If only cows could smoke -it might help pass time

Press, 10 April 1987, Page 12

If only cows could smoke -it might help pass time

By

HUGH STRINGLEMAN,

who visited Italy

as a guest of the Verona Fair Authority and the Italian Trade Commission.

Automatic, year-round feeding of more than 100 housed Holstein-Friesian milking cows and 50 ha a year of cropped tobacco are the unusual farming activities of Dr Guido Finato Martinati, near Verona in Northern Italy. Dr Martinati’s family has been on the same property since the end of the eighteenth century and as vice-president of the giant Verona Fair Authority he hosted 15 Australasian and North American farm journalists recently during an Italian Trade Commission study tour.

A visit to Dr Martinati’s 205 ha farm, which is very large for one family, by Italian standards, was some compensation for the absence at the annual Verona Fair (to be compared with the N.Z. National Farming Fielddays) of any four-footed animals because of an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the region late last year.

Livestock movement restrictions had forced the cancellation of the show classes at Verona and the disease threat was taken very seriously by Dr Martinati and his staff also. All visitors to his farm were required to wear overshoes, which are left behind, and the sale of surplus cattle from the farm is suspended in the meantime. The restrictions that followed the first outbreak of foot and mouth in northern Italy for 40 years were upsetting, said Dr Martinati, and he felt that inadequate quarantine restrictions at Italy’s borders were to blame for the outbreak.

Bull calves and surplus heifers are usually sold from the Martinati unit to specialist beef cattle fin-

ishers but they are being taken on in their own shed at present. The Martinati stock don’t wander outside on pasture but stay penned inside and outside while fodder is brought to them from silos containing up to 1200 tonnes of shredded maize silage by an expensive fully automated feeding system. The milk output of each cow is metered in the 6-a-side herringbone shed and she receives a food allowance according to production. The Alfa-Laval computerised unit recognises each cow by a responder around her neck and feeds out to that bale only what is required by the' level of milk production. The system is used with pigs more commonly and has not been tried in New Zealand with its all-grass feeding of dairy cows. A typical daily ration of dry feed would be 13kg of maize, 2kg of barley flakes, 3kg of 20 per cent protein food, 6.5 kg of meadow hay and about a kilogram of straw and supplements. From this 25kg of dry feed the cow would be expected to produce 18kg by weight of milk daily. For every 3 kg of milk above the average, cows get an additional I.2kg of proteinenriched fodder. Dr Martinati has cows in milk all year round, with the average lactation 300 days and 110 cows in milk at any time. A top cow will do 6400 litres a year, at better than 20 litres a day, and would sell on the livestock market for about 5M to

6M lira, or SNZ7OOO to $BOOO, which is equivalent to the gross value of its production for just one year of its five years in milk. The town milk supply side of Dr Martinati’s farming industry (employing 10 permanent workers and 50 to 60 for tobacco picking) is in a growth phase but tobacco production is battling against a gradual reduction in cigarette consumption. A reputation for the best quality leaf in Italy has kept prices high for Dr Martinati and 21 fellow farmers in the Verona Tobacco Co-operative but the decline in consumption obviously has them worried. The chain-smoking Dr Martinati joked to journalists that he was still trying to increase the number of cigarettes he smoked to counter the trend. More than SNZSO,OOO a ha gross production is

possible from tobacco but the labour costs are very high. Each plant must be reared in glasshouses, transplanted in the spring and then stripped six times (three leaves at a time) at harvest by hand, at a cost of $8 an hour labour. Machines were used once but the Verona co-operative growers have reverted to hand picking for better quality. Average income is about $3OOO net per hectare. Yield is about 7700 kg a hectare of Virginia Bright and after harvest the leaf must go through another labour-intensive drying, leaf selection, cutting and packing. Apart from the first drying which takes place on the farm, all other processes are carried out at the cooperative’s factory. Onfarm drying consists of seven days at 32 degrees and requires a large amount of cabinet space for the 400,000 kg of tobacco produced each year on the Martinati property. Including the warehouse space on-farm and the seed raising and

planting machinery, Dr Martinati reckons he has two billion lira, or about $2.8 million, invested in tobacco growing either on his own place or at the co-operative, of which he is the chairman. The cooperative farmers produce 6000 tonnes annually and tobacco is obviously a big employer in the Verona district The remainder of the Martinati estate is planted to maize or barley each year, which goes to feed the dairy cows, and grass is grown only as a soil structure improver and to make hay. The flair for things mechanical among Italians has meant a constant stream of automated feeding and produce collection systems for the home market and export. One of the most impressive at the Verona Fair this year was a fully automated and computerised feeding, egg collection and waste removal system for battery hens designed and marketed by Facco. It works on three or four tiers of battery cages which, a company representative was quick to point out, were bigger in the E.E.C. than in the United States and other parts of the world. Another stand at Verona promised rapid growth from sturgeon fish, not for the roe (caviar) but for the flesh, on the very latest of pelletised diets from Calvinsano. The company operates a fish farm in Lombardy, near Brescia, using excess hot water from a steel mill.