Damage and workload reduced

Peter Fullerton Smith.

01-03-2010 | Not Specified

The damage and workload that went with running bulls saw Peter Fullerton Smith switch two years ago to dairy grazing on his Mairoa farm in the King Country.

Peter has reassessed that decision, appreciating the value of owning stock and the flexibility that goes with bull operations in the King
Country.

He began buying in bulls as 100kg calves this autumn, but was keen to work on ways to reduce the damage, stress and time bull farming bought with it.

This winter he wanted to trial Bopriva on a mob of his rising two-year-old bulls.

He vaccinated two mobs of 70 bulls with their first shot in autumn late in March, followed by the booster shot on May 12.

"We would normally run this many animals in about eight mobs, but using Bopriva allowed us to run the bulls in only two mobs, and I felt we could have almost put the two mobs together as 140, their behav­iour was that quiet," he says.

Administration was a simple affair with the specifically designed vaccine gun, and Peter says the critical point was to calculate when it is desirable for Bopriva's immune-castration effect to wear off.

"It is important to get the timing right so that it starts to wear off as spring growth takes off, given the main reason for running bulls is to maximise that growth rate, but we also wanted to minimise the hassle."

Ten days after the first shot he observed behaviour was more docile, and the bulls easier to manage as a larger mob. While not having a control mob for comparison, he felt the mob grew quicker than would have been expected through the difficult winter, partly because less energy was spent fighting and digging.

On a group basis Peter believes he saw 90 days' worth of Bopriva's full effect over the mob, and on some bulls up to 30 days extra.

For him the two large mobs significantly reduced time spent moving the bulls, and paddock damage on the unforgiving hill country was miminised.

"I would consider trialling it on our R1s, of which we have 700; that would make a significant impact on numbers of mobs, if we ran seven mobs of 100, rather than 17 mobs of 40 or so."

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