Senior farm systems specialist

Head of Regional Teams

Enhance team communication by getting to know the different personalities within your team, leading to a more efficient and productive workplace.

Heat stress can negatively affect dairy cows in many ways. DairyNZ is researching methods of identifying when heat stress might occur to help farmers manage their herds and lessen its impact.

BCS training is open to all but is recommended prior to assessment. It will guide you through theory and practical hands-on learning.

Backing gates are tools used in the dairy yard to improve cow flow into the dairy, leading to more efficient milking. Moving the gate little and often takes up space in the yard, while still providing cows enough room is important.

Calf scours, or diarrhoea in calves, can be caused by multiple factors and if untreated, can lead to severe dehydration and even death. This disease disrupts the normal water movement in the digestive tract, leading to water and salt loss.

Managing your cows during the transition from pregnancy to lactation helps prevent diseases and optimises seasonal performance. This period sees the cow's nutrient requirements spike but intake doesn't match up, leading to negative energy balance.

DairyNZ is leading a potentially game-changing catchment project to test the benefits of plantain in local pastures.

Crunching the numbers before spending money is critical. Use the Investment Calculator to work out what it might cost and what your return could be.

Carrying out a ‘bucket test’ will help determine the application depth, rate and how uniformly water is being applied during an irrigation event.

Use this calculator to measure the depth of effluent applied from a variety of effluent systems.

A monthly cashflow budget takes your annual cash budget and spreads your income and expenses across the year giving you a month-by-month basis picture of expected income and what you can anticipate spending.

A monthly cashflow budget takes your annual cash budget and spreads your income and expenses across the year giving you a month-by-month basis picture of expected income and what you can anticipate spending.

The milk on/dry off tool is designed to help test scenarios and make informed decisions around the cost of continuing to milk all or part of the herd into late lactation under a feed shortage situation.

To test the robustness of the current Fertility Breeding Value (BV) and identify new measures of fertility, we generated a unique herd of heifer calves that had a 10-point difference in their Fertility BV (-5% vs +5%).

The Pillars of a new dairy system is an eight-year DairyNZ-led research programme that aims to provide management and genetic solutions to improve cow health, fertility and longevity.