The Pasture Princess

Unusual season shows regional difference in grass growth

Over the past few weeks I have been travelling all over the UK visiting farms with Aberdale ewes. The difference in climate and grass growth has varied considerably this season, with a very noticeable difference in the west of the country compared with the east and central regions. 

Being based in Aberystwyth we are used to our fair share of rain, and despite weather records suggesting that Wales has had it's driest summer in many years, you would not believe that in western counties like Ceredigion, Gwynedd, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire (since May). The grass growth curve for the year seems to have shifted from the 'typical' season in these wetter areas, with generally more grass growth earlier in the season but less of a peak in May, and more grass going into the autumn than usual. Visits to Cumbria and the Scottish Borders indicate the same trend, with one farmer in the borders telling me that he has not seen a season with so much grass growth since 1985.

However this has not been the case in eastern areas of Wales, the midlands, eastern and southern England, with many areas experiencing a drought.  In stark contrast to the west of the country, many farmers in these regions have been crying out for rain and many have been feeding stock over the summer period. Farms using brassica crops and drought tolerant plants such as chicory to finish lambs over the summer have benefitted, with these crops far outperforming ryegrass. Many areas have now had rain and the grass is freshening up.

In terms of managing Aberdale ewes, neither scenario is ideal for maintaining ewes at around condition score 3 over the tupping period. Ewes that I have seen in the wetter areas with plenty of grass are generally too fat, and will struggle to lose any condition over the coming month. This is likely to result in high scanning percentages this year, especially for ewes tupping in early to mid October when the ewes are at their optimum prolificacy for the season. In areas where it has been dry and feed has been limited, ewes are in ideal condition for tupping or are slightly on the lean side. Many farmers that I have spoken to have commented that non-flushing will be easy this year. However; we experienced similar conditions last year where grass availability was poor until rain came in mid September. This caused a flush or grass, and as a result ewes flushed and many scanned well above 200%.

Bearing this in mind, it seems sensible to expect scan results in excess of 200% in Aberdale ewes this season, but to be prepared for it by having ewes going into winter carrying enough condition to carry a heavy load of lambs and to rear twins (or triplets) next spring. Milk machines may be needed to rear cade lambs, or some extra work may be required to cross foster triplet lambs onto single bearing ewes. With the high lamb prices we have seen over the past two seasons, and with them predicted to remain high farmers can really reap the benefit from having extra lambs, provided that they are prepared and that an effective system is in place to deal with larger numbers of lambs this lambing.

Psychic sheep predicts rugby World Cup results

Last year Paul the octopus rose to fame by predicting the outcomes of the football World Cup in South Africa. This year for the rugby World Cup in New Zealand it is the turn of 'psychic sheep' Sonny Wool!

Sonny has kicked-off the tournament by correctly picking New Zealand to beat Tonga in the opening game played this morning (UK time). Sonny was offered two identical feed containers, one carrying the New Zealand flag, the other the Tonga flag. Only time will tell as to whether Sonny Wool's psychic skills extend to predicting the eventual winner of the tournament on 23rd October.

Follow this link to see Sonny Wool picking New Zealand to win the opening game:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/rugby/5594761/Sonny-Wool-aims-to-match-Paul-the-octopus

Australian wildlife!

An Eastern Grey kangaroo in the wild - not at all afraid of me!

Me holding a snake!

Saltwater crocodile in Mary River, Kakadu

Freshwater crocodile in Kakadu

A dingo in the wild

Not sure you can class Charlie, the stuffed water buffallo from Crocodile Dundee as wildlife!

Keep a close eye on your brassica crops

Following a couple weeks of damp and humid weather in West Wales, conditions have been ideal for sawfly to hatch and feed on brassica crops.

Despite it's name, sawfly is actually a small black caterpiller that can be hard to spot when you don't know what you are looking for. The photo below shows a swede leaf with small holes in the centre of the leaf, and in most cases the sawfly are found on the under side of the leaf. This example has very little damage, but sawfly can be known to cause severe damage to a crop in only a few days. At this time of year it is important to regularly check on brassica crops such as swedes, rape and kale to check for any signs of damage. Sawfly were found on two swede crops on the Innovis farms this week, one at 100ft and the other at 800ft. As soon as they were identified and conditions were fine to do so, the swedes were sprayed.

Another possible culprit at this time of year is the cabbage white caterpillar. Often seen on brassica crops at the same time as sawfly, the large yellow and black striped caterpillar can severely damage crops in a short period of time.

Sawfly caterpillar on the underside of a swede leaf

 

Glad to be home as NZ is hit by it's heaviest snowfall in 15 years

Just three weeks ago I was at Christchurch airport, all set to fly home. Considering it was winter I was surprised at how mild it was, apparently this had been the case so far through the autumn and early winter.

Luckily my flight wasn't three weeks later, as parts of New Zealand have been hit by the heaviest snowfall in 15 years. The coastal regions of the South Island appear to have been worse affected, with Christchurch, Dunedin and Queenstown airport closed, and many roads closed between Dunedin and north of Christchurch to Kaikoura.

When we were hit by the snow early in winter last year, it caused havoc for many farmers. Farmers across the country adopting more of a New Zealand approach were hit hard, with kale, swedes and fodder beet crops that hadn't fully matured rotting in the snow and ice. We experienced this at Peithyll, with a field of swedes in the valley bottom next to the river completely rotting before any stock had even been turned on to graze. I joked with many New Zealand farmers that they may end up with a winter like ours. Despite the heavy snowfall now, it has arrived in mid-winter and most crops started being grazed in late May to June.

With dairy farms in New Zealand not milking cows during the winter months of June and July, many cows and heifers will be due to start calving over the next couple of weeks. The majority of ewes will also be in mid to late pregnancy.  Having not been in New Zealand over winter and seen how hardy the winter crops are, I was interested to hear how the crops are holding up in this cold weather.

This following extract is a reply I had from one of the consultants at AbacusBio in Dunedin when I asked how winter crops would be holding up in this weather:

"It has been a great autumn for most farmers in the south. While unpleasant, farmers are well placed feed-wise to handle the winter. Things were looking as good as they could be going into winter in most of the SI. In my opinion the snow will probably just chew up the surplus in winter feed, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

A lot of the feed is Kale (which would be strip grazed still) which stands up in the snow and isn’t as hard to get to when things freeze. However big snows can cause some strippage of leaves and breakage of stems which can lead to rotting, which in that case can favour the Swedes which will keep for longer (but may be less accessible under ice).

Unless there’s a massive big freeze which keeps the snow for weeks I don’t think the snow will be too much of an issue. Farmers would be prepared for this. It’s those later storms like the South got last year when lambs are at foot which are more of a worry. The snow could help clear a bit of the glut in hay and straw which some cropping farmers had."

 

The wanderer returns!

Well, it has been almost 6 weeks since I last spoke to you all via my blog. Since I said fair well to the crew at AbacusBio I visited AgResearch at Invermay to discuss previous research work on the management of Inverdale ewes, and I spent a couple of days in Southland with Chris Adams and family (including a drunken NZ style goodbye!). My last two days in New Zealand were spent in Queenstown, where I was put up for the night by David Clarke, a good friend of Chris Adams. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with David, picking up 70kg of mutton sausages that he'd had made by the local butcher in Arrowtown before taste testing them for him! He also cooked me a fantastic lamb roast (also one of his own) and talked about his time shearing in Wales - he knew many farmers that I know, which always leads to interesting conversations!

From Queenstown I flew out to Sydney, ready for my annual holiday! I spent three weeks travelling from Sydney to Darwin, via Melbourne, Adelaide, Uluru (or Ayers Rock) and Alice Springs. It is a very long way, and Australia is a very diverse country. The south east of Australia has experienced it's coldest autumn on record, which was evident by the fact that I needed a coat everyday until I got to the Northern Terittory, and at Thredbo (Australia's ski resort) I was in a heavy snowstorm before the ski season had even begun!

Travelling through New South Wales into Victoria I saw many dairy farms, and I was surprised at how green and lush everywhere was. This has been the case in general across Australia this year as they have had far more rain than usual, with the wet season in the Northern Terittory lasting a whole month longer than expected. You may have heard on the news that the cattle industry has been suffering in Australia of late, following reports and video's by media showing the poor conditions that cattle in Indonesia, exported from Australia, have been kept in prior to slaughter. This led to a ban on the live trade of all cattle from Australia, which as you would imagine has had a huge impact on the rural community, particularly in the Northern Terittory where live exports to Indonesia is the main outlet.

I will upload some photos this week to illustrate how diverse the countryside is from the very south to the far north of Australia. 

Today is my first day of being back at Innovis. I went for a drive around the Innovis farms this morning, where the stock and pasture is looking tremendous. I started writing this blog 5 months ago with the intention of keeping you posted on my travels and work in New Zealand. I would like to thank you all for the tremendous feedback I have had on my blog, and you are all responsible for encouraging me to keep the blog going now that I am back in Wales! Over this busy summer period I will be travelling over the UK visiting various farms, and I will try my best to continue updating you all on how I am getting on!

Last day in the AbacusBio office!

After nearly 4 months in Dunedin, today is my last day in the AbacusBio office! It has been a fantastic few months working with everyone at Abacus. I have been made to feel at home and have been able to join in with all sorts of wonderful things - from the tour of Otago and Southland with 15 Brazilian farmers in my first week, to several farm visits with Simon, to 'muffin club' meetings and several Friday nights drinks!

The social side of my time in Dunedin has been great; getting to know the area, having people wave at me on the street because I've been here long enough to make friends, and meeting a fantastic guy! But on a serious note, I cannot even begin to comprehend yet just how much I have learnt over the past few months, and how much knowledge I have gained. I set out to learn more about grassland management, New Zealand farming systems, budgeting etc, but for any of you that have reguarly been reading my blog you will have seen that what I wanted to gain has just been the tip of the iceberg. Other than a few days spent with Chris Adams in Southland, the thanks has to go to the wonderful team at Abacus, who truly have made my stay here so memorable!

"Meat the Future" day focuses on new technology

Last week I joined Milton and Stan (Chris Adams' sheep farm team) at a Beef and Lamb NZ "Meat the Future" event taking place just down the road from Chris' Brightview Farm. The event focused on using farmer-friendly technology that can be used by sheep and beef farmers to improve on-farm efficiency.

The day began with a presentation from Matt Wyeth, a sheep and beef farmer from Masterton on the North Island. Matt is working as a pilot farm with meat processing company Silver Fern Farms, tagging his 5,000 ewes and 8,500 lambs with EID tags. He believes that sheep and beef farmers need to become more efficient, and told us that what farmers did yesterday is not necessarily what they will be doing tomorrow. Matt tags all lambs at weaning and records if they are a single, twin or triplet (he does not know if they have lost a sibling). After weaning lambs are finished on rape, chicory, grass and plantain, and he is able to track the kill data that he gets back from Silver Fern Farms to the forages used to see any differences in carcase yields. With ewes now tagged, he plans to track ewe performance to compare ewe weights with lamb weaning weights and pull out ewes with poor performance. He has also EID tagged commercial cows and finishing and replacement cattle, and uses the data he collects as a management tool to maximise efficiency of his system.

We were then split into groups of 5, as the next few hours of the day was split into individual sessions looking at weighing systems, useful websites to help with farm production decisions, GPS technology and a session from NAIT learning about the new cattle EID regulations due in November. The one thing I found from the session is that New Zealand farmers are now at the stage that UK farmers were at 2 or 3 years ago when we realised that EID tagging was to become compulsory in sheep. From what I heard at this event, many believe that it is not too far away for sheep in New Zealand too. I'm sure we will know the answer for that one when it happens!

At the end of the day we were in for a treat, with a presentation from the 2010 South Island Farmer of the Year Doug Avery. I heard Doug present at the IFMA congress back in March, and I though he was fantastic! His presentation this time was an extended version of what I heard in March, and even though he ran over schedule and it was dark by time he finished, nobody cared as he was well worth listening to (even Milton who still had mobs of ewes to shift wasn't too worried!). Doug farms in Marlborough, right next to a salt factory! The title of his presentation was 'Beyond Reasonable Drought', and he filled his talk with humour, jokes, the story of Bonavaree (his farm), and filled the audience with inspiration for improving how we farm or generally lead our lives. Doug has found that you have to adapt to situations, and for him one way of achieving this meant moving away from grass and clover that just doesn't cope in the extreme drought he faces. So he began the renaissance of using lucerne; a legume with an exceptionally deep tap root that finds water. The photos he showed us illustrated his point - his farm was green and lush and achieving exceptional growth rates and lambing percantages of 150%+, his neighbours who say they can't afford to change had barren fields, and no stock to be seen. Doug's thoughts on his neighbours comments were - he can't afford not to change. We were told about how the farm has expanded dramatically over recent years, and even this year he has bought a neighbouring farm and leased another. Proof in itself that his policy is working better than his neighbours!

A truly inspirational speaker, and if you ever get the chance to listen to Doug I can't recommend it highly enough.

Not the best photo, but this is one that I took on my travels in Marlborough of a grazed Lucerne paddock. It's either one of Doug Avery's or some of his neighbours are taking a leaf out of his book!

Dairy discussion group a real eye opener

While staying with Chris Adams and family near Nightcaps, Southland last week I joined Chris, Brad and Tracy and other dairy farmers from the area in their recently formed dairy discussion group. Chris is the owner of Brightview Dairy, but the 1200 cows are managed by young couple Brad and Tracy and their team of staff.

The new discussion group, formed by Chris a year ago when the Brightview Dairy business was established is facilitated by Louise, a young Scottish vet based in Otautau. In New Zealand dairy cows are dried off in late May and are wintered on brassica crops in June and July, before calving in August and September and being milked once again. With the exceptionally wet conditions underfoot following days of heavy rainfall, one major question that Chris, Brad and Tracy wanted to discuss and consider with Louise and the group was when and how should the cows be dried off? With 1200 cows split into two herds, one lot milked through a new 54 point rotary parlour and the other lot through the older herringbone, drying off the cows in one go would be a very big task indeed!

Previously I have only been to sheep and beef discussion groups in New Zealand, which run from 1pm to about 5pm followed with a beer or two! Obviously dairy farmers milk