This is a YouTube video titled "The Colours of Your Land - Leo Donkers" featuring Leo Donkers, a New Zealand dairy farmer, and Steve, who works with Leo to produce winter feed for their dairy cows. The content, created in 2017, showcases their farming practices on the Canterbury Plains, emphasizing sustainable irrigation, pasture management, and the importance of reliable farming equipment like John Deere tractors. It highlights their commitment to environmental sustainability and the legacy of their family farming business.
The snow falls on the Southern Alps and melts into our rivers and aquifers. This water percolates and flows down from the hills down the plains and allows us to sustainably manage those rivers and aquifers for our irrigation requirements. My name's Leo Donkers and I'm a very proud New Zealand dairy farmer. We farm on the Canterbury Plains and the Canterbury Canary Plains are at the foothills of the Southern Alps in one of the most beautiful parts of New Zealand. My family are dairy farmers for generations, originally in Holland and we immigrated to New Zealand in the 50s and started farming here, originally on the west coast. But for the last 25 years we've been farming in Canterbury. The reason to come to Canterbury was the potential for irrigation. So it gave us some control and it allows us to farm a very simple system using cows on grass and not inside feeding a lot of supplements. The key essential element to that is having irrigation to grow that grass. We're in a dry environment with only 650mils of rain per annum. We need irrigation to be able to have sustained growth throughout the milking season. To supply our animals with enough feed, we run seasonal supply dairy farms where we milk twice a day for 270 days. So we need all of the resources involved in that working together to achieve the outcomes. At running an intensive pastoral system, we rely on very good equipment to be able to do the tasks involved, to continue to, to grow grass to supply our cows. We see John Deere as being a key partner in supplying us with machinery, tractors and other equipment to achieve those goals of producing high quality pasture for our farming system.
I'm Steve and in partnership with Leo and the group, we are charged with producing their winter feed for around 4,000 cows. We're just doing some final tillage on a paddock that's come out of winter feed. We've got our primary cultivator, a time based machine. We've run through with a finishing disc machine and followed up immediately behind with the drill planting grass. In around six to eight weeks this grass will be up and it'll be available for either grazing or making into silage for the coming winter months. It's great to have such an important role in the dairy sector and we're really proud of the work that we do and the contribution we make to the success of this business. We wouldn't be able to perform our daily jobs without the reliability of the John Deere tractors and they've been a vital part of our operation for many years. The growth in the dairy industry over the last 14 years that I've been involved has been amazing and it's been great for, for the community and for anyone who wanted to make something of themselves and looking forward to seeing that continue for many years to come.
Environmental sustainability is one of the key tranches to our business. We are here as custodians of the land while we are farming it, and that is a critical part in all aspects of our farming system are on a sustainable level. We look forward to carrying on the Camden Group's culture with the staff we have now and with our families as a succession plan to continue this farming legacy. I'm Leo Donkers. I'm a proud New Zealand dairy farmer and these are the colours of our land.
