IT only took a little bit of maths for Inman Valley dairyfarmer Tristan Mulhern to realise how much money he was losing in feed wastage.
In the past 10 years, the Mulhern family - Tristan, his wife Dolly, father Rob and mother Lyn - had tried a number of different things to reduce feed wastage.
Farming Hilltop View Dairy, the Mulherns had tried everything from using a Waste-Not feeding system on treated rubble, where they found their cows were still not getting full feed intake, to buying a mixer wagon to bring in other commodities besides hay and silage and feeding that out under fence lines.
But about two years ago, Tristan did the figures on what it would cost and how much wastage they could cut if the family was to build a feedpad and feed a partial mixed ration or total mixed ration.
"For about five months of the year, we were wasting between 30 per cent and 40pc feeding under fence lines and for the other two or three months we were feeding we were wasting 10-15pc," Tristan said.
"Just saving 20pc overall for eight months was working on $250 a tonne of dry matter and I worked out we could save ourselves about $90,000 a year."
The Mulherns milk 520 Holsteins under a year-round calving system across 275 hectares of dryland on sandy glacier, acidic, non-wetting soils with the help of four full-time labour units, supplying milk to United Dairy Power.
Tristan did his research on feedpads by visiting the Hurrell family's set-up at Torrens Vale and the Altmann family's set-up at Murray Bridge to see how much they had saved in wastage when they switched over to a feedpad system.
"More and more people are starting to look into it because it gives you more control over how you operate," Tristan said.
"You can't control milk prices or input costs, but you can control what you feed to get the maximum yield out of your cows."
The timing of building a feedpad worked out well resources-wise, with work beginning in January 2013 when the housing industry was tough, so materials such as concrete and steel were all bought at a reasonable price.
"Had I waited another year it would have cost me another $100,000, so the opportunity was there to take advantage of a flat housing market," Tristan said.
But many dairyfarmers remember the 2012-13 season as an extremely challenging one, with a low milk price and high feed costs, meaning most farmers were trying to tighten their belts and investing in new infrastructure was relegated to the back of their minds.
"When we started building the pad, I had confidence in the money we were going to save by having one," Tristan said.
"The way I saw it, we were going to keep dairying for at least another five years and couldn't afford to keep losing the money we were by wasting feed.
"It is even more of an eye-opener in a bad year when the hay price is high too because then you're losing more money.
"It was a bit of a gamble, but we had good financial backing from the banks."
While it should have taken about four months to complete, bad weather and other hold-ups meant the project took about 11 months and was finished two weeks before Christmas, with the cows having their inaugural run on the new pad on Christmas Day.
In its completion, the feedpad measures 190 metres long by 15 metres wide - enough room for 550 cows.
Tristan said it proved to be a success straight away in reducing feed wastage.
"That day the cows first went on the feedpad, I took out 20pc of the forage that would normally go in the feed ration but production stayed the same and the cows were still full," he said.
* Full report in Stock Journal, February 6, 2014 issue.
