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XtraBlatt issue 02-2016

  • Text
  • Krone
  • Straw
  • Machinery
  • Agricultural
  • Forage
  • Harvest
  • Menschen
  • Alfons
  • Enterprise
  • Rotor

MENSCHEN INTERNATIONAL

MENSCHEN INTERNATIONAL RUBRIK Farm contractor Diamond J THE CALIFORNI California USA – sun, Pacific Ocean, beaches and the Golden Gate Bridge spring to mind at once. But California also means farming and dairying in Central Valley. Here, agricultural contractor Wiebren Jonkman is kept very busy forage harvesting for large-scale dairy farms. Central Valley is shielded on its east side by the Sierra Nevada mountains and on the west by California’s coastal range. This leads to the heat being retained in the valley with moisture in the Pacific winds already squeezed out on the coastal range. The valley summer temperatures are extreme. During our visit at end of July the mercury soared to 43 °C at the beginning of the forage maize harvest. Agriculture here is very dependent on irrigation and competes in this respect with water demand from the great coastal cities Los Angeles and San Francisco. Thus farming the area depends on well water, sometimes pumped from 250 m down. In this way, fields are flooded so that crops such as maize, wheat and lucerne can be grown for dairy cattle feed. 28

AN WAY Luciana and Wiebren Jonkman, here with son Wyatt, run the agricultural contractor business Diamond J, as well as a 900-cow farm in Central Valley, California. Not in the picture is five-year-old son Wiebren. The Wiebren Jonkman family enterprise is based near the 80,000 population town of Merced, right in the middle of Central Valley. Jonkman came from the Netherlands in 2003 and worked one year for a contractor in California. Then he moved to a dairy farm and became herd manager: “Two years later I decided to move into the contracting business myself.” He started with two used silage harvesters, five trucks for carting the forage and one tractor. The demand was enormous because, at that time, farms were undergoing great changes. “Some farms outsourced all cultivation and harvest work because they were already fully occupied with feeding and managing the milk cows. They were looking for competent partners”, he recalls. CUSTOMERS WITH 600 TO 3,200 COWS All his customers are dairy farmers with 600 to 3,200 cows plus followers, all within 25 km radius. In California, the maize harvest can be planned relatively early beforehand because, even right after drilling, it’s clear that the crop will be harvest-ready after 90 to maximum 120 days, depending on variety. The weather is very stable between May and September. It is permanently warm with minimum 30 °C, and it’s dry. Rain is, other than in winter, not to be expected. “This means that right at drilling, or emergence, we can determine relatively precisely when the harvest will start,” says Jonkman. Average per ha cut with forage maize here is around 66t chopped fresh material. As a rule, dry matter content of the plants at harvest is between 32 and 34%. Harvesting is billed according to tonnage carted home. “Especially with maize, this is the best method. Customers want a chop length from 16 to 18 mm.” They are advised not to chop any longer than this. “The farmers here feed lucerne hay in the ration so they need less additional structure in the maize silage. A longer chop would reduce feed intake and negatively affect milk yields.” 29