Early action lessens pain for farmers

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

The farm’s autumn window for growth shut down last month with the first frosts arriving in the middle of March

‘‘We don’t have a window left of growth for winter,’’ Mrs Harmer said.

‘‘So all we’re going to do is batten down the hatches and work out what we’re going to feed and how do we look after our capital stock. We have got rid of every surplus animal on the place that we can other than the merino wether lambs and they don’t take a lot to feed and will go in July anyway. There’s been an opportunity cost — we lost a lot of money by selling those other lambs early, but we had to.’’

She outlined the toll of drought on the station to about 70 farmers attending Beef + Lamb NZ’s (B+LNZ) Farming for Profit: When will it rain field day at Windwhistle’s Tui Estate.

This was tempered with the wisdom of making quick and early decisions to prevent further pain.

The Harmers run just under 6000ha in the Ashburton Gorge in the middle of the valley in a rain shadow with much less rainfall than other properties around them.

Their Merino ewe breeding operation has about 13,000 ewes, as well as 600 Angus beef cows and about 230 hinds.

‘‘So it’s all about capital stock for us and to give you an idea of what this season has meant for us I did a quick work out and we’ve been measuring rainfall for the last 30-odd years we’ve been up there and we’ve actually only hit our average monthly rainfall target twice since December 2022. Our last significant rainfall was snowfall events last October and so we went from a cold spring to a dry spring and didn’t get our normal rainfall.’’

Castle Ridge collected 25mm in November, followed by 14.5mm the next month and 43mm in January after two small rainfalls.

‘‘We’re used to dry so we plan for it. This season has probably been a little bit more so than usual.’’

The couple spilt their heifer calves at calving from steer calves each year.

To counter feed getting tight in a dry summer they have only had to put the heifer calves and cows on to the hill before weaning a couple of times and this is the first time they have weaned the heifer calves early.

This reduces their feed requirements with these calves staying with 250 to 260 cows on poorer quality feed as they need another year of growing before they can go to the bull.

That means their good-quality feed can go to their steer calves to be sold in autumn.

They realised more steps needed to be taken when it became apparent in November there was little rain and they could only take one...