Lyn Parish is continuing a family tradition of having stud Jersey heifers that started in the late 1960s. Photos: Fiona Hanks
What do you do when you have too many cows to fit on one farm?
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For the Parish family of Winchelsea, you buy a second dairy farm, plus you turn to beef-dairy crosses to populate a third adjoining family beef farm.
And if they’re all full, some of the beef crosses can be trucked off to another family member’s farm in Gippsland.
The rotational system is all about using the land and the animals to their best advantage and with a family that loves farming, it’s a good way to keep everyone involved.
The main family farm south of Winchelsea, Bonnie View, is home to the Dornoch Jerseys, recognised as one of the top herds in the country, and it will host visitors from across the world in April when the World Jersey Conference comes to Australia.
The nearby beef farm was purchased in 1997, and in 2021 a second dairy farm, Retreat Creek, was added to the portfolio.
Retreat Creek was purchased to deal with the overcrowding problem, but it has an added bonus of irrigation, which has been particularly handy this summer.
The Parish family has been farming in the area since late 1949 when Ernie and Jean Parish invested in stud Jersey heifers in the 1960s.
The stud aspect was left dormant for a long time before the farm’s current owners, Lyn and David Parish and David’s brother Paul, were inspired in 2015 to make a comeback after winning some on-farm challenges.
Lyn Parish is striving for a high BPI herd and has been pleased with the progress.
“We were just a commercial herd until December 2015 when we reinstated the stud’s name Dornoch — a Scottish word for rolling green hills — and started the slow process of registering all the animals,” Lyn said.
Lyn’s passion for achieving a high BPI herd is behind the rotation of cows from Bonnie View to Retreat Creek.
When Dornoch Jerseys first appeared on the BPI lists, it was ranked 278 out of about 320 Jersey herds.
Barely a decade later, they’ve peaked at number five on the December list, and Lyn believes she can go even higher.
“It’s an exciting time,” she said.
“We have many calves and heifers coming through that are featuring right up at the top of the BPI rankings.”
Bonnie View peaks at 800 cows in spring, but Lyn admits that’s too many.
While Bonnie View is totally Jersey, the second dairy farm is mixed bag, with some of the former sharefarmers’ cows along with other purchases covering Holstein, Illawarra, Aussie Reds and crossbreds along with the lower performing Jerseys that Lyn sends across.
Bonnie View farm will be visited as part of the World Jersey Tour in April. Photo: Fiona Hanks.
The relocation march happens at least once a year, most often during spring when the home farm is over-populated.
“It’s a walkable distance, so we just walk 100 or 130 to the other farm,” Lyn said.
“We take them down a laneway, let them stop and have a feed and then walk them on. It takes about an hour and a half.”
Lyn has the call about which cows stay and which go, and she admits it’s sometimes hard to say goodbye.
“It can be tough, but then you forget about them eventually.”
There’s no return ticket — once they leave Bonnie View, they don’t return.
“At Retreat Creek they’re just looking for production, not worrying about the BPI, and they’re cows that I don’t want to breed from because they will pull my BPI down.”
Lyn attributes the stud’s improved BPI performance to her insistence on selectively using high BPI bulls, and focusing on fertility, components and health traits.
“We’re focused on breeding hard-working functional cows that suit a commercial operation,” Lyn said.
The main family farm south of Winchelsea, Bonnie View, is home to Dornoch Jerseys.
The production performance is still high among the relocated cows.
Lyn also attributes a lot of her breeding program’s success to consultant Amy Wright, who evaluates heifers each year and creates individualised breeding reports and discusses bull choices.
Retreat Creek is run by Lyn and David’s daughter Jodie, alongside her sister Wendy around her duties as a vet.
Lower performing cows are also bred to Angus through the Greenham dairy-beef program at Retreat Creek.
Once dairy-beef calves are reared to just past the weaning stage, they are shipped to the beef farm, which is managed by another daughter, Elizabeth.
And the rotations don’t stop there. If there are still too many beef cows, they are trucked off to Meeniyan in South Gippsland where another daughter, Sam, runs a beef enterprise with her husband Nick.
Completing the family, Lyn and David’s other daughter, Kasey, is in the United States studying psychology, and wants to return to Australia to help farmers dealing with mental health problems.
Bonnie View peaks at 800 cows in spring.
The family said that buying the extra farms with an eye on growth had been a good investment.
“If you have an opportunity to buy your neighbouring property, you grab it,” Lyn said.
“It doesn’t come around too many times.”
If other options come up, they are likely to pounce.
Lyn grew up on a small hobby farm at Waurn Ponds and was heading for a career in agriculture.
“I had been accepted into Marcus Oldham, which didn’t happen for women very often back in those days, but then I met David and I never went.”
She has no regrets about the dairy farming life.
“I love being outdoors and around animals. It’s very satisfying to deliver a live calf or to help a sick animal to recover.”
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