A new addition to the Moorepark Open Day for 2025 was the ‘business of farming’ forum. Chaired by the Irish Farmers Journal, the forum was a discussion centre for ways to reduce costs of production, grow the farm business and explore future farm system requirements. The following is a summary of some of the key points.
No change based on milk price
Kiwi farmers Greg and Rachel Roadley travelled to Ireland for the open day and shared their perspective on opportunities to cut costs and grow the business. The Roadleys are milking over 5,000 cows across seven dairy farms in Canterbury, running a low-cost but highly profitable system. Greg was asked what will he do if milk price falls over the coming months;
“We always farm for low cost. So we only focus on what we can control inside the farm gate.
“So when I’m doing a financial budget, I’m pretty ambivalent about what the milk price is and we’ll actually do a budget on the long-run milk price rather than what Fonterra might be forecasting. We don’t flex our level of expenditure up based on a high milk price. We will have levers that if the price drops during the season that we can pull, and that will be around some P and K inputs and some animal health spending, but we run a bare bones budget year on year irrespective of milk price.
“Our objective is low cost and if milk price is high it’s great because we bank a super margin. If the milk price is low we’re still profitable,” he said.
The Roadleys set the milking platform stocking rate based on the summer growth rates. Greg said that the average stocking rate is 3.6 cows/ha based on a typical growth rate of 65kg/ha/day. Under centre-pivot irrigation, 190kg N/ha, 20% clover content and plenty of New Zealand sunshine these growth rates are very consistent in Canterbury, unlike in Ireland. Furthermore, cows are wintered off the farm for 60 days in winter so making silage from summer surplus is not a requirement. Asked if they would increase stocking rate on the existing farm in advance of expansion, Greg said that is something they would never do;
“We would not compromise an individual dairy unit by driving stocking rate up. Every farm is a stand alone business unit and it’s got to be profitable year on year so we will just buy more cows if we purchase a new farm.”
Northern Ireland nutrient action programme
Brian McCracken milks 260 cows with his wife Lynne and son Ewan in Co Down.
The farm has bucked the trend in Northern Ireland having switched over 20 years ago from autumn calving to spring calving.
Calving start date is late February in order to maximise the amount of milk produced from grazed grass.
Asked if the grass-based system is less exposed to the proposed new rules on nutrients Brian said;
“Yes, absolutely, I’ve no issues and no worries. Spring calving in Northern Ireland is like an endangered species; there are very few of them left.
“The biggest problem for Northern Ireland is the phosphorus balance.
“Over-stocked small parcels of land with high production and high input feeds. Some are profitable but a whole lot more are not profitable. Our farm will be fine but the biggest challenge will be to maintain conacre, that will the biggest limiting factor.”
The importance of benchmarking
On the subject of benchmarking costs of production, Rachel Roadley said they put a lot of effort into making sure they are benchmarking their figures with the right people.
“We do a lot of benchmarking and we pick the people that we want to benchmark with.
“We pick people that we know who have similar cost structures to ourselves and the same kind of system. We are quite competitive I guess between ourselves.
“For example, say they have a lower animal health cost than us, we want to know why theirs is lower and learn from them,” Rachel said, before Greg elaborated further;
“We will benchmark on a cost per kilogram of milk solid so that gets around any variation in per hectare production.
“We’re on track this year to be around $4.10/kg MS (€2.10/kg MS) which is farm working expenses excluding wages of management, depreciation and debt servicing.
“The way we run our system is that we have a big focus on pasture harvested, but we also have a really strong focus on the real boring, unsexy act of finding small savings.
“We focus on saving small cents per kilo of milk solids and in our experience there is a lot of power in that.
“Saving 5% in every cost category really compounds up and even for our business in one year, within each cost line there are small savings if we really look for them, so challenging conventional wisdom is really important.
“I do a lot of; ‘this is what we used last year, can I do the same with 5% less’.
“I could give you a thousand examples such as using 70g of magnesium per cow per day, can we do that with 65g, are the lights in the dairy shed getting turned off just as it gets light or are they left on for an extra hour, are the hot water cylinder settings right?
“There’s a million small savings but they really compound over time.
“It’s pretty boring and unsexy and it’s no silver bullet but by challenging conventional wisdom we have been able to keep our costs really low,” Greg said.
