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Lambs growing well, shame about the price
01-02-2010
December, as for everyone, is always a busy month. Despite there often being a few more sheep each year, we still like to get everything weaned, shorn or dipped before Christmas.
I never liked the idea of having to leave my mates (or nowadays my family) on the beach to return to the dagging pen after Christmas Day.
Christmas this year was with Cath's family in Northland. Cath and our 21⁄2 kids headed up the weekend before for a wedding. I was left to finish off the stock-work before facing the Christmas Eve traffic, but as if endorsing my habit of leaving a bit late, by the time I hit the Auckland motorway most holiday-goers had long left the roads.
While away I spent little time thinking about sheep, cattle or pasture covers. But what I couldn't avoid and stirred some thoughts were some of the challenges we face as an industry.
My mother-in-law is a pretty awesome cook (I made sure that that hadn't skipped a generation) and part of the Christmas feast was roast turkey. Rather than an old-fashioned and oversized bird taking over the oven, a bit of further processing had made it a cook's dream. It was boneless, and the picture of the cooked meal on the colourful packaging was perfect for massaging any cook's ego.
The companies marketing our competing proteins are constantly innovating with new products and are very savvy in how to attract the shopper's eye and wallet. A big slab of meat wrapped in clear plastic hardly says "Pick me" to the typical shopper who is still deciding what to cook that night. What's more, the turkey cost more a kilo than probably any lamb cut in the chiller. There are some great initiatives in our industry; let's be bold and make them happen, rather than focusing on reasons why they mightn't work.
Trying to have a sleep-in in a bach with eight cousins all under five proved frustrating, but nothing compared to reading the New Zealand Herald on New Year's Day. In a three-page feature titled "100% Pure", a reporter gave his subjective analysis into the country's environmental performance.
Farming is facing an increasing barrage of negative criticism in the news media, just about all based on emotion rather than accurate science. In this article, a large photo of a beef cow and calf standing in water surrounded by tussock with the caption "Dirty dairying" is a well-aired example of emotion disguised as fact.
We need to find an effective means of combating this, and maybe we could learn some tactics from our disturbed friends in groups such as SAFE. They carefully choose their messenger, and pick emotive issues to attract the media and the public's attention. Maybe we, too, need to pick an emotive angle when defending agriculture. Possibly have a high-profile new mum fretting about having to feed baby products produced in China because we had such a hindered local industry?
We need to wake up because our industry seems to be under siege, maybe on the same path but a few years behind the agriculture sectors in the UK.
After being beaten by much younger legs in the cross-country run at the Martins Bay bach holders' sports day and barely catching a feed in the fishing competition, it was time to head home and look for better success on the farm.
Cath and I, with my father Les still actively involved, and a great team of staff are farming 2000ha inland from Fordell, Wanganui.
The original 470ha has been in the family since 1905, with the balance either being bought or leased recently. The properties
are predominantly medium hill country, supported by 400ha of river flats and terraces.
We are carrying 9800 highlander ewes and 520 breeding cows; most of these are performance recorded Herefords in our Riverton Ezicalve Hereford Stud.
All breeding stock are carried on the hill country apart from the lambing hoggets and first calving two-year heifers, with the flats also being used for lamb finishing, growing out our yearling sale Hereford bulls and usually some cash cropping.
After a reasonable spring that got off to a cracker start but then became a bit ordinary; we were pretty happy with weaning weights and ewe condition.
We lambed our hoggets again this spring after missing a year due to poor lamb returns and the drought. The motivation to lamb them again was paying $84 for our winter trade lambs last autumn.
Wasn't it refreshing having the decent returns providing an incentive to push our system again.
We were spoiled here last year; we had great clover growth through the summer, and we were able to capitalise on the good lamb schedule.
This year, I think we may be shaping up for disappointments on both fronts.
I have told Cath to make sure that I take foreign exchange cover for at least a share of our lamb sales next time our dollar goes below US$0.65. It is a shame our meat company's survival instinct means that the option of taking foreign exchange cover at this rate was seen as a potential competitive disadvantage rather than the means of guaranteeing a level of profitability for the industry.
We have just had most of the lambs back through the yards. Lambs have done well since weaning, but it will become more difficult on pasture if we don't get a decent rain to grow a fresh pick. We shear our top two-thirds of our maternal lambs at weaning in mid-December.
At the time I always question the practice, but every January I am relieved that I haven't buckled.
The shorn lambs have always outgrown the very tops that I've left woolly, and with the limited amount of bright fine wool, I have at least sold some wool for $4.50/kg - what a shame that that's the clean price and it wasn't enough to pay the shearing bill.
We grow some 80ha of feed crop predominantly for lamb finishing. The pasja has battled this year, with a delayed wet start, meaning that we were weaning on to it at just 35 days and it hasn't had much rain since. However, the lambs are still doing well on it and it guarantees that we can keep drafting well-finished lambs through the summer.
Half of this feed crop area was last year's maize ground. When a 10-year-old supply relationship between the local grain growers' group and an end user disintegrated last year, many of us have had to carry last year's harvest.
We have chosen to carry this grain through this season, too, rather than grow more. Locally, the area of barley planted is just 30% of last year and maize would be about 50%, all of which was sown three weeks later than usual.
Paul Mackintosh, who is responsible for the harvesting, storage and the marketing of our local grower group's grain, says inquiry and demand for grain has come alive and has been building steadily since early December.
A portion of the grain has been stored in plastic, and there were a few relieved sighs when it came out still in pristine condition.
Agriculture has a few battles to win, but our kids often remind us what a fantastic environment the farm is for them.
Most days either Sam, 3, Hamish, 18 months, or both, will spend an hour or three on the farm with me. They never get bored. There's always an animal to converse with, a tractor to ogle at, and in the case of Hamish, lots of "raisins" to collect in the sheep yards.
It's very cool listening to their imaginative world, which seems to be filled with fences, animals and machines rather than some of the dribble that comes from the square box.
I hope that their enjoyment and enthusiasm for farming doesn't run out by the time they become really useful; more so, I‘m hoping their affinity for tractors spreads to the dagging pen. I know which one I'll want to be out of in 20 years' time.
• Mike Cranstone is a new columnist for Country-Wide.