Gareth Hale Continues a 160-Year Dairy Legacy
Hale is the latest member of a farming family whose dairy history began with his great-grandfather in Taranaki in the mid-1850s. His grandfather continued dairying in the Waikato from the early 1900s. Hale has spent the past 25 years developing the family business in South and Mid-Canterbury, with the stated aim of leaving a business that his children can continue.
The enterprise started with roughly 160 hectares and 500 Jersey cows. It now operates 125 hectares and milks approximately 2,600 cows over three farms. In addition to dairying, the business cultivates about 400 hectares annually for winter feed, barley silage, maize, grass silage, kale and other crops.
The farms target production of 500-550kg of milk solids per cow. Hale says the result depends on feed quality and on completing fieldwork within narrow seasonal windows. Crops must be planted on time, fertiliser applied when conditions permit and silage cut at the point of highest quality. Double cropping creates additional timing pressure: when one crop is removed, the tractor is expected to be ready to prepare the paddock for the next.
John Deere 6 Series tractors are used throughout the business, ranging from smaller models for dairy work to higher-horsepower machines for heavier cultivation. Hale says maintenance costs fell to about one-quarter of their previous level after the business changed to John Deere. With a workforce of 20, he said machinery downtime creates a direct cost when equipment is unavailable at the start of a job.
Guidance technology, including GreenStar and AutoTrac, is used to improve field accuracy and limit overlap in cultivation and cropping. Hale also uses the John Deere Operations Center to bring together information on machines, jobs and paddocks. The system records data such as fuel consumption, idling time, area covered, service histories and machine alerts. Hale said it should provide more precise figures on fuel use and other real-time operating data.
The local Drummond and Etheridge dealership is another part of the machinery support arrangement. Neil Paver, its Large Ag Sales Specialist, said Operations Center information allows the dealership to diagnose problems more quickly before arriving at a work site. Hale said future developments in dairy farming would include more efficient GPS use, variable-rate fertiliser spreading and variable-rate spraying, with the objective of reducing costs. He said the technology could change while the business’s stated goal remained to create an operation that could continue for another 160 years.