Dealing with adverse events
When asked how they deal with a grass deficit due to a lack of moisture or rainfall, Greg says their approach is to continue to focus on costs;
“The first thing we would do is one grazing round of the farm with restricted dry matter intakes so we would compromise production.
A general view of the large crowd that arranged the Moorepark 25 Open Day. \ Donal O' Leary
“Then we would look at early culling of cows, cows on once a day milking and any other tools we possibly could to reduce demand [while not using supplement].
“The first we would do is grin and bear it for a full grazing round which buys us 30 days before taking more radical action. Our philosophy is to save cash and ignore production.”
Mayo farmer Sean O’Donnell is milking 200 cows across two milking platforms near Ballina. Sean says he puts away 15% of the milk payment each month into a deposit account so it is out of reach of the current account and can’t be easily spent. He says this puts him into a “cash-is-tight” mindset which means he has to focus on managing cashflow and costs during the year.
The bank of cash built up in the deposit account can then be used for more strategic purposes.
Opportunities and figures
Katie O’Toole and her partner David Fogarty are equity partners in a large leased farm in Kilkenny. Prior to going farming in their own right, Katie worked as a Teagasc adviser and David worked as a farm manager but they were keen to one day own their own cows. Katie explained how they assessed opportunities;
“A key thing for us was the figures. We passed by multiple opportunities to get to where we are today. We had an excel sheet, we put the numbers into it and the figures aren’t going to lie. There were some very hard decisions for us when passing over farms as we were dying to go milking cows on our own. There were times where one of us might have wanted to do it even if the figures didn’t stack up. Whether it is the price of the land lease, the capital infrastructure that had to be spent or the type of stock that were there and had to be purchased, they are all factors to be considered,” she said.
Brendan Muldowney is a Kilkenny man operating multiple farms in Scotland, a business which has grown significantly over the last decade.
He was asked how he deals with setbacks;
“Expect them, they are going to come. We’ve got knocked down plenty of times so they are going to come. You’re going to get rejected and lots of other unexpected things will happen. I suppose the difference between the people who can make it and those that can’t is that those that make it can block out the noise of the day.
“When they get slapped on the face they’ll get up and go again,” he said.
A new addition to the Moorepark Open Day for 2025 was the ‘business of farming’ forum. Chaired by the Irish Farmers Journal, the forum was a discussion centre for ways to reduce costs of production, grow the farm business and explore future farm system requirements. The following is a summary of some of the key points.
No change based on milk price
Kiwi farmers Greg and Rachel Roadley travelled to Ireland for the open day and shared their perspective on opportunities to cut costs and grow the business. The Roadleys are milking over 5,000 cows across seven dairy farms in Canterbury, running a low-cost but highly profitable system. Greg was asked what will he do if milk price falls over the coming months;
“We always farm for low cost. So we only focus on what we can control inside the farm gate.
“So when I’m doing a financial budget, I’m pretty ambivalent about what the milk price is and we’ll actually do a budget on the long-run milk price rather than what Fonterra might be forecasting. We don’t flex our level of expenditure up based on a high milk price. We will have levers that if the price drops during the season that we can pull, and that will be around some P and K inputs and some animal health spending, but we run a bare bones budget year on year irrespective of milk price.
“Our objective is low cost and if milk price is high it’s great because we bank a super margin. If the milk price is low we’re still profitable,” he said.
The Roadleys set the milking platform stocking rate based on the summer growth rates. Greg said that the average stocking rate is 3.6 cows/ha based on a typical growth rate of 65kg/ha/day. Under centre-pivot irrigation, 190kg N/ha, 20% clover content and plenty of New Zealand sunshine these growth rates are very consistent in Canterbury, unlike in Ireland. Furthermore, cows are wintered off the farm for 60 days in winter so making silage from summer surplus is not a requirement. Asked if they would increase stocking rate on the existing farm in advance of expansion, Greg said that is something they would never do;
“We would not compromise an individual dairy unit by driving stocking rate up. Every farm is a stand alone business unit and it’s got to be profitable year on year so we will just buy more cows if we purchase a new farm.”
Northern Ireland nutrient action programme
Brian McCracken milks 260 cows with his wife Lynne and son Ewan in Co Down.
The farm has bucked the trend in Northern Ireland having switched over 20 years ago from autumn calving to spring calving.
Calving start date is late February in order to maximise the amount of milk produced from grazed grass.
Asked if the grass-based system is less exposed to the proposed new rules on nutrients Brian said;
“Yes, absolutely, I’ve no issues and no worries. Spring calving in Northern Ireland is like an endangered species; there are very few of them left.
“The biggest problem for Northern Ireland is the phosphorus balance.
“Over-stocked small parcels of land with high production and high input feeds. Some are profitable but a whole lot more are not profitable. Our farm will be fine but the biggest challenge will be to maintain conacre, that will the biggest limiting factor.”
The importance of benchmarking
On the subject of benchmarking costs of production, Rachel Roadley said they put a lot of effort into making sure they are benchmarking their figures with the right people.
“We do a lot of benchmarking and we pick the people that we want to benchmark with.
“We pick people that we know who have similar cost structures to ourselves and the same kind of system. We are quite competitive I guess between ourselves.
“For example, say they have a lower animal health cost than us, we want to know why theirs is lower and learn from them,” Rachel said, before Greg elaborated further;
“We will benchmark on a cost per kilogram of milk solid so that gets around any variation in per hectare production.
“We’re on track this year to be around $4.10/kg MS (€2.10/kg MS) which is farm working expenses excluding wages of management, depreciation and debt servicing.
“The way we run our system is that we have a big focus on pasture harvested, but we also have a really strong focus on the real boring, unsexy act of finding small savings.
“We focus on saving small cents per kilo of milk solids and in our experience there is a lot of power in that.
“Saving 5% in every cost category really compounds up and even for our business in one year, within each cost line there are small savings if we really look for them, so challenging conventional wisdom is really important.
“I do a lot of; ‘this is what we used last year, can I do the same with 5% less’.
“I could give you a thousand examples such as using 70g of magnesium per cow per day, can we do that with 65g, are the lights in the dairy shed getting turned off just as it gets light or are they left on for an extra hour, are the hot water cylinder settings right?
“There’s a million small savings but they really compound over time.
“It’s pretty boring and unsexy and it’s no silver bullet but by challenging conventional wisdom we have been able to keep our costs really low,” Greg said.
Dealing with adverse events
When asked how they deal with a grass deficit due to a lack of moisture or rainfall, Greg says their approach is to continue to focus on costs;
“The first thing we would do is one grazing round of the farm with restricted dry matter intakes so we would compromise production.
A general view of the large crowd that arranged the Moorepark 25 Open Day. \ Donal O' Leary
“Then we would look at early culling of cows, cows on once a day milking and any other tools we possibly could to reduce demand [while not using supplement].
“The first we would do is grin and bear it for a full grazing round which buys us 30 days before taking more radical action. Our philosophy is to save cash and ignore production.”
Mayo farmer Sean O’Donnell is milking 200 cows across two milking platforms near Ballina. Sean says he puts away 15% of the milk payment each month into a deposit account so it is out of reach of the current account and can’t be easily spent. He says this puts him into a “cash-is-tight” mindset which means he has to focus on managing cashflow and costs during the year.
The bank of cash built up in the deposit account can then be used for more strategic purposes.
Opportunities and figures
Katie O’Toole and her partner David Fogarty are equity partners in a large leased farm in Kilkenny. Prior to going farming in their own right, Katie worked as a Teagasc adviser and David worked as a farm manager but they were keen to one day own their own cows. Katie explained how they assessed opportunities;
“A key thing for us was the figures. We passed by multiple opportunities to get to where we are today. We had an excel sheet, we put the numbers into it and the figures aren’t going to lie. There were some very hard decisions for us when passing over farms as we were dying to go milking cows on our own. There were times where one of us might have wanted to do it even if the figures didn’t stack up. Whether it is the price of the land lease, the capital infrastructure that had to be spent or the type of stock that were there and had to be purchased, they are all factors to be considered,” she said.
Brendan Muldowney is a Kilkenny man operating multiple farms in Scotland, a business which has grown significantly over the last decade.
He was asked how he deals with setbacks;
“Expect them, they are going to come. We’ve got knocked down plenty of times so they are going to come. You’re going to get rejected and lots of other unexpected things will happen. I suppose the difference between the people who can make it and those that can’t is that those that make it can block out the noise of the day.
“When they get slapped on the face they’ll get up and go again,” he said.
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