Published by John Deere, May 2017
Meet Leo Donkers, a proud dairy farmer operating a sustainable business on the Canterbury Plains at the foot hills of the Southern Alps of New Zealand.
This intensive farming operation is reliant on high quality pasture, produced using advanced and reliable equipment and machinery this makes them green and yellow. This farming legacy is built on hard work and dedicated to environmental sustainability.
Published by Business Rural, Autumn 2016
All the advantages of scale and experience made Central Canterbury’s Camden Group an attractive career choice for Lincoln University Agricultural graduate Robin Hornblow.
Published by Stuff, October 2015
Dairy farmers say they took a long-term view when investing in the Central Plains Water scheme, even though they already had access to irrigation water from aquifers.
Water started flowing in early September in stage one of CPW covering 23,000 hectares at Te Pirita and Hororata. Sourced from the Rakaia River at high flows, water travels down a 17km headrace canal before flowing into 132km of underground pipe which delivers irrigation water to individual farms. Many farms in this area, particularly dairy units, were already irrigating from wells, but have chosen to switch to the community scheme, even though in some cases it is more costly.
Best economic benefits come from renewing underperforming pasture early in the season – simply because early sown pastures spend less time as ‘poor’ producers and more time as ‘good’ producers.
An example of this is from Willsden Farm, owned by the Camden Group at Te Pirita (presented at field day 21 October 2014) which showed Tabu Italian ryegrass spray/drilled a month earlier in spring to grow 0.8 t DM/ha more, with an extra value of $160/ha (assuming a $3.85/kgMS payout).
Published in Journal of New Zealand Grasslands January 2015 – GA Kerr, J Brown, T Kilday, DR Stevens
This paper presents a case study using a cost/benefit approach to pasture renewal for Willsden dairy farm in Canterbury, which has renewed 28% and 38% of the property in the last 2 seasons.
This case study shows there is a significant opportunity for dairy farmers to profit from better use of weekly pasture cover information to plan pasture renewal, to better assess the success of any renewal, and for pasture management software developers to provide automated analysis options to support a cost/benefit pasture renewal strategy.
Published by AgriHQ, October 2014
In the next four months Canterbury dairy farmer Leo Donkers will regrass 40% of the area across his three farms. Anne Lee takes a look at how that’s possible and what he’s learned from last season’s foray into this massive exercise.
Last season Leo Donkers and the team at his family-owned Camden Group embarked on an ambitious plan to regrass the entire 800ha of the milking platform across their three pivot- and spray-irrigated Te Pirita and Bankside dairy farms in just three years.
Published by Farmers Weekly, November 2008
Tony and Anna Wakelin are young farm managers on a decisive pathway to land ownership, now looking to make the next step in their journey and hoping to go 50:50 sharemilking at the end of this season.
Since the outset of their dairying careers just five years ago they’ve worked strategically, making decisions based on whether the outcomes would help them in their determined quest.
