John Deere Africa | Tech Terrain | Episode 10

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Hello, and welcome once again to Tech Terrain, where we talk everything agricultural on the African continent. This time around, we've got some experts to discuss the importance of animal feed quality animal feed to achieve optimal production. In studio, we welcome international silage consultant Richard Fenter sharing his most valuable insights. We visit Jared Hurwitz from Hurwitz Farming to see how things are done in practice. Of course, Team John Deere is back in studio and we discuss the technology on offer in the animal feed space. Remember to visit the website regularly for bonus material related to the show. Let's kick off. So, to start off this episode of Tech Terrain, we'll be talking about roughage, quality of roughage, when you as a farmer should decide whether to make your own or to buy. And to make all of that a lot easier, I'm joined by Richard Fenter from Agsai in South Africa. Rehat, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks, Tony.

So talk to me about the importance of the quality of roughage that you're feeding your animals.

Yes, I think the first thing we must remember is that a ruminant animal, you know, cattle and sheep and goats are specifically developed to utilize roughage. They have a fermentation organ, you know, the rumen part of the digestive tract, where they are very, very good at utilising quality from roughage. So it basically comes to the fact that the better the quality you feed, the more the growth or the production of milk or wool doesn't matter what you're growing from these animals, the better that growth or production will be. It basically decreases your necessity to buy other feedstocks like concentrates and licks. So the higher the quality, the better the growth or the production from what you're producing yourself on the farm.

So what's better? Produce it myself or to actually go and buy the roughage?

It's a great question because I think both of those industries are strongly developing. We're finding more and more roughages being sold or for sale nowadays as that we never had before. But I think for me it's about controlling the quality of the whole process. If you produce roughage yourself, you can determine yourself the harvesting stage, your drying period or your moisture level, whether it be hay that must be dry or silage must be wet. Also, the way that you store it is it properly stored and kept, whereas when you buy rough itch, you don't always have control over that system. I think if you then buy, it will be good to just understand where it's coming from, so have a relationship with the supplier or go visit the people and just see what the process is all about so that you know what the quality is that went into that feedstuff.

The technology involved in all of this, is it expensive?

You know, expensive is relative. You know, I think it's all about the value. We find that you have to sometimes invest to have that extra gain. Like a lot of things in life, you know, there's all kinds of technologies that can make roughage production more expensive, if you like. But it's all about the value. You know, you can have two hays or two silages. Compare them. The one being more expensive than the other, but the expensive one producing so much more through the animal that it actually has a cost of gain or cost of milk production. It actually works out much less.

So with reference to managing losses, how can a farmer actually produce and store roughage?

Successfully managing the losses through that process is absolutely critical, you know, both through the production period as well as the storing period. As you say, there's challenges. When we look at equipment, for example, there's a big difference in the way that we can today cut, you know, rake, pick up and bale in the case of hay, or pick up and chop in the case of silage. How efficiently the, the machines, the machinery can actually do that. How much losses is experienced in the field? So you're not even in the hay bale or in the silage pit yet and you're already experiencing losses. So we have to manage that. And then during storage, I mean, hay cannot lie in the sun forever, it degrades. And how many farmers today have enough store space or storeroom space to actually keep all the hay they need inside? Silage might then be a better option because you cover the silage with plastic and you can store it indefinitely, as on the condition, of course, that the plastic stays intact. So in that case, for example, silage offers a better long term storage mechanism, which will lead to less losses over time. But silage has its own losses. You know, silage through fermentation, there's losses that we need to manage as well.

Talk about some of the challenges that may arise. What mistakes do farmers usually make when they decide to produce their own roughage?

