Longtime Buckland farmers say goodbye to dairy

AMID low milk prices and the failure of a dairy cooperative Buckland dairy farmer Bruce Lumsden was considering leaving the industry in 2015. “The price was so poor that for three years we made a loss on the dairy farm and all I could see was gathering debt,” he said. He and his wife, Robin, stuck it out for another nine years, buoyed by strong prices and good seasons, but this time it’s for certain. After 101 years the Lumsden family have left the dairy industry and moved into beef cattle, marking the end of dairy in the Upper Ovens region and generations of dairy farmers at their Buckland farm. This time it wasn’t economics that drove the decision, but simply the passage of years. Nearing 70 years old, Mr Lumsden said they are retiring from the demanding rigour of dairy farming, including milking the cows twice a day, feeding, calving and calf rearing. “It's seven days a week and it's relentless,” he said. “If you talk to any dairy farmer they would say the same; there's no rest period and you're on call. “If a cow's got to be delivered, a calving in the middle of the night, you've got to go and attend to it no matter whether you've been out or whether you've got up early. “My wife and I are of the age when it's time to stop.” The decision marks over a hundred years of dairy farming at the property. According to Mr Lumsden, in 1923 his grandparents Charles and Margaret Lumsden came from Scotland to the Buckland property, previously run as a dairy farm for an estimated 40-50 years by the Howell family. They weren’t farmers, he said, and not long after becoming established they endured the Great Depression, World War II, followed by years of industry booms and busts. “The locals were sure that they would fail and, in reality, I'm surprised that they didn't,” he said. Dairy farming was once common across the region, including in the Ovens, King and Kiewa Valleys, Mr Lumsden said, but he wasn’t sure why dairy farming has since dried up, suggesting it may be down to increasing mechanisation and productivity. “When I was a kid if anybody was milking 120 cows that was considered a really big herd, whereas today that would be considered a very small herd,” he said. “When I first came home on the farm, if we had a cow that was producing 18 litres of milk a day she was probably our very best cow, whereas, we've had cows producing over 50 litres a day.” He said they've had the only dairy farm in the Buckland Valley since 1980, while another in Porepunkah closed in 1986. Mr Lumsden said they had been considering exiting the dairy industry since 2015, when they had been hit by poor prices and the failure of a dairy cooperative. Luckily, Mr Lumsden managed to sell shares in the co-op when the new buyer took over, and dairy prices started to improve. “In the last four years it's been a delight to dairy farm because we've had very good prices, we've had very good seasons, but those things don’t always line up,“ he said. They have been breeding a beef cattle herd from their dairy cows and sold the remnants of their dairy herd to a farmer in Moyhu only last week. They have around 10 dairy cows, including their pet cow. “There's certain things I won't miss and that's getting up early every morning, particularly in the winter,” Mr Lumsden said. Mrs Lumsden agreed. “You don't have to rush home to milk,” she said. However, it’s too soon to say what they’ll be doing with their spare time. “I think we've yet to work out the things that we'd like to and probably the things that we can't do,” Mr Lumsden said. “At the moment, we're just sort of relaxing - not going as hard.”

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