Aiming to be the best in the world

It stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal and while the term wasn’t used at the Lincoln University Foundation Farmer of the Year field day earlier this month, it could very well have been.

“We want to be the best multi-farm dairy business in the world,” Synlait Farms chief executive Juliet Maclean told the crowd in her introduction.

As the day progressed six “pillars” of the business strategy to achieve that were relayed in six workshops: cows, grass, people, profit, environment, and innovation.

“If the things we are looking at doing… don’t fit into one of those key areas then it’s likely we shouldn’t be committing any time to them,” said Maclean.

Michael Woodward, Synlait’s contract milker on its original property Robindale, presented the cow pillar where the core aim is to have the herd producing it’s liveweight in milksolids every season.

With an average liveweight of 475kg and historical average output of about 400kgMS/head “we have a fair way to go,” he acknowledged.

However, it seems strides towards that 1:1 milk to liveweight goal have already been made through better body condition scoring and action, and splitting herds. For example, heifers have their own mobs.

“They always struggle up against the big eaters.”

Making a late-calving mob – those due in October - at the start of winter so they have at least 90 days dry and are in “fantastic condition” come calving has also paid dividends: 55% are back in the early calving bracket for next season.

Mixed age cows are split into high and low production herds throughout the season with the mobs redrafted after every herd test to make most efficient use of feed. The opportunity to transfer cows between farms if there are surpluses and deficits on different properties is also taken.

Supplement use isn’t high: Woodward told Rural News this season they’ll use about 350kgDM/cow in total: silage and grain. Despite that modest input over grass, and a budget of 418kgMS/cow, “this season we’re on track for 460kgMS,” he told the field day.

It’s not all about quantity across the farms either: running an A2 herd, and other herds producing specialist milks for (now separate business) Synlait Milk, mean cow-driven quality traits add value to the volume.

Woodward says he believes this season’s output is “a direct result of that body condition scoring”, reflecting on last season’s February shift of anything below BCS four onto a 16-hour milking roster, which saw them gain 0.6 of a condition score in three months.

With herds in even better condition this year, “next year I think we’ll really see a huge rise in per cow performance,” he added.

Weekly feed budgets for next year are already drawn up, as Woodward’s colleague Brett Walter explained in the grass workshop. These are monitored weekly against actual covers throughout the season, and even more frequently during spring.

Walter outlined the detail that goes into their spring pasture planning, and stressed the importance of getting it right so cows hit their potential peak, and consequent season-long production.

“It’s about doing the planning and putting it into action and monitoring.”

Maclean threw that back at the audience.

“The Synlait challenge to you is if you’re not using a spring rotation planner now, have a go at it and let know if you have a better spring because of it.”

In the following innovation session, she threw down an even bigger gauntlet to the whole of the New Zealand agricultural industry.

“If we don’t start innovating more effectively New Zealand’s advantage is going to slip away… For us to be the B team is not good enough. We’ve got to be the A team. We’ve got to be there or we will die.”

An example of innovation by Synlait presented on the day is a trailer-mounted herring-bone stall for teat-sealing heifers away from the home farms.

“When you’ve got 2500 heifers away teat-sealing isn’t very practical.”

However, the trailer solved the problem, allowing them to do 250 on a standard day, or over 300 at a push. The result is when they enter the herd mastitis incidence has been slashed from 19.5% to 4%.

While that’s a successful innovation that’s paying dividends, Maclean said she’s disappointed that when they analysed what they’d done over the years, they could only identify 20 such ideas.

“Only 20 in 12 years isn’t a great hit rate… we’ve now set ourselves a target to come up with ideas and act on them much more frequently than that, or we’re not going to be the A team.”

Looking off farm, and even outside agriculture, will prime the ideas and innovations pipeline, she suggests.

“Sometimes we all get a little bit insular.”

Involving the whole farm team is also key.

“Great ideas frequently don’t come from the leaders of the business... making sure we mix enough with the people all the way through the business is really important.”

Synlait livestock and innovation manager, Dave Campbell, relayed a similar message in the ‘environment’ session, which he admitted was taking a “slightly different angle” to what visitors might have expected under that heading.

“I’m going to talk about the work place environment. That’s really important to us at Synlait Farms.”

Individuals are rarely to blame for problems that occur: it is the systems and structures in which they’re placed that are the root cause of things going wrong.

“We don’t go and blame; we go and ask ‘why?’. And ‘what can we do to rectify the problem?’… It is about the system and the leadership of that system. Let’s not blame the people but examine the system and work out how to make it better.”

In the ‘people’ session, Synlait’s people and performance manager Josie McKenzie illustrated the key difference between telling people what to do, and telling them the why and the how.

“People don’t buy ‘what’ you do; they buy ‘why’ you do it.”