Promote • Educate
50 September/October 2019
Farming and horticulture
The Flipps’ cowshed effluent is held
in a 150,000-litre sump, and pumped and
sprayed onto the pasture through a travelling
irrigator over a 34-hectare grazing platform.
The irrigator’s GPS turns the pump off if it
encounters a problem.
“If the weather is too wet, the effluent
gets pumped directly into our two-million-
litre storage tank. However we have the
ability to pump it back to the sump and
irrigator. Usually, anything that goes into the
storage tank is spread over the driest areas of
the farm by slurry tankers,” Mark said.
Mark also applies a certified organic
compost at 2.5 tonnes per hectare.Animal health
Breeding from your most physically sound
cattle and culling those that have poorer
traits is the way good livestock breeding has
always been done. The remaining animals
pass those traits on and tend to breed healthy,
strong, robust calves.
Before converting to organics Mark
hadn’t used penicillin for almost 25 years,
and when he stopped using it he found his
recovery rates didn’t decline.
Mark feels that the best way to prevent animal ill health is to
ensure that they are well fed on a nutritionally balanced diet. And
to achieve ‘well fed’ in an organic system you must have the correct
stocking rate.“Animal health hasn’t become
worse since we changed; it’s simply
been a continuation of what’s always
happened here. There’s nothing
wrong with penicillin; but when we
used it on the cows with bad udders
we usually had to cull them in the
end because they never really came
right,” Mark said.
“When we used penicillin on a
cow that wasn’t too badly affected it
usually came right in a day or so. It
got me thinking; if it didn’t fix the
bad ones, did it even help the not so
bad ones that cleared up? I think for
many ailments time is the healer. But
there is a huge industry built around
the farming industry to provide
‘instant fixes’.”
Any cows that don’t respond
are dried off and put in one of the
pine tree paddocks (with plenty of
pasture growing underneath) for a
month or more before being culled.
Many people who want to
convert to organics often feel that
they need to replace a non-organic
remedy with an organic one. But Mark feels the key is to try to
eliminate many potential ailments through breeding, and by feeding
animals a balanced diet, thus removing the need to use any other
remedies.Above: Friesian/Angus weaner bull calf