South Gippsland dairy farmer Wendy Whelan realises her farm ownership dream

South Gippsland’s Wendy Whelan has progressed from dairy farm worker to sharefarmer to owner — discover how she did it.

Wendy Whelan with her dog, Joey, at her farm at Toora in South Gippsland.

Glancing at her phone screen, Wendy Whelan’s dream of farm ownership hit home.

“The first thing I did, once it settled, was look at my online bank and I could see the debt,” she said.

“I guess it makes it official when you see the bank balance.”

For the dairy farmer from Victoria’s South Gippsland region, the sight of a six-figure loan on her screen provided an overwhelming sense of relief.

On December 1, it was official – Wendy had purchased the 390-cow dairy farm at Toora where she worked and sharefarmer for the past 20 years.

“I’d always hoped I could buy a farm,” she said. “I did the groundwork to see if it was achievable, went to banks – and a few knocked me back – before I found one that would help.

“Anyone can say ‘buy a farm’ but to actually make it happen, you have to have a lot of money saved, the cows paid-off and then all the budgeting and cashflow provided to the bank has to work.”

Her new farm — a total of 182ha with a milking area of 150ha — is a place she’s called home for the past 15 years and where she had worked with the previous farm owners Bruce and Jan Best.

Farming at Toora on the South Gippsland peat soil flats had been tough these past two years.

Told “there’s money in mud”, Wendy understands the premise – but isn’t entirely convinced.

“We’ve had about two dry months in two years,” she said.

“To try and keep the cows fully fed we’d have to feed out hay on the laneway in feeders, because we don’t have a feedpad. It was really hard; we had a fair few lame cows because they were just standing in water for months. The poor buggers, we’d let them on the tracks and into the cow yard, so they had somewhere dry to sit down.”

BAIL TIME

FEED additives in the grain bail mix improved the lameness, but feed costs rose as cereal and lucerne hay filled the nutritional gap left by the poor silage harvest.

A summer crop of turnips will be sown into paddocks with the most pugging damage, while track maintenance will again be a priority this year.

Not surprisingly, constructing a gravel feedpad is also high on Wendy’s agenda.

Despite the testing conditions, Wendy prioritised the health, welfare, and management of her herd.

Her Holsteins, weighing an average 600kg, continued to average 665kg of milk solids a lactation – production never wavered.

She was philosophical about everything else — managing the never-ending rain, reworking budgets, and preparing financials for the purchase of the farm.

After all, it was nothing compared to what happened early in her sharefarming career.

“I had my stroke, then the milk price dropped the year after – when Murray Goulburn and Fonterra cut the price – we had a crappy autumn and had been in drought, buying hay,” she said.

“So, this? Now I own it, it’s back to business as usual really. Since I had my stroke, I am a little more chilled.”

Wendy Whelan has progressed from worker to sharefarmer to farm owner.

ROUGH START

WENDY started sharefarming for her long-term employers, Bruce and Jan, in September 2014. Eleven months later the 38-year-old was in the Monash Medical Centre recovering from a stroke.

Not that she remembers her two weeks in critical care, Wendy woke in rehabilitation at Berwick hospital where she spent the next eight weeks learning to walk and talk again.

“We’d nearly got to the end of calving, and I carked it,” Wendy joked.

“Bruce, he was starting to ease-out of milking and Jan had backed-out, but Bruce had to come back and do the milkings with the staff and Jan had to pay my bills for me with Dad.”

It took 12 months for Wendy to recover, although she started computer work and small tasks immediately after returning home.

Getting back to milking — and riding her horse — was her motivation.

Mimicking the action of putting cups on cows, she’d demonstrate to her physio what she needed to be able to do. Then, she’d spend countless hours on a fit ball bouncing up and down to prove she could ride a horse.

Now, she can’t complete the volume of work she used to — tiredness and headaches still plague her — but she’s managed thanks to the support of long-term staff such as Charlie Tyers as well as Bruce and Jan.

“I was lucky to have good procedures in place and staff that care about their jobs and Bruce and Jan,” Wendy said.

“I would never have got through the stroke without them.”

CAREER COURSE

INITIALLY relief milking for the Bests, Wendy moved to become a full-time employee and expanded her farm apprenticeship education with industry pasture, business, and cow nutrition courses.

“Fascinated” with rotationally grazing cows and growing grass, Wendy joined a nearby Focus Farm discussion group – to learn about the business of dairying – and completed a Diploma of Dairy at TAFE.

In 2013, she extended the mortgage on a house purchased a few years earlier and bought cows.

Her 20 animals pushed the Best’s milking herd to 300 and she became a 36 per cent sharefarmer, paying the farm’s production costs and labour.

Her share increased to 45 per cent when she bought half the herd, using a lump-sum payout from her stroke income protection payout to assist finance.

In 2017, Wendy owned the entire herd, had purchased machinery and her share was 70 per cent.

Wendy’s persistence, her ability to produce profitable milk and her relationship with Bruce and Jan was something her long-term consultant John Mulvany said helped her into farm ownership.

“If she didn’t have all those things, actual evidence of how good she was wouldn’t have even got in the front door of a bank,” he said. “It is not all about figures, and why this is so relevant to other young people is because it is about the evidence that you are very good at the business of dairy. That doesn’t just mean doing budgets, its producing milk profitability and all the things it takes to run a good dairy business.”

Business consolidation is Wendy’s next goal and then she will consider purchasing the Best’s outblock.

But for now, it’s business as usual – with interest payments.

“I feel really positive about dairying, it’s been great for me,” she said.

“I started sharefarming in 2014 and I’d already paid-off a herd of cows, bought machinery and paid that off and saved enough for a farm deposit. I don’t think it’s too bad.”