Good facilities and staff essential

Brownrigg Agriculture Ngawhakatara manager Kevin Le Comte explains the approach taken to parasite management to visitors to the property last month.

01-10-2007 | Not Specified

Good facilities and good staff are key to running Ngawhakatatara, says Kevin Le Comte.

He's been working for Brownrigg Agriculture for 20 years, and managing Ngawhakatatara at Poukawa for 12 years.

It's a 1000ha property, stretching across from the main road at Te Hauke, circling the northern end of Lake Poukawa, and then running over the hills to Middle Road. The eastern boundary is the Tukituki River.

Kevin says his current team of Bruce Oliver and David McKenzie is the best he's had for a long time.

The three of them look after a sheep and cattle operation, and in summer Brownriggs' cropping arm turns 350ha of the flats into squash, maize or onions.

In mid-September Kevin had 18,000 lambs on the farm, which was about 25% above budget. Some were being held on the hills at minimal weightgains, and others finished on the flats for maximum weightgains.

And they carried just over 900 yearling export Friesian heifers, and 150 yearling Wagyu cattle.

They were having the best spring for three to four years, Guy Hamilton, Brownrigg's agronomist says.

"Pasture covers on the flats growing at 50 to 60kg drymatter (DM)/day, and on the easy hills 25-30, slighter steeper 20 and harder hills 15kg DM/day." Kevin's pasture covers at Ngawhakatatara were averaging about 1710kg DM/ha.

Like all the Brownrigg farms, Ngawhakatatara has a formal pasture monitoring each month with Farmax. Kevin keeps an eye on pastures with a pasture ruler and works out monthly covers.

He meets AgFirst consultant Phil Tither once a month for an individual meeting about pasture growth and to update the Farmax model. Guy says Farmax figures are very true for what they grow from March to October with about 98% accuracy.

"For the months outside that we don't have a good handle on as we are summer dry and rain has a large bearing on it."

Lake Poukawa rises and falls dramatically through the year. Kevin says: "People laugh and call you fish farmers in winter but the boot is on the other foot in summer."

The 100ha around the lake edge grows in excess of 60kg DM/ha/day in the height of summer, so its growth is equivalent to 600ha on the hills, and it's perfect cattle feed.

Cattle also graze the hills in summer to clean up the pastures for lambs, which start coming onto the farm in March. At the end of February these cows go off grazing, and lamb feed is produced all through winter.

They start drilling new grass on the flats when the harvest is completed from March 1, and six weeks later the first paddocks of Moata are being grazed with lambs.

The covers on the flats are 2200 to 2500kg DM/ha pre-grazing, and 1500kg post-grazing. Here Kevin runs mobs of 600-650 lambs in rotations around 20ha blocks.

On the hills the lambs are run in mobs of 1500-2500, and they are held on long rotations at weight-gains of 20-30g/day until they go onto the new grass on the flats. The paddocks are mostly 6ha in size, and if necessary the rotations are changed or mobs split to protect soils and give the stock more space in wet weather.

Using new grass each year means they don't have much of a worm problem, but if that occurs, they first faecal egg count. Waipukurau vet Richard Lee of Vet Services says they have a robust monitoring system.

The lambs don't come onto the farm until the worst of the summer autumn parasite problems are over and lambs start to build up worm immunity. They are quarantine drenched on arrival with a triple combination drench, and often it's the only drench the lambs get.

A faecal egg count of 400eggs/g is the threshold for drenching and current average egg counts were just on 50eggs/g, Kevin says. Flystrike problems are largely avoided because the lambs are gone by the worst time for fly in November.

When it comes to picking the lambs, Kevin aims for a GR measurement of 10, and this year kill-out weights for males have been averaging just over 22kg, and ewe lambs 20.5kg.

"I have been pretty happy with them. As we get towards the tail end of the season we get some smaller lambs and weights might drop a couple of kg, but the average is hopefully still a bit over 20kg."

Guy says the average of all farms is just on 20kg. Kevin prefers to keep away from any Finn influence in the lamb.

He says towards the tail end of season Finn lambs are all they are left with, and last year about 60% of the last 2000 lambs were Finns.

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