MAKING money from dairying these days involves keeping a lid on costs and Max Saul, Taylors Arm, credits his father Leeton for being innovative in that regard.
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Late summer calls for planting rye grass as a winter supplement and a Mid North Coast dairy farmer can go about that task one of two ways: he can spend a lot of money on equipment or he can work creatively to get the job done for less.
Leeton Saul was the first in the district to buy a rotary hoe. He’d seen too many freshly ploughed alluvial paddocks wash downstream in an autumn flood, sloughing its freshly sowed rye grass with the rest of the floatsam.
So he modified his rotary hoe by cutting the tips off the blades, thereby tilling the soil in strips. There remained enough roots in the ground to hold soil together either side of bare, churned soil which readily accepted rye seed.
Max was three years old when the family moved from the floodplains of Smithtown to the hills of Utungun where they could escape the terrible inundations of the Macleay – 1949 being the worst.
In the hill country Mr Saul witnessed an era when farmers worked less and had more time for things like fishing – and talking on the verandah.
“I often wish it would go back to those days,” he says with a sigh.
Max, who married the daughter of a Victorian broadacre cropper (Bev’s grandmother is one of four people painted upon the Brim silos) worked hard to follow in his father’s footsteps, keeping costs down and profits up - despite a global glut in milk products.
As an example, Max started to improve on his father’s modification to the rotary hoe by adding a disc spreader, chain driven off a geared wheel on the ground which broadcast seed at the same time.
These days he uses a Vicon spreader driven by a variable flow hydraulic motor to plant about 200 acres of rye grass each Autumn.
The beauty of his strip mulching system is that Kikuyu is well established come spring so there is less lag time in converting winter pastures to summer paddocks.
There is a final step: newly broadcast rye must be rolled so the seed gets good contact with freshly exposed soil.
By comparison a farmer using a $50,000 pneumatic seeder would first have to spray out his summer grasses with glyphosate to give the winter rye a chance.
In Max’s case a second hand rotary hoe costs $8000 plus a bit of time involved in trimming its blades. With this system there is no need to spray herbicides and Kikuyu is retained.