Always looking to the future

He didn’t want to give them a new dairy sitting on an old concrete base. Instead, the business invested in an entirely new build from the ground up.

The new build also invested in new technology for the business, at Nyora and Loch in South Gippsland, Victoria.

The Lancey family has created four generations of innovation and expansion, with three generations currently involved in the dairy business — Graeme, Chris and his wife Leanne, son Callum, and son-in-law David Lewis with their daughter Maddy.

Although in a wheelchair and a widower, Graeme is still involved in the business — the daily morning discussion about work and plans for the dairy occurs in his kitchen.

“Every morning after milking, whoever is available goes to Graeme’s place for breakfast,” Chris said.

“That’s where we talk about what’s happening and who is doing what,” Callum said.

Graeme remains involved in making decisions about which bulls and semen are used for breeding.

“Dad loves breeding and has done it forever. He chooses the bulls with great care for genetics,” Chris said.

“We breed a medium-stature Friesian cow, with good teat alignment and feet, quiet temperament, and producing high components.

“Annual milk production averages 8000 litres/cow.”

The origin of Mt Lyall Dairies

Patricia and Graeme Lancey started dairy farming at Poowong North in 1968.

Between 1977 and 1981, they ran two dairy farms, milking 130 cows on the home farm, and then Graeme would drive three miles to their second farm and milk 70 cows.

In 1981, they sold both those farms and bought a 400-acre farm at Nyora, milking 200 Friesian cows in a five-a-side herringbone dairy. Chris said they walked the herd the 6km distance to the new farm.

That farm became the genesis of Mt Lyall Dairies, and Graeme and Patricia used that dairy farm to build their business for successive generations, a passion inherited by Chris.

“I started working full-time with them when I left school at 15 years old,” Chris said.

“We stretched the herringbone dairy to 11-a-side. In 1988, we were milking 350 cows and changed the herringbone for a 42-bail rotary, so we could grow the herd again.”

By 2001, they had grown the herd to 700 cows and installed a 70-bail rotary.

“We wanted to grow the herd again,” Chris said.

“The year we put the 70-unit in, we bought the property next door which was 200 acres.

“We already had another 200 acres behind us, so we were up to 800 acres from the original 400.”

The home farm continued to expand from the original 400 acres to its now about 2000 acres.

As additional land has been acquired, Chris has overseen extensive work on fencing, laneways and reticulated stock water systems to improve productivity.

The basic business model has been followed throughout the decades — milking the split-calving herd twice-a-day and growing their own pasture and fodder on a dryland farm in a, normally, reliable rainfall pattern.

“Buying additional land is about building the size of the herd, being able to keep developing pastures and basically being self-sufficient,” Chris said.

The farm also supports a considerable workforce, including Australian, Irish and Philippine workers among the 15 employees.

Chris has sponsored many of the Philippine workers for Australian residency, a not-inconsiderable undertaking in time and cost.

Taking risks

Chris said he was keen on continuous expansion of the farm business, and his willingness to take risks included using debt to grow the business, rather than remaining debt-free with a smaller operation.

“I reckon being willing to take risks is the only way to get ahead,” he said.

“Dad’s always had that go-forward thinking too. It’s been tough at times, but it’s quite okay now.”

He credits Leanne with the most important job on the farm — as the businesses bookkeeper.

In 2016, Chris and Leanne purchased a second farm nearby, of 650 acres, which was milking 200 cows in a herringbone dairy.

They installed a 50-unit rotary dairy, which they bought secondhand from a farm near Bendigo, dis-assembled it and reassembled it on the farm.

“It was three years old and I bought the whole works, shed and all,” Chris said.

“We pulled that to bits and set it up. We bought the farm in January 2017 and we began milking in the rotary on July 18, 2017.”

In recent years, a couple from the Philippines have been managing that farm.

For Chris, the second farm is insurance against the entire business, giving him two assets he can dispose of if he needs to generate additional cash flow — the land and a separate titled house.

“I want to just keep expanding while I can,” he said.

“The second dairy could always be sold as a separate entity if I wanted to. So I’m not keeping all my eggs in one basket.”

Purchasing this dairy farm replaced a leased 450-acre farm at Yannathan where Chris milked 450 cows. He also leased 350 acres at Nyora for 10 years where he milked 300 cows, until 2015.

He still leases 300 acres at Nyora for growing out young stock and to produce silage.

The entire land footprint ensures the business is largely self-sufficient, growing their own pasture and fodder.

“We usually cut 1000 to 1200 acres of bulk silage and make 1000 round bails,” Chris said.

