Kevin and Brody Game run Blackjack Holsteins, a dairy farm in Bemboka, NSW. First-generation farmers, they've adopted John Deere technology to improve record keeping and operational efficiency on their property.
If you don't have that generational farm given to you or money or it is near impossible to buy, the farm.
Was something that was sort of always seemed that little bit too far out of reach. My name is Brody Game. I'm a dairy farmer from Bamboca on the far south coast of New South Wales.
My name is Kevin game. We milk 450 cows here at Bamboca on a 100 hectare milking platform.
Our name came from jumping head first.
It was a bit of a roll of the dice. So, you know, we put it all on blackjack.
I am a dairy farmer first and foremost, but I'm a mum, bookkeeper, vet, milker, puppet. Part agronomist, part animal health. Yeah, it's a varied list that comes with being just a dairy farmer.
We're jacks of all trades and you sort of got to be good at all of them. Well, it's unusual to be a first generation farmer because the cost of getting into land, like you're standing on a $5 million farm, when you've got to have 40 to 50% equity in the business before you can even think about going to the bank, it's bloody hard.
So being first generation farmers, leasing was sort of. We were happy if we stopped there. So we ended up paying out our whole herd and have had a lot of wealth creation there.
I think we're in our 12th year of dairying for ourselves. I don't know if you want to count the 15 years it took me to get to the point where I could actually buy stuff to create my own business.
I guess dad always said horses spend money, cows make money, and I took that to heart. I think with school. I started with a few sort of studs, beef studs around the place, and then sort of entered my own hoof and hook competitions with steers. But I decided to come try dairy farming for work experience and fell in love with it.
I had the choice of being a butcher or a dairy farmer basically and just haven't looked back since then. I think it's a disease that gets in your blood and I tried to shake it off every now and then but always end up coming back. I always longed to be a dairy farmer, so I brought a couple of cows and started raising bull calves. And then, you know, we did that for a couple of years and got a bit of money together and came down here one day to buy bull calves. And just me being me, I was keen to get going again and Brody was keen to come with me. So I called into a bloke's face and asked him if he wanted to lease his farm.
Kev always had that passion. It's definitely not for everyone and I think because we do love it, it's not. It's not a job, it's not a chore on. There's some days we hate it. You don't want to get out of bed at 2 o'. Clock. But it's, I think, knowing that we could be our own employers and get to spend so much time with animals and really be rewarded for the work that we put in, really it home to us. It's what we wanted to do and raise a family doing what we love.
Many times we thought it was never going to happen, but this actual farm that we bought, we worked, we leased it for eight years and then the fellow that owned it asked us if we wanted to buy it. So we went to the bank with everything, literally. And we got lucky that day too.
Innovation is so critical to the dairy industry, as we've seen with other cropping practices. Efficiencies and benefits gained from being more accurate, from being more precise all of the time and consistent. There's no reason why it can't be adopted into the dairy industry.
The John Deere gear has been a bit of a game changer for us. We get audited every year because we're classed as a food producing business. Your records have got to be up to scratch, right down to batch numbers on chemicals you use. Yeah, Everything's got to be accounted for because if you lose that food license, you don't have a business.
Most of the time you get the call, the auditor's coming and it's a mad dash to get everything done. Whereas for us, it's all. It's recorded, it's all done. We have records constantly. If anything was to go wrong. We have withholding periods on paddocks.
Every.
Everything is there. It's so much simpler, so much safer. We have a responsibility to provide a safe product and John Deere makes it so much easier.
Yeah. So the op center's great. Our whole farm is mapped now and we can set tracks and Brody can set jobs from the office where a worker can drive into the paddock, doesn't have to think about anything, he just hits that, turns the seeder on and away he goes. The record keeping is fantastic, especially with the audits we get. They want batch numbers, they want which way the wind was blowing the day you sprayed that paddock. And it's pretty. Print it out on the little ticket at the bottom and, you know, there's no arguments.
Predominantly in the dairy space where maybe there hasn't been the big uptake. Seeing these dairy farmers starting to adopt this technology, which isn't new, but might be new to dairy, and seeing the benefits is huge. It's game changing.
John Deere technology is probably something. I didn't realise how powerful it was when we first bought the tractors. It used to be a little notebook that I'd have to rely on whoever was Dr. In the tractor to write everything down or that they wrote batch numbers or anything like that. Whereas operations centre takes care of all of that for me. Like everything is there. When our order processor comes through, I literally print it off. The operations center print it out and it's ready to go. It also gives me peace of mind. I've got the records that I can go back and Kev and I can come together and plan things out. When we were at a very high risk level in terms of debt, buying a John Deere seemed extravagant. When you bring it back in terms of investment, we haven't been able to go wrong. Those tractors are so easy to maintain, easy to work with. We don't have breakdowns. And if we do have any questions, there are so many support services there that we can just ring at the drop of a hat and everybody is there to help us get back on track.
