But the demand has left suppliers scrambling to deliver as promptly as farmers might want, with a two-week wait compare with the usual two days.
Matamata stock food supplier Swap Stockfoods confirmed demand for all types of concentrate feed and not just palm kernel had picked up in the last two weeks.
The level of palm kernel imports has largely remained the same over the past four years.
«We’ve got to the point where it’s so wet. For a lot of people, it’s not that they’re drastically short of pasture, it’s just so waterlogged so it’s a pasture utilisation issue,» manager Morgan Swap said.
One of the other factors behind the spike in palm kernel use was the extra income in farmers’ pockets.
Suppliers were «a bit stretched» to deliver but demand might taper off in October. Swap said all supplements were in demand, including dried distiller grains and pellets.
Federated Farmers dairy group chairman Chris Lewis said farmers were not worried about the cost of the supplements – «they just want to get through calving».
«This year’s calving is very different to anything I’ve experienced in the last 20 years. It’s a lot wetter, there’s less sunlight, and that changes the nutrient composition of pasture.»
«When you’ve come through bad weather like we’ve had in the last few months, it’s not in your planning so you go to the handy option which is to truck in a little palm kernel for a couple of weeks. It puts you in a difficult spot,» Lewis said.
Fonterra said in its latest Global Dairy Update that New Zealand milk collection was 2 per cent down in August this year compared to last, largely because of challenging wet weather.
Meanwhile Statistics NZ figures show, despite reports farmers are using less palm kernel, they appear to have as much appetite for the supplement as ever.
To the year ended June, 1.9 million tonnes was imported, the second highest amount after use rose to a peak in 2015, at 1.94 million tonnes.
At the same time they are paying a lot less for the product. In 2014, 1.89 million tonnes cost $454 million, but this year it cost only $311m to buy 1.9 million tonnes.
Fonterra is trying to persuade farmers to use less palm kernel because it says milk from grass-fed cows fetches a premium on world markets, and because PKE affects the composition of milk, making it less useful to convert into high value products.
The dairy giant has recommended farmers feed a maximum of 3 kilograms of palm kernel per cow per day. This year it started to test herds to let farmers know how their cows rated, but from June 2018 it will penalise them for excessive use of the supplement.
A farm would only receive a demerit after its milk supply is found to be outside the acceptable Fat Evaluation Index levels by the milk screening three times, and fails a fourth, confirmatory, test. This allows farmers an opportunity to manage their feed to ensure they comply with testing.
Lewis said farmers «generally speaking» didn’t think about the importance of such changes until they hit – «it wouldn’t be on top of their priority list at the moment».
An unknown factor was how quickly the impact of PKE dissipated.
Source: Stuff
Link: https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/97398319/dairy-farmers-chase-palm-kernel-to-tide-themselves-over-wet-weather