They also supplementary feed the herd on the feedpad, mixing silage with celery and leeks from a large-scale vegetable producer at Tarwin.

“About 10 to 15 per cent of the cow’s diet is made up of these vegetable products. Over a year, I reckon we would average about three to four kilograms of dry matter per cow per day,” Chris said.

The role of one employee is to drive one of the trucks daily to the vegetable farm to collect the vegetables.

Sheds and more sheds

A unique aspect about the home farm at Nyora is the number of sheds.

As well as the loafing barn and feedpad, hay is stored undercover, there is a calf rearing shed, the springers are undercover, the entire platform for the new dairy is undercover, and there are numerous large sheds housing trucks, machinery and equipment, fodder, and bedding.

Chris compares the cost of buying fodder for lean years and shedding it, against the cost and availability of buying nearby land to increase the grazing rotation.

Chris’s resourceful approach to infrastructure development is repaid — he said he now receives inquiries about if he wants to buy a shed that is being deconstructed.

On Boxing Day, 2022, he and Callum purchased the shed and concrete walls of the old Warragul saleyards, which became an 8000 square metre covered loafing barn and another 2000 square metres over the feedpad alongside it.

“We’ve had the feedpad since 2009, and we extended it to 4000 square metres in 2020, and now half of it is under the roof,” Chris said.

Callum said that even at that size, there is still a considerable amount of steel left over for another project.

The barn has been in use since January 26, 2023, and allows them to keep cows off pastures during wet winter conditions, and provides shelter for the herd during hot summer nights.

“It doubles our rotation to 60 days in winter,” Chris said.

“In summer the cows have the option of walking to the paddock and some just walk to the barn and loaf.

“There’s no point walking cows far in summer. You burn milk production.

“In autumn, it’s great for holding cattle off the paddocks as pastures shoot.”

The concrete walls surround the barn, providing a perimeter that also helps keep the bedding material in the barn, which they turn daily.

“In winter, we top up the bedding probably every two weeks — about 200 cubic metres every two weeks,” Chris said.

Eventually, the bedding is used as compost, probably incorporated into the soil to grow a corn crop, he said.

“I’ve bought several secondhand sheds,” Chris said.

“I coordinate with the seller about our availability, and we take everything we need with us to deconstruct sheds, load them on our trucks — if we do the work, I can’t blame someone else if something goes wrong.

“Now I get calls about other sheds that have become available, and I buy those too.”

A games factory at Dandenong was bought, deconstructed and reconstructed to house silage and woodchips for the calf shed.

The springers wait to calve in their own undercover expanse.

“We keep about 750 to 800 heifers a year as replacements, which has been good while we’ve been growing the herd, but now we’re not growing the herd so much, it’s plenty,” Chris said.

The business also sold heifers to the export market, while it was a financially worthwhile proposition. Now Chris is rethinking his heifer breeding strategy.

“We have a strict culling policy on the milking herd. Some cows only last one season, some last six seasons,” he said.

“Normally, you need 20 to 25 per cent replacements, but when you have 750 heifers for our herd size, that’s more than 35 per cent. We’ve just sold 60 heifers, to lighten the load.”

Four years ago, they built a new calf shed — 88m by 20m, with pens and outdoor areas — to raise 450 calves each season.

Calf rearing in their split-calving system, with the size of the herd, takes nine months of the year.

“We have a full-time calf rearer, with Callum and other people backing up,” Chris said.

“The calves start in individual pens, then progress to groups of two, groups of five, and then two groups of 60.”

Chris has innovated feeding, making a long stainless steel trough with 66 teats that is used by the calves from when they are three weeks old.

“Depending on how active they are, calves are weaned at 12 to14 weeks.”

They then go to contract rearers and return to the farm one month before calving.

Building a 100-bail dairy

Building a new 100-bail dairy will enable the business to grow the milking herd by about 100 cows, but it will also improve operator and cow welfare.

“I could have nursed the 70-unit dairy through for probably another five years with patching up here and there,” Chris said.

“But I thought, bugger it, build a new dairy now, while I can still enjoy working in it.

“Then I can set it all up with the auto-drafting and keep it pretty good.”

The 70-bail rotary had retention arms, cup removers and milk meters, which improved production and cow and operator welfare.

The 100-bail rotary is the first dairy unit with auto-drafting that Chris has installed. He also added posi-arms [position arms], which drop the cups down under the platform, lifts them up, and positions the cups right behind the cow so they’re ready for the operator to put them on to her teats.

In early 2024, Chris, Leanne, Callum and David started talking about building a new dairy. They were beginning to consolidate their wish-list when they attended the Raising the Roof conference in the Hunter Valley in March 2024.

“At that stage, we might still have been considering a 94-bail rather than 100,” Chris said.

“We mainly went to the Raising the Roof conference to get ideas about how we can better use the loafing barn.”

That led them to Western Australia and Victoria’s Western District, to look at dairies.

Callum also went to the United States to look at some large rotary dairies and barns.

“We pretty well knew what we wanted once we’d been to Western Australia,” Callum said.

“We settled on the 100-bail and decided on the auto-drafting and posi-arms.”

At the same time as these decisions and plans were being made, the herd began wearing cow collars.

“We started using them in 2024 for heat detection at milking,” Chris said.

“We didn’t have the auto-draft technology when we started using them, so they weren’t being used to their potential.

“That all changed with this new rotary, as they’re drafted automatically when they go through the draft and race.”

Construction on the new dairy shed began on November 28, 2024, and Chris began project managing, coordinating all the work and when trades were needed on site.

Graeme also spent most days at the new dairy site, interacting with the workforce and keeping a close eye on proceedings.

“I wanted to have the footings in by December 18,” Chris said.

“It was the last day I could get concrete poured before Christmas.”

Two thousand square metres of concrete was poured.

“The first part of the shed went up in January, when they came back from holidays. It was flat out every day since,” Chris said.

“The platform was booked before the footings were in. I told them what week I wanted the platform, so I knew I had to get to a certain stage by then.

“They wanted two weeks for installation, and then I knew the milking machine guys could move in.

“It was all pre-planned and very structured.”

Milking in the new dairy began on July 2.

“The cows have been performing exceptional throughout the build and in the transition,” Chris said.

While the new dairy is built on a greenfield site, it is connected to the sheds of the previous two dairies on the farm.

“We built one shed and new dairy, then we built the next one beside that,” Callum said.

“This new dairy shed is built alongside the second shed. So they’re all connected, and all we’ve done is remove the hardware.

“With each build, we’ve converted the previous dairy space to undercover cow yards.

“Where the cows are coming in now, that’s where our three dairy sheds have been built side-by-side, from 1981 to 2001 to 2025.”

Chris wanted to set up the new 100-bail rotary dairy on a new concrete platform — he said it was important to ensure everything was a new build for the next generation, rather than using one of the old bases.

As the cows come into the dairy for milking, they progress along a large concrete yard, incorporated under the old shed roofs, with a forcing gate used to gently move them towards the bails.

Walkways have been incorporated above and below a concrete funnel which the cows traverse across to enter the rotary bails.

Chris said the new dairy cost $5 million to build.

“I was in a position where I could do it comfortably, and we’ll just keeping paying it off as we go,” he said.

“I’ll never be debt-free, and I don’t want to be debt-free.

“I could have done nothing more in life than still be milking 400 cows and be without debt, but where’s the challenge in that?

“As long as you can service the loan, there’s nothing wrong with paying interest if you’re generating enough income.”

What’s next

“I want to get the farm all set up pretty well so I can take off in a caravan at a later stage, and let these blokes [Callum and David] have a go at it,” Chris said.

“That’s one reason we’ve done it. I want to get some benefit out of working in it, too.”

One of the problems he has yet to sort out is effectively using solar panels.

With so much shed roof expanse, Chris agreed to a project to install solar panels, but there have been problems, and he is trying to resolve them.

“We have about 940 solar panels and 800 kilowatts of battery storage, but it’s been a disaster,” Chris said.

“The batteries are buggy. The solar panels were a million-dollar investment and I wish I’d never seen the bloody things.

“If the system had done what it was supposed to do, we were using 1100 kW of grid power a day.

“At certain times of the year, that means we’d have been nearly off-grid if it worked, with 700 kW of solar energy stored in the batteries.

“Even if the solar panels worked, we could at least have it chilling water and heating hot water during the peak of the day.

“We could get a fair bit of the afternoon milking just off the solar. I’d be happy with that.”

He has turned to another company to try and improve the system so the dairy business can benefit from solar-powered energy.

Planning for succession with David and Callum and a successful transition to the next generation is also on the to-do list for Chris and Leanne.

They have already been through the process, 10 years ago, with Graeme and Patricia, and Chris and his brother.

“We haven’t really started having those conversations with the next generation, but we will,” Chris said.

“I don’t know how we’ll do it, but down the track we will work it out.”

The Lancey family opened their new dairy to public scrutiny during the South Gippsland Dairy Expo in September. More than 300 people attended the two-hour event and toured the dairy, which was led by Chris and Callum Lancey.