No-brainer in the certainty water brings

While the numbers don’t look too great for a dairy farmer to sign up to water this year in a low payout, the dam needs to be considered in the longer term, they say. And farmers can look at irrigating a part rather than their whole farm, which will also bring production and financial benefit.

They were responding to recent media comments by about six farmers from the region who say the numbers do not support signing up for the irrigation scheme.

Graham Anderson, of Anderson Ag, a dairy support and mixed farmer in Central Hawkes Bay, has signed up to water from the scheme. He has experience of irrigation and knows its benefits. 

“The biggest thing is it puts [certainty] into the business in terms of reliability of growth given we have more variability with our seasons now,” he says. “It will not necessarily initially be more profitable but as [Central Hawkes Bay farmers] work more wisely with water we will be more profitable. 

“Without doing anything extra and special, in the pastoral sense, it grows the additional feed at the times when you usually run into a deficit.”

This applies not only to summer but early autumn because that affects the following season. They have had prolonged dry periods for the last two-three years when autumn hasn’t “arrived on time,” he says.

“With sensible use of irrigation in our experience you can probably grow 50% more available dry matter with the use of the water and if you convert that back to whatever pastoral business you are in, it will pay the way. It won’t necessarily make any money but it will pay its way from the extra production at the key times,” he says.

“Then it gives you the other strength of being able to have right numbers of stock when your growth is greater than your demand. You can actually carry extra stock for those other times.”

Anderson’s business is dairy support and cash cropping, and they do dry dryland cropping and irrigated cropping so already now use water.  “It certainly brings a lot of options and some of those things haven’t been fully explored in Hawkes Bay,” he says. “In future there will be other uses that evolve from it once we’ve got more water available. 

“My personal take on it is that not every farmer in ‘central’ will want to water his whole farm but if he puts a percentage of his farm into it, that will ensure the rest of his business is pretty predictable. The real strength is that though it will have a cost relative to operating expenses, it would pretty comfortably cover those costs.”

But the farmer puts the certainty into his business rather than just saying ‘it has been a dry year and a bad year’. 

“Rather than having farm revenues up or down 20% depending on the season he could actually move that part of the risk, or some of it, out of the business. That’s where I see irrigation has its real place. 

“Once we have water and are smarter with it that’s when we get into things which become more than a cost benefit.” 

An example in the cropping side of his business: they grow a cash crop and then put behind that a winter feed crop so they get two lots of crop out of that land. 

“Some of those sorts of things come into their own [with irrigation] so you’ve got a good handle on what you are going to produce for the year.”

For dairying, if a farmer knows he can harvest 12 tonnes of grass instead of 8t, his business will be more predictable and productive. Anderson says today it probably doesn’t stack up to pay land values plus water values and get returns on a dairy farm this year. 

“But we’ve got to look more inter-generationally – take more of a long-term overview. Water is widely accepted worldwide as a valuable commodity. I struggle seeing the wastage of it as it disappears out of our rivers, not producing anything and not benefiting anyone on the way.”

Dairy farmer Eliot Cooper, who has signed up for the scheme, says it means he can go from milking 700 cows to 1100 cows and employ two more fulltime people. 

“It’s guaranteed production, that’s what it is,” he says. “It’s a no-brainer and anyone who thinks it doesn’t stack up hasn’t done their homework properly. It’s as simple as that.

“It probably doesn’t stack up if you want to carry on sheep and beef farming but it certainly stacks up for cropping and dairy farming and every other avenue.”

He says a farmer does not need to do whole-farm irrigation but part of the farm. “That would ensure their summer feed,” says Cooper. “The numbers may not work for individual farmers looking at a whole farm changeover to irrigation, but I’m sure if they looked at a section of their farm under irrigation it definitely would work.”