Nigel & Kate Kerin - Yeoval, NSW - 2008 NSW Farmer of the Year
With wife Kate and children Joseph, 14, Ollie, 12 and Georgia, 11, Mr Kerin has in nine years put together a land base of 2630 hectares across five properties in the Yeoval district.
Four are owned by Kerin Agriculture; the fifth is leased.
The business runs 18,000 to 19,000 dry sheep equivalents (DSE), 60 per cent of them sheep. The remainder are trade cattle, and 250ha of country is cropped – mainly pasture cropping.
Seasons had been tough, but the Kerins’ fresh take on their farming business had allowed them to prosper in difficult times. In the past financial year, Mr Kerin said, the business turned 7.1 per cent return on assets managed, purely on production. Add a 10pc capital gain on real estate, and Kerin Agriculture turned a tidy 17 per cent return on assets in a year that only delivered productive rain in the summer quarter.
A product of the PrincipleFocus “Business of Farming” course and Holistic Management training, Mr Kerin – who credits these courses with providing his tertiary education – focuses on groundcover. “I’d rather call it a mulch layer,” he said. “We keep the ground 100 per cent covered all the time, except in our no-till country.
“It’s the only way to manage the sort of rain we’ve been getting – one month of good rain, three months of nothing.”
Maintaining the cover allowed most of the rain they received to enter the soil and stay there. The properties were all rotationally grazed to a carefully-monitored plan to ensure adequate feed was ahead of the stock, and that the mulch layer was sustained. Drought feeding was no longer viable: “The last time I drought fed, it cost us $300,000,” Mr Kerin said.
“But that wasn’t the worst of it – the worst of it was the damage we did to the country. It took us four years to get it back into shape.”
He had another problem with drought feeding: it killed turnover. When in mid-April his grazing charts told him he was about to hit a feed availability trigger point, Mr Kerin de-stocked 6000 DSE and agisted them for 35 cents a DSE on the Cuttaburra floodplain at Bourke.
“It means I’ll be getting $500,000 worth of income in September, rather than watching money going out with no idea when it’s going to stop,” Mr Kerin said.
“The problem with a silo full of grain is that it stops you making decisions.”
Getting rid of breeding stock was a “hard and emotional” but necessary decision if a farmer was committed to maintaining the land base and turnover that underpinned the ecological and financial health of their business.
AUTHOR: MATTHEW CAWOOD
[Click here] to listen to radio interview with Nigel Kerin.
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