 'getting big or getting out'.

I'm still finding 20 tonnes or output from 57 acres hard to compute. It probably can't be done without either turning the place into a feed lot - or adding to the land base. And I've got at least two ideas on how to do that:

• the first is to use our existing forestry property at Grenville south of Ballarat as an associated property where stock can be moved for part of the year; and
• I'm also very attracted to the concept of co-opting under utilised hobby farm land in our local district and running stock there as well.

Both these ideas effectively add to our available land base - and I think I'll need some element of this to get to 20 tonnes output.

The other question that might reasonably be raised - and indeed raises itself in my mind - is whether we could have renovated our pastures other than the conventional way with tractors, disc ploughs and diesel? Peter Andrews would be sure we could have. I suspect we could to - but why look back? We're part way there.