A Reporoa dairy farmer claims the key to environmental sustainability is to know your farm's environmental footprint and utilise technology.
Todd and Renee Halliday won the Central Plateau Share Milkers of the Year, and also won the Meridian Environmental Sustainability merit award at the National Dairy Industry Awards this year.
They ran a predominantly grass-based system with minimal inputs, milking 520 cows.
Todd said they pride themselves on using minimal manual labour which was prevalent in their production results from intelligent and efficient jersey cows.
All input supplement was fed through the shed, silage was grown on the farm and they wintered their cows on the farm using crops to minimise destruction and keep costs low.
"Overall it's important so staff and cows aren't overworked and everyone can achieve a better work-life balance," he said.
Initially, he said they struggled with the section when entering the awards, as they'd only been on the farm for a year.
"The more we researched it and learnt about our farm, the more we realised what we were actually doing was quite good."
The key to sustainability, he said, was understanding their farm's environmental footprint.
"Once you know how you use your nutrients and resources then you're in a better position to act on it. We have a detailed farm environment plan, we use OverseerFM for accurate data and we now understand our nutrient hotspots and have options to reduce such things as nitrogen use and that sort of thing."
Listen to the full conversation with REX Today hosts Hamish McKay and Dominic George and Todd Halliday above.
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This article was produced by TodayFM in association with the Dairy Industry Awards.
