A drive to be sustainable through innovation, efficiency and seasonal resilience has seen Southbrook dairy farmers Peter and Jess Garratt awarded a $100,000 grant.
Part of the inaugural round of the Woolworths Dairy Innovation Fund, the Garratt family's operation was one of four Queensland dairy businesses to receive grants.
Farming in partnership with his parents Ross and Robyn on the property that has belonged to the family for 95 years, Mr Garratt currently milks 225 Holstein cows.
Supplying Lactalis for the Pauls brand, they produce about 2.5 million litres of milk a year, or 7500 litres of milk a day.
"We are really excited to have the opportunity to make some of our dreams a reality," Mr Garratt said of receiving the funding.
Several projects formed part of their application, including the installation of automated grain batching.
"We're going to add an automatic batching system to our existing grain processing plant which will allow us to batch a daily amount of corn, wheat and barley into the silo ready to go," he said.
"That will be automated on scales and you can put in a recipe of what you want of each ingredient and then when it comes to dispensing that out, it's ready to go each day when the feed mix is ready to get done.
"That's going to be a real labour saver and a time saver, we're not having to stand there and manually dispense each product so that will be pretty good, and it will ensure our cows receive a correctly-balanced diet."
They'll also be incorporating a feeding management system that links the feed mixer to the software that balances their diets.
"We can communicate between the office where we're batching our diets and the feed mixing tractor or the loader so we can make changes to the diets as you go through in real time," Mr Garratt said.
"Not that that's done real often, but it then gives me feedback from the management side of things how accurately my staff are following the diets, it gives me reports on whether certain products are being underfed or overfed across the space of a week, or a month, or a year."
An effluent recycling system will allow them to recycle the effluent from their washdown facilities.
"We'll re-use the water for washing down again and recovering the fertiliser, the solid part of the effluent, to use on fertilising our paddocks, which will save a fair bit of time from how we're currently doing it," Mr Garratt said.
"We will also be providing motion detecting comfort brushes and a ventilation system to keep our herd healthy and happy all year round."
With the dairy industry having faced a rough few years, Mr Garratt said innovation is 'absolutely critical' to sustainability.
"Time is so precious these days and we've got technology available to us so we need to be embracing that and incorporating that into our business," he said.
"Especially where we're doing the things every day of the year, if we can bring a level of automation and innovation technology into those areas, it's going to make us efficient and efficiency means we're going to be sustainable and we're going to be here for many years to come.
"If my kids want to come home [to the farm], I definitely want to build a business that has created an opportunity for them to come back and we can further expand or diversify into other avenues of dairy or other parts of ag if we wish to."
Important investment not a quick fix
While receiving the grant is 'really important and a pretty big thing' for the family, Mr Garratt said the Woolworths investment shouldn't be confused with 'it being a fix for the industry'.
"I still think we have a long way to go with regards to the retail price of products," he said.
"They're still selling milk for less than what they were in 2011, but I think one of the key things I recognise within this whole thing is Woolworths being the largest retailer in Australia now realise that they have a role to play in how farms perform.
"What they've done at a retail level, they used to think was a separate issue to farmgate price or farm profitability, but I think they've realised the two things are pretty closely tied together.
"This is a really good move in the right direction that they do realise they've got a role to play in the future of our industry and they're prepared to have a go at something that's not been done at this scale before, and I think it's really positive for our industry what they've done."
The Dairy Innovation Fund will invest a total of $5 million in around 60 businesses over the next three years, with yearly grant application rounds open to all dairy farmers in the Woolworths supply chain, including those supplying vendor brands.