I think the first mistake comes in deciding harvesting stage, you know, just cutting stage, looking at the crop, saying, right, today we start. So let's take maize for example. That's commonly made into silage, the most common silage. There's a tendency that farmers harvest the maize for silage too early. So that's a big problem. As far as leaving starch and yield potential in that maize crop in the fields, you've spent all the money in producing and even now harvesting this maize as silage. But if you cut early, you lose a yield potential as far as starch and even dry matter yield per hectare. In the case of hay, we can look at lucerne for example. Lucerne has a lot of leaf losses when made into hay. So the, the whole decision making about the point to cut lucerne, the point when it's dry enough to pick up and bale affects that. You know, if it's too dry, most of the leaf stays behind in the field and that's really the quality of lucerne. Or we can now choose to maybe make the same crop lucerne into silage. So now you don't want it to dry out, you want to pick it up earlier and all the leaves are retained, which gives you very high quality silage. So that has to be managed all along.

Is it a good business to get into farmer produce roughage, obviously for other farmers?

I think it is, as long as you can manage that quality. I think it's a growing trend. A lot of roughages, especially silages nowadays, are for sale. I think it's critical to ask whenever you want to purchase any roughages, to ask for a nutritional analysis. The analysis really is showing the quality. You know, you can't just buy from whomever. But I think if you manage the quality well, it can be good business.

Are there alternatives when it comes to foodstuffs, other foodstuffs, if I don't want to use roughage?

Well, the alternatives I think that we are using today has been known as roughages, but not used used per se. What I mean with that is let's take soya for example. Your soya plant can be made into silage, whole plant silage. Now we've never done that before, or not a lot anyway. But now through the technology we have available today to make silage from these high challenging kind of silage crops, we can now make that into a silage, which gives you home produced protein quality silage on the farm, which then reduces your need to buy other proteins into the system.

Okay, layman's point of view or layman's terms, any difference? If I'm farming for beef or I'm farming for milk, for instance, do my cows have different feedstuff? Do they need to have different roughage?

So in the end, all those animals are ruminants. As I said, they all need rough features. The main proportion portion of their diet. The differences will come in from the output. For example, a dairy cow usually has the the highest output, so she's got the highest demand as far as daily nutrient intake. And usually the dairy cow for example needs the highest quality and the most nutrient dense feedstuffs, including roughages that she can find. Whereas your extensively reared ruminants, maybe through the winter kind of cattle or sheep scenario, they have much less needs and for them it's more about survival. We call it maintenance requirements. So there you can actually use the so called lower quality or cheaper if you want roughages. But it's about giving them something to just maintain body condition and maintain health throughout difficult periods.

Richard, your word of advice for anyone who wants to get into beef farming or dairy farming at the present moment. What's the first thing you say to them?

First thing I say is home produced quality roughage. You need to have a source of roughage whether you grow it yourself or you utilize felt in that natural pasture. That should be your focus. Your focus should never be to buy all the feed you need because we're buying concentrates feed, we're buying it at high prices and there's logistics involved. So the, the first thing you need if you want to grow cattle or any ruminants, you need access to high quality roughage.

Okay, Richard, thank you so much. Interesting speaking with you, Richard Fenter there from Aksay saying the first thing you should do if you want to get into bee farming or even dairy farming is maybe produce your own roughage. Stay with us on tech terrain. Well here on tech terrain we like to give you practical examples. So we sent our team to Hurwitz Farming in South Africa to find out the importance of animal feeds, well quality animal feeds to that farming operation.

