It has been a tough few years for long-time goat farmer Chris Savage, but for the first time since the downturn, he is looking forward to a rise in payout next season.
In the space of three years, the Dairy Goat Co-operative (DGC) lost half of its sales when their supply to China dropped during Covid-19.
The result was a devastating loss of income for farmers like Savage and his wife Keren, putting them in the position of selling or finding a way to maximise efficiency with less staff. But things could be improving with a more optimistic outlook for next season.
Goats is what Savage has known for most of his life since his parents decided to take a punt and get into the new industry in the early 1980s. Savage was just ten at the time and spent his childhood out on the farm or sleeping in the back of the truck while his parents went to co-operative meetings.
Savage’s parents were one of the first to join the co-operative and things weren’t always easy back then.
“It was easy access to a promising career of goat farming and then it pretty much went in the doldrums for the early 1980s with boom and bust.
“We used to have feral goats out of the bush at Franklin Saleyards and for $100 you could buy any sort of colour and then anything white was like $1000.”
His parents started with a herd of 240 goats who lived outdoors before eventually moving the goats indoors to maximise feed utilisation and production with better conditions.
After a stint in dairy cows after university, Savage came back to the farm in 1996 at 24 years old and gradually took over the running of operations before buying his parents out 15 years ago. He and Keren now milk a herd of 700 goats on the 60ha property.
Goats aren’t quite as easy as cows to satisfy and Savage said it is a demanding job.
“Dairy goats are so fussy because typically people think a goat will eat anything, you know, your roses and your washing off the line, but if you want them to make milk, they have to eat good food.”
With the goats indoors they are fed cut-and-carry grass as well as silage with grain concentrates. These days, Savage mows the grass a couple of times a day, but back in the old days, when the feed was primarily grass, it would be four times a day.
“In those early days, it was an 8 o’clock at night feed, so Keren was in London at the time and I was talking to her on a Telecom $10 talk all you like plan and then i’d have to nip off and feed the goats.”
Despite the demanding work, Savage loves the goats and would take them over cows any day.
“All of my friends are down there in the barn. I walk in there and there’s Mavis, there’s Princess, Sparkles and Nesquik, who’s Sparkles daughter.
“I’m rushing around all day and then I go and get the goats and Princess comes up to me for a cuddle.”
Things have changed a lot for the couple over the past five years. Before Covid, growth in the industry was strong and steady, with payouts reaching peaks of $21.50/per kg.
However, Covid-19 was a game changer, DGC chief executive officer Alastair Hulbert said.
“China was about 55% of our market either directly or indirectly. There were two ways the product went to China: either the Daigou channel, where Chinese students or people bought it off the shelves and shipped it, or directly.
“When Covid came along, all of those travellers and all of those students went back, so we lost 25% of our revenue overnight. The next thing was the regulations to export to China got tightened in 2023 and we lost our registration to ship directly to China.”
At its worst, the payout was at $10.91/per kg of milk and for the current season sits at $12.50 to $14.50/per kg. It was a “double whammy” for farmers, Savage said, because they also restricted the amount of milk farmers could supply to 65% of their shareholding.
The couple dropped their own goat numbers from a peak of 800 down to 600 at their lowest, which was difficult with their infrastructure capable of milking 1000 goats.
They reduced staff from two full-timers to just one younger staff member and Keren has become the full-time milker. They also sold the property that housed their staff, and they are now working on switching to only feeding a silage and grain mix to reduce labour costs and maximise production.
Alongside the goats, in the last few years they have started to rear about 280 autumn calves and have 50 beef cattle to supplement their income.
Hulbert reckoned DGC had lost about twenty farmers because of the drops, but Savage said they decided to push on.
“We’ve worked so blinking hard and we saw that everything we had in financial terms would just disappear if we were to sell. We’d have gotten nothing and we had to trust that someone was going to come and pull things back together and build it up again.”
Hulbert said they are working on getting back into the Chinese market in the next couple of years, but at the moment, they have generated a new income stream through selling whole milk powder alongside infant formula.
Next season, farmers will be able to supply 100% of their shares at a payout range of $14 to $16/per kg of milk solids, with the $14 guaranteed. Hulbert said “things are definitely improving, but we’ve still got a way to go”.
Savage and Keren were cautiously optimistic about the next season, although they would continue to work on improving farm efficiency to manage costs.
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