Mentors make all the difference

They have relished the support at Tupehau, with monthly online meetings with their advisers, including farm consultant Greg Mills and DairyNZ’s Board chair, Tracy Brown, who also chairs the Te Rarawa Farming board. During busy times of the season, they connect fortnightly.

“We have this awesome team behind us,” Jesse says.

“Everything we do we do as a collective, and with all that knowledge we are producing milk as efficiently and as environmentally friendly as possible.”

Tupehau is two-thirds flat, with the rest rolling sandy hills. It has two pivot irrigators covering 140ha and a 600-cow concrete feed pad. During wet periods, the sandhill areas of the farm are used, to prevent pugging on the flats.

The farm runs a split calving system, with 70% of the herd calving in autumn and the rest in spring.

The picturesque scenery of Ninety Mile Beach forms part of the boundary of the 400ha support block, which is within walking distance of the farm that the Bagleys also manage.

The youngstock are on the support block, which is also used for winter grazing, growing maize and producing grass silage. Their summer feed crops – maize for silage and sorghum – are planted in October.

Jesse explains that even though they are a system 4, they are strict on pasture management, with a key focus on targeting residuals of 1,600 kilograms of dry matter (kgDM) after grazing (or 2,700kgDM pre-grazing depending on the time of the year).

“We are grass-based, and the supplement is a top-up. The first thing we always teach our team is to know the residuals we are chasing,” he says.

“The cows are always behind break fences, and we shift them any time of the day or night – if they leave grass when they come in for milking, we send them back and move them once they’ve hit that residual.

“Our friends think we’re mad because we’re shifting cows all the time during spring. It might be an hour before they come to the shed or an hour after they are milked.”

They’re applying the principles behind DairyNZ’s Supplement Price Calculator, which shows shifting cows based on residuals, not the clock, helps get the best return from supplements.

The spring-calving cows are farmed solely under the irrigated area, which is used to keep pasture growth optimal over summer. They have also been improving the pasture base in these irrigated paddocks.

“We’ve been planting ryegrass and fescue in the irrigated areas. We don’t want to be watering kikuyu.

“For the rest of the farm, kikuyu is the only grass that can survive the summers.”

They use mixer wagons to feed silage, dried distillers’ grain (DDG) and soy hull onto the pad, with each cow getting around 1,200kgDM of supplements per year. They use the feedpad from March until spring pasture growth takes off.

The farm team consists of three full-time staff members, one casual on the dairy platform, a full-time staff member on the support block, and Jesse and Sharon.

The couple met when they were 17 and have been farming together ever since. They both come from dairying families in Northland.

They began their journey in Hikurangi, Northland, initially working as farm assistants before taking on management roles. In 2012, they spent some time in King Country and then relocated to Wellsford, where they worked as contract milkers on a farm owned by equity partners Neville Porteous and Ken Hames. They stayed there for six years.

Over that time, they lifted the three-year production average from 150,000 kilograms of milksolids (kgMS) to 175,000 by tweaking how the farm was managed.

“We just put the hard yards in, and we always treat farms like they’re our own because at the end of the day, we’re the ones doing it, making our life easier,” Sharon explains.

They also built equity through savings and reared young stock to progress towards herd-owning sharemilking.

As Neville and Ken weren’t looking to employ a sharemilker, the couple moved on in 2019 to a Kaitaia farm that offered a potential pathway into sharemilking.

After two seasons, they discovered that Te Rarawa Farming Ltd was seeking sharemilkers. But with the larger herd beyond their budget at the time, they contacted their former employers with a proposal.

“We suggested to Neville and Ken that we form a sharemilking equity partnership together, and Jesse and I would contract milk to it,” Sharon says.

“The contract milking business would pay for normal contract milking things like fuel, staff, power, and the sharemilking company would own all the tractors, gear and livestock.”

They put together some budgets, and Neville and Ken agreed, knowing the Bagleys’ reputation as hard-working and savings-oriented dairy farmers.

Their agreement requires them to buy equity partnership shares every year. They now have a 44% stake, up from 33% in 2021.

The Bagleys achieved record production for the farm in their first season and have maintained it since — lifting output from a previous high of 393,000kgMS to over 400,000 every season, and reaching 460,000 last season.

Sharon puts the result down to a lot of fine-tuning.

“We have made a lot of mistakes in the past.”

Jesse adds, “In farming, you’re always learning. Every year, we want to get better.”

The Bagleys have overseen upgrades to Tupehau’s effluent and feed systems, aiming to reduce waste, retain nutrients, and cut costs. Solids are separated and spread on maize paddocks, reducing fertiliser needs.

Soil testing every paddock every three years also reduces fertiliser as it can be targeted, not blanket-applied and often less is needed. Pest control also protects rare bitterns in the nearly 20ha of fenced-off native habitat, now free of possums and stoats.

Their hard work also led to their success in the New Zealand Dairy Industry Awards, where they won Northland’s 2025 Share Farmer of the Year title — a programme proudly supported by DairyNZ to celebrate and grow future dairy leaders.

“We’re proud of ourselves, what we have done and where we have come from. We wanted to showcase that and show young farmers they can do it too,” Jesse says.

With their three children (9, 13 and 16) settled in school, they’re planning to stay at Tupehau for a few more seasons. Their ultimate goal is to own two farms – one that they run themselves and the other as an equity partnership.

The Bagleys, who have come a long way since they left school at 15, will then use that partnership to help other young farmers gain ownership.