A few years ago we were faced with quite a severe drought and we thought we'd need to cut off all our maize that was planned for maize harvesting for silage. And we decided to invest in our own machine. So we bought a second hand old machine, probably a third, fourth hand machine because we thought it would be a more cost effective method than getting in a contractor per se. So that's what we did. We bought a machine and we cut our own stuff. And then we got a call out of the blue to go and cut a couple of hectares towards Carolina area, quite a small quota, about 8 hectares. And we decided let's go and do it. Normally that wouldn't be worth the while to haul from here to there, but we decided let's go and do it and from there it kind of spread a bit of word of mouth that here we were in the area and we had a machine and we were doing the silage contracting business. And so from there it developed and one thing led to another and the division within the farming business developed quite a bit. When we sort of invested in technology, which was around about 2017, we took quite a big leap in technology investment from a machinery mechanization point of view and the business grew from there. Well, there's a whole host of crops that we work with is maize and feed sorghums, but we also do a hell of a lot of work in ensiling grasses. All the multiple species of grasses, era grastis, often teff oats, rye grass, kikuyu, tritical, all these types of grass species that we do a hell of a lot of work with on an almost daily, well, seasonal, but almost daily basis in those seasons. It's a little bit uncommon to a lot of people who haven't worked with it, but it's very common in some of the areas that we do this type of work and it provides a fantastic quality feed at a very cost effective methodology of actually putting feed away. We're very accustomed, especially in the halfveld, to dry hay from our perennial pastures. But when you really dig it down and you analyze the numbers and the figures, making silage out of that type of crop is a very advantageous process. And somewhere where we see a big growth in the potential, potential future growth in the market and in feed and hay production or fodder production techniques for sure, the capital intensity is clear. If you just look at the equipment that would arrive at a site, it obviously starts with a machine to chop the forage. And these are highly, highly technical machines the market doesn't often appreciate because with respect, you haven't dealt with that type of machine, but doesn't appreciate the technology and what actually goes into these machines, the R and D and what they, what they're actually doing. I mean, the capacity of these big machines is in excess of 200 tonnes an hour that they can process. So you're taking a full course crop, like a maize crop, and you're chopping it up into little bits in fragments of a second at the rate of in excess of 200 tons an hour. At the same time, you have technology in there that is monitoring the chop lengths and adjusting it by itself. And you have inoculant applicators, which involves a liquid process and biological additives you have replaced. You have yield mapping, you have quantity reporting and moisture Reporting all of this technology in a piece of machinery that, yes, it's expensive, but there's a lot going on there. Fodder production is a race against time. It's an efficiency process, and it's a race against time in terms of managing the crop and minimizing wastage and optimising product quality. Essentially, our process is the same regardless of the client we're working for. They must define the parameters so the equipment can do whatever the client requires in terms of additives that they would choose, inoculants, chop lengths, and those types of parameters and timing. So we can really cater for what they require at simple settings on the machinery. And that's the beauty of embracing technology. You can adjust these types of settings to cater for what they require. Obviously, livestock, such as sheep, would require a different chop length. But I mean, that's a simple push of a button in the machine and on you go. And obviously, seasons, you know, this is not an exact science. Seasons can throw a curveball at you. Crops can dry off faster than you anticipate, and you have to modulate and adjust accordingly. And you do that with chop lengths and adjusting inoculants and elements like that. One of the most critical elements of silage production is having reliable and fully functional equipment. As I mentioned earlier, it's a race against time and it's a race against efficiency. The silage season is quite a small window period season, and you need to be able to operate chop from a contractor's point of view, from an own farmer's point of view, you need to optimise your chopping and your forage making when the timing is right. And from a contractor's point of view, you need to be able to perform that service and move on to the next car and the next client who needs that service as well. So uptime of machinery is critical. Parts availability and maintenance. These are elements which we look after and we pay specific attention to very carefully. Because if you actually analyze it from a. From a contractor's point of view, if we are selling a service, that service is coupled with being able to sell it within a time period. And our ability to sell time is very much dependent on the equipment performing as it's supposed to perform and staying up and functional and critical within the dealer network. It's a very, very important process. It can never be understated at all. I think the value of silage in any farming operation where ruminants are involved or small stock is becoming more and more a topic that will become pursued. Shall I say by more and more farmers. Farming is a business about chasing efficiencies. We know that we're in a production phase and often farmers are price takers, they're not price makers. So the ability to remain in business is the ability to chase efficiencies. And feed production will always be a challenge. And feed cost efficiency will always be a challenge for farmers, no matter what spectrum they are. And silage, once you analyze it, no matter the crop, maize feed, sorghum grasses, when you analyse it on a as is basis or on a dry matter basis, however you analyse it, there's very few feedstuffs that can be produced as cost effectively as silage. Often it's produced on farm, which saves a hell of a transport factor of trucking in feed loads to the farm as well. So I think silage production and fodder flow and fodder banking will become very much a more embraced technique with informing practices in this country. For sure, quality of silage starts at the cutting stage, obviously with the correct moisture levels and crop dependent. You know, you get crops such as maize where you have a starch element within the maize and the starch percentage and the quality of starch is dependent on the moisture of the crop as well as varieties are all different and cultivars are different. And thereafter is the rest of the process. As I mentioned, silage making and silage production is a race against time. The quicker you can chop it in, get it into a preserved state, the better. That is where your quality really comes from. And machinery and efficiency of machinery and uptar of machinery and scale of machinery plays a huge role in locking in the optimal chopping stage. A rule of thumb or a norm within. Let's talk about maize. Silage is maize silage dries off roughly at half a percent per day. Now you want to optimise your silage production at between 35% to say 45% dry matter. That's a 10% window period, which if you analyze it at half a percent per day, one can do the numbers and that can actually extrapolate out the understanding what is the window period in terms of chopping, forage and locking in the best quality. In order to do that you need machinery that operates on a scale and you need machinery that is reliable. And you need a dealer network that is reliable with a parts infrastructure and a know how from a technical point of view and a workshop infrastructure point of view that can keep you running. Because those more moisture drops on a daily basis is what can influence the end product. At the end of the day, quality is critical because at the end of the day, feed is produced for a conversion factor. You're either converting that feed or that fodder into beef or you're converting it into milk. The animal is a tool in order to convert that forage into an end product for the consumer to make use of. And feed conversion is obviously optimized with quality. So the higher quality your product and the more sustainably and cost effectively it's produced, the more the benefits you'll see when that's converting into the end product, be that beef or dairy or sheep or whatever the end product might be. And that's where the true, very often unquantifiable, unfortunately, benefit is. But that's where it lasts, is in feed conversion. Higher quality feed, higher quality conversion. It's just a simple hand in glove relationship.

Well, it's time now to join two gentlemen from the John Deere team. They're here to talk to us about the importance of getting good quality animal feed and also some of John Deere's new innovations when it comes to animal feedback feed. I want to welcome Vika and also Peter. Gentlemen, good to have you with us.

Thank you, Danny.

Peter, let me start with yourself. Let's talk to us about the importance of cattle on the African continent.

Danny? Yes, the importance of cattle on the meat side, meat production side, as well as the dairy farm, our dairy farmers. It's quite important for the sustainability of tomorrow. We are in an ever growing nation and we need to get our food security in order to feed our nation of the next generation after generation. So some of our challenges we encounter in Africa is actually the efficiency of cattle and then the production. So in South Africa, we've got 14 million heads of cattle, whereas we've got a highly efficient farming operation where you get high kgs per dairy cattle and also meat production. But if we go back to the African continent, we got even more, I think 35 million heads in Ethiopia and then also in Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria. Nigeria got 20 million heads, and that's even more than the cattle in South Africa. So one of the biggest challenges is that efficiency. So we're not getting that same efficiency as we're getting in South Africa. So some of the challenges that are directly linked to this is the feeding efficiency. So how do you get that output? And that's where you get more precise in the feeding chain.

Vika, when you talk about the farmers on the continent, a lot of them are subsistence farmers. Are they adopting new technology? You know, like Peter Saying using that new technology to optimize yield.

So it's a bit of a slow intake with the subsistence farmers, but yes, there is technologies available out there for them.

Okay, so you're saying there's been slow uptake when it comes to technology from the substance subsistence farmers. But what does John Deere have or what does John Deere offer some of these subsistence farmers for them to maybe upscale?

Yes, so we have a wide range of small detractors, square and round balers. And then there's also technology that we spoke about in previous episodes like JD Telelink, where it will help contractors utilize that information and be able to manage the data and obviously get more output out of their work.

Okay, so that's what's available for the subsistence farmers. Let's talk about the commercial farmers, Peter. What does John Deere offer them in terms of the new technological advancements?

So John Deere actually goes way beyond in their forage equipment with mow conditioners, with different kinds of impellers and conditioners, you can retrofit your machine according to your needs. Well, all our farmers are encountered with the challenge of weather. So this, this impalis actually assist the farmer when cutting the hay to dry out much quicker or more effectively and you can retrofit it with your option. Secondly, when we go into our forage harvesters, self propelled forage harvesters, we've got wide range of 8000 series forage harvesters currently on the South African market. And some of the new technologies on there are like the Ivylock infinible variable length of cut where it actually uses live data from the Harvest Lab 3000 to adjust this length of cut according to each farmer's different needs. If you go into a dairy farmer versus a feedlot, your rument in the cow, your rument feeding differs. So for contractor to go from customer to customer, it just makes it much more easier in providing still providing efficient service and efficient silage quality for each of his customers for with their different needs.

Well, let's talk about animal feeds in the value chain where the animal feed feed sit in the value chain. Because we also know that some farmers prefer to produce their own animal feed and some prefer to actually buy from suppliers.

Yes Tony, really good question. If we go into more depth on that each farmer got different needs and for the specific specific outcomes with the livestock. Also you need to feed your animal according to to your outcome. So your goal that you've got and a dairy farmer would feed different than a feedlot. And if you want more energy in certain Feeding applications. And just imagine we mentioned 14 million heads of cattle in South Africa. Just imagine if we can take, increase that 14 million heads in South Africa to 20 million heads, how much more, how much better food security we can have in the future. So feeding this livestock more efficiently can also increase the margins of our farmers, but also increase that food security into the future, feeding our nation.

Okay, and Peter, a little bit earlier on you mentioned the Harvest Lab 3000. I'll just come to you, can you explain a bit more about that? What is that?

So Harvest Lab 3000 is a product that we're currently testing. It ties into what Peter just mentioned now, where we want to increase the food security by increasing the amount of cattle heads, but with the same amount of feed or the same amount of lands that we have. So with the Harvest Lab 3000, you are able to see the length of cut as well as the nutrients in your samples that you're getting off the field. So you can manage that when you are feeding those cattle.

Okay, so Peter, the diet program for animals or for cattle is key. It's important. How's John Deere geared up for this market?

So John Deere goes beyond in just grain management mechanization. And we actually got a wide range of balers, small and large square balers together with ground balers, fixed and variable chambers. Whereas a customer can actually configure this baler according to his needs. Furthermore, we can jump into MoW conditioners, whereas you can also once again configure according to your needs, going over also into loaders and the attachments of loaders to work your operation throughout the year and specifically to use needs. And then finally jumping into our forage harvesters where we've got the leading advanced 8000 series forage harvester and possibly increasing to a 9000 forage harvester in the near future that we could see in the South African market. Technology wise, under mower conditioners, we've got the rollers that you can actually choose the specific roller according to your need. And then this also assists. We must remember that weather plays a big role when it comes to making hay and then forage. Also on a maize plant, you've got only 10 days to harvest it and get that optimal silage. So with our mechanization, we want to assist our farmers to, to fight the challenges and overcome that short window period. So with the forage harvesters, we've actually got the technology that assists a farmer to cut at a right length with the live data and then also tying in with that to measure the nutrients of the. Of the silage. That's your protein starch, your neutral detergent fibre, acid detergent fibre. And with this information, a farmer can make life decisions while cutting the silage for the whole next year or even beyond that.

Right, so what is that technology actually called?

So this is our constituent sensing. We've got a few units in the South African market and this is a futuristic product, so we might actually see that coming onto the market in the near future.

Right, just to close the conversation off, Vika, are you confident that John Deere is well placed to take the African continent forward in terms of this particular space, the subject matter we're talking about?

Yes, Tony, very excited about it. Just like how we have those current products with our, our crops in the field where we can minimize input to maximize your yield. The future products that we have available for the beef and dairy to do exactly the same in terms of technology, it's definitely going to take us forward.

Vika and Peter, thank you so much for coming through. Interesting conversation. So there you have it. John Deere is well placed and they are there for you to ensure food security on the African continent going forward. Thanks so much for joining us for this episode of Tech Terrain. Next time around, we'll be looking at the important issue of biosecurity. Don't forget to go on to techterrain Co Za for bonus material that we upload every single week. Until next time. Take care. I'm Tony Ndoro. Bye bye, Sam.