USE of the Techno system to finish bull beef on summer-dry North Canterbury hill country has put Richard and Jane Maxwell in the top 20% of hill country farmers in Canterbury and Marlborough.
The Maxwells’ 670ha Mt Catherine property inland from Cheviot was on show at a recent Meat & Wool NZ Beef Focus Farm field day.
The day was hot and travel was by quad bike on dusty tracks.
While Canterbury hill country is usually the realm of breeding cattle, the Maxwells’ system shows that good returns are possible from intensive finishing once the development work is done.
Travis Jensen of Meat & Wool NZ said that although the Maxwells were now in the top 20%, they were ready to move ahead further. Because of the development done they had a lot more potential than many of the other farmers in that category.
The Techno System is a way of close subdivision using electric fences. The Maxwells have divided 134ha of the hill country into 27 narrow lanes each of about one kilometre length and 5ha in area.
The lanes are divided into about 60 distinct cells for intensive grazing, each with access to stock water via a water line and micro troughs.
Mr Maxwell said his father bought the property in 1966, and when the Maxwells took over in 1983 it was running 4000su of sheep and beef, but there was no beef finishing.
He liked working with cattle, and they started the shift to an all beef system 10 years ago, with the arrival of the first Friesian calves. Friesian bull calves are used because they are readily available through the dairy industry, and there is a recognised margin for both the rearer and the finisher.
In North Canterbury, with its dry summers and cold winters, good pasture growth can only be relied on for about three months a year, and growth at any other time is a bonus.
The aim to intensively rearing bulls on this country is to maintain them through winter, and then pack on the growth during the period of rapid grass growth in spring.
“In a normal year, we’ve achieved 450g a day liveweight gain during the winter, and typically 2kg a day in spring to the end of January,” he says.
The one-year bulls are managed under an extensive grazing regime on the farm, with forage crops available for the last two years, before they enter the intensive Techno system as rising two-year-olds.
A key to meeting the target slaughter weights in this area is the acceptance of slower liveweight gain than could be achieved in areas of better pasture growth, so that slaughter is at 27 months, rather than 15 months. Nitrogen is used to improve the feed supply.
Another important factor is a totally disciplined approach to rationing pasture to the bulls in the Techno system over winter, followed by a high level of feeding in spring.
If the season is poor, the Maxwells have a fallback position of selling their bulls as stores if they fail to make the target weights.
Bulls in their Techno set-up are stocked at three to the hectare and they are normally run in mobs of 15.
During the winter rotation one cell of pasture lasts the bulls two days.
In early spring, they are allowed about three cells every two days. At present, they are getting six cells.
Previously, they have taken on 500 to 560 calves each autumn, but this year they took on 465 spring-born bulls and will later add about 100 autumn-born calves, which they hope to bring up to slaughter weights by 18 months.
This year’s rising two-year-olds came into the Techno system at 270kg, about 100kg lighter than in a typical year. The targeted slaughter weight is 580kg to 620kg (carcase weight 300kg to 310kg).
“Once they get over 620kg behaviour becomes more of a problem,” Mr Maxwell says.
One of the drawbacks of the Techno system is the daily shifting of fences, but in compensation working days are a lot shorter than on normal sheep and beef farms.
Mrs Maxwell: “The whole skill of management is when you speed up and slow down to maintain pasture quality and quantity. That depends on personal management.”
Mr Travis said that on a production per hectare basis, the Maxwells’ operation “`blows others out of the water”.
He said the stocking rate of eight to nine su/ha was “huge”.
Fertiliser application was higher than for most other hill country farms, but there was no supplementary feeding and animal health spending was half normal.
The rate of return on total farm capital for the past two years had been 1.5% and 0.6% for the top 20% of hill country farms in Marlborough and Canterbury.
For the Maxwells’ Mt Catherine property during the same period it had been 1.6% both years.
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