DIVERSIFICATION has proved a key component of the Newlyn Park operation at Meadows.
The farm is run in a partnership with Ian and Elaine Newman, sons David and Gavin and their wives Kate and Meredith and families.
To get the best out of their operation, the family runs a registered Holstein dairy herd, an Angus stud and a commercial Angus herd at a property at Willalooka.
At their base in Meadows, the Newmans milk about 220 cows on 150 hectares, mostly dryland, and run a nucleus herd of 25 stud Angus females.
At Willalooka, they have 130 breeding cows in a self-replacing herd.
They also use a property at Meningie to raise dairy heifers and background weaners for sale to feedlots.
Ian said the stud side to the dairy operation was an effective way of value-adding to the herd.
"To sell milk is one avenue, but if we can also sell excess stock, it is one way of value-adding, making enough for three families to get an income," he said.
They also sell heifers into China, Japan and the Middle East.
Ian said the beef herd was another complementary venture.
Gavin said the family had been running the Angus herd since the 1980s but had seen an increase in interest in the early 2000s.
They began the stud about 10 years ago, with a focus on "quality rather than numbers".
"We always had that interest in cattle breeding (from the dairy)," Gavin said.
"While we are looking for different things, we have that interest in the information to be in the breeding side."
He said they began buying bulls for their own herd and realised a lot of the high-performing types were coming from interstate or the South East.
"We thought we could supply some of the market here," he said.
"We're breeding the style of bulls we wanted to use."
The Angus commercial herd is primarily run as a backgrounding operation for weaners, with some finished to MSA-accreditation, depending on the season.
Gavin said the breed was good for servicing a number of different markets.
Ian said by having a range of income streams and options, they could balance-out some of the extremes seen in the milk price since deregulation.
David and Gavin are the fifth generation of Newmans to work in livestock.
Ian began working on the dairy farm in 1959 and said at that time, all his neighbours were dairyfarmers, each with about 50 to 60 cows.
"If you milked 100 cows you were huge," he said.
The family has decided 220 is the right number for their size, rainfall and topography.
About 15 years ago, the Newmans decided to upgrade their milking facilities and built a 44-unit rotary dairy.
Ian said investing so much in dairy when deregulation was taking place had its benefits, with no-one else building at the same time.
He said it was also a "bit stressful" but the investment paid off for the family.
Ian said the infrastructure cut down their milking time from as much as seven hours a day to two.
"Some times of the year it takes longer to get the cows in than to do the milking," David said.
Ian said that in the years since installing the rotary, they had made some upgrades but preferred to keep the human element, rather than rely on too much technology.
"We feel it's good to have people to make decisions rather than technology," he said.
The Newmans also actively keep up with industry innovations.
David said there were a number of farmer-run discussion groups that shared ideas.
He said these were a good way to find out about issues and potential solutions, with the groups often hearing from consultants on nutrition, pasture species and soil.
With a number of enterprises, the family divide responsibilities. Gavin is primarily focused on livestock while David has an interest in the pasture program and conservation, alongside his stock-carrying operation.