Choices hoped to lessen future woes

• Published date: 10 April 2024
• Publication title: Central Rural Life

The working sheep station in Canterbury’s Craigieburn Valley is largely a breeding unit of about 8500 ewes with 350 breeding cattle

They came out of a relatively mild winter into a cold spring and growth was particularly slow.

Then it stopped raining, Mrs Hill told about 70 farmers attending Beef + Lamb NZ’s (B+LNZ) Farming for Profit: When will it rain field day at Windwhistle’s Tui Estate.

Early decisions had to be made as being at a higher altitude meant a shorter growing season, she said.

The farm management team reported to the board of Flock Hill at tailing time that the outlook was ‘‘grim’’.

‘‘It’s quite a hard pill to swallow that this farm which is meant to be making X amount of dollars is actually costing. They wanted to know what happened and why it was so bad so there was a lot of explaining all the way through. We tried to make decisions as soon as possible and tell them what decisions are coming.’’

She said early plans were made such as bringing forward the on-farm lamb sale.

The decision to be proactive and not reactive was key to limiting losses, she said.

‘‘There’s no point making a decision when you’re forced in to it and it is hard to sell lambs for less than expected and our average for the whole year is going to be ridiculous. It’s about mitigating the losses and putting ourselves in the best possible position to reduce the effect on next year. It’s those capital stock that we need to maintain as well as we possibly can because that’s our next year’s income. We want to reduce the flow-on as much as we can.’’

In the past, much of the about 450ha of lucerne grown is sold as baleage.

‘‘So our decision making really started at the end of October when we were looking at our lucerne and the potential if it didn’t rain. We looked at how much of that lucerne are we going to put down the throats of ewes with lambs at foot, how much are we going to conserve and put into baleage to sell. A lot of decisions happened early based around the weather because it was cold and then the lack of rain.’’

Mrs Hill said they had only cut half the amount of lucerne they normally would by halfway when they would usually be making large amounts of baleage.

‘‘But the crops were that low that it meant the next cut which went into a silage stack as opposed to baleage was about half of what we would normally have. From then it’s just been all hands on deck.’’

Lambs were weaned five weeks early with an...