With son Harrison moving into the family business and keen to take it forward, the family realised the only limiting factor was the current 26 swing-over dairy — and the opportune purchase of a new farm complete with a 44-unit rotary soon solved that particular problem.
Located just 3.5 km away from the home farm gate, the close proximity of the new farm has been perfect from a management perspective and the transition has been faultless, with the cows adjusting well to the rotary.
“We had spent a lot of time running the numbers and doing the budgets around building a new dairy but when this came up for sale we soon worked out we were much better off buying a farm with a rotary already established.
“The rotary has everything you could possibly want in a dairy including auto draft, and being a one-person shed it has helped reduce our labour costs,” John said.
The Keelys now farm a total of about 730 ha which has given them self-sufficiency, confidence and the capacity to eventually hit their target goal of about 500 cows.
Herd numbers are currently sitting about 360, with the majority of the herd made up of Holsteins with a few Jerseys and Brown Swiss thrown in for good measure.
Cows are calved in autumn and spring and all the young stock are now raised on the home farm, leaving the purchase to fully supporting the milking herd.
With about 120 ha of established lucerne, the new farm had plenty of grazing potential and as a result the business has changed direction slightly, transitioning the herd away from a TMR to a pasture-based system to capitalise on the productive lucerne.
The cows are currently grazing morning and afternoon and are receiving a PMR at night to help balance the feed and reduce issues with bloat, a change from the feed pad system.
While John acknowledges there is a place for both, he said it was much easier to manage a cow's diet with a TMR.
“Our fat test is down significantly from 4.6 to 3.7 per cent compared to this time last year. Down the track we will probably go back to a TMR but there isn't a proper feed pad here and we have a lot of lucerne, so we are currently making the best of what we have,” John said.
There are plans afoot to build a feed pad in the future but John said he had been surprised by the adaptability of the lucerne.
“We had 40 ha of patchy lucerne which we put the heifers on over summer to graze down and clean up; I couldn't believe the recovery once we got a bit of rain. There were some paddocks that hadn’t been watered for a couple of years and you can see the plant still there,” John said.
Some of the poorer lucerne paddocks have been over-sown with Kittyhawk wheat.
The Keely family has been farming in the Cohuna area since 1874 and Harrison is sixth generation.
From a very young age he has always wanted to be a farmer and he spent many of his school holidays trailing around after his dad and pa.
“I have always wanted to be a farmer and I love working with cows,” Harrison said.
Harrison is confident in the future of the industry and is looking forward to building up stock numbers.
He is fortunate to farm in an area where they are quite a few other young farmers taking the same steps into the family farm as he is, and they are looking at forming a young farmers group.
“We catch up socially and talk farming and it has been really good to know there are other young and keen farmers in the same area to share ideas with,” Harrison said.
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