This is a YouTube video titled "John Deere | The Fleming Family - Traralgon region of Victoria | Captions" featuring an English-language interview with Darrell and Lachie Fleming, fourth-generation dairy farmers from Victoria, Australia. The content showcases their daily farming life, the challenges and pride of dairy farming, and their use of John Deere machinery and technology to improve efficiency and productivity. The video highlights the family's multi-generational commitment to farming and the integration of modern agricultural technology.
Yeah, we do feel responsible to carry it on from the generations before because they've done a lot of hard work to get us to where we are these days. It's an honour to take it on.
Dairy farming is very demanding and grueling as farmers work 365 days of the year. We're out here doing this and milking cows and we wouldn't change it for the world.
My name's Darrell Fleming, I'm a fourth generation dairy farmer. Farming here on about 600 hectares with my three sons milking 400 cows.
Hi, I'm Lachie Fleming, I'm a dairy farmer from Wilung in Victoria. I've grown up here since I was young. I've always loved the farm. I've always had a passion for. This has been my Life now for 22 years.
Yeah, it was just tractor mad. Yeah. Every John Deere tractor toy you could think of, every time we made a purchase at John Deere, it wasn't about the purchase, it was all the free toys. Maybe they could chuck in the deal.
Typical day up at five cows in by 5:30 and cups on over night time. We try to have cups on at quarter to four and be done at 6:30 every day.
It's not your normal nine to fivers, so to speak. I've always said you've got to be a jack of all trades. A plumber to fix water troughs, a builder to build calf sheds. I guess I've liked the variety of industries we tap into apply to our business.
To us, having good grass means every day the cows have something quality to eat. To be able to harvest that grass in its prime and use it as silage for the cows in the summer months. The nutritional side of things, we're very high on feed testing. Make sure that only the best is going into the cows mouths and we get paid a premium price for good quality milk.
We do need a lot of equipment as the years have gone on. It's just one of the areas we've had to get more efficient in. Like every other aspect of farming these.
Days.
The John Dee stuff has been absolutely brilliant. We've chosen it. Yeah, like I said, for the reliability and it's great machinery. Have a breakdown or if we do the guys, local guys are fantastic to work with us from. Our local branch has been phenomenal.
It's nice to be able to jump in a tractor and start every day reliably. We use the bigger 6ms. For a range of cultivation and tillage. The auto track side of things on The John Deere machines is very easy. It's used for tillage, mowing, raking, seeding. From tillage to harvest. We're using auto track to be bang on every time. It's a very streamlined platform and we use it day to day. Good to see you, mate. The M series, for me, I love the simplicity, jump in serviceability. I can service it and do all the oils myself. It's not a complex system. This is a game changer auto loop. Not having to pump grease into thousands of grease nipples to be able to just press that from the cab or actually it comes on automatically.
Yeah, yeah.
Technology has changed our business over the years that we've embraced it and it's been fantastic.
John Deere Operations Centre is an online data management system that allows you to access critical machine and production information anytime, anywhere. With hardware that's included as standard in your John Deere tractor, you can go online, set up your Operations Centre account and start accessing data. That's going to help you gain efficiencies and overall make you more profitable.
We use OpsCenter. I've started using remote display. No matter what operator you've got in the tractor, I can get on the phone and go in and remote display and talk through any problems or any queries about any of the settings. From here we can work on efficiency and look at any alerts we may need to. Also our maintenance schedules, order parts. We can monitor everything, all our inputs to produce a higher quality feed for cows. And in this business, that is number one.
It's great to see customers like the Flemings utilising this data and unlocking benefits and gaining efficiency which is accessible for all dairy farmers to start using.
The combi baler for us was a no brainer. Wrapping beforehand of the combi baler could take us anywhere from five to six hours, depending on how many rolls. But now we get in one machine, one man, one labour unit can get in and go. There's just something about being able to walk out into a field and having a sense of pride in a crop you've planted and being able to see it grow from nothing to something being the whole way to watch it grow.
Every day we have, we hope to see it continue the same way as it has for the last four generations. Yeah, the boys take it on and I retire and do more fishing for me.
I've got no plans of ever moving. This is me, this is my livelihood and this is all I know and love. One day I'll take over the milking side of things and maybe run a few more cows. I'm not sure whether there's room for that, but we'll see.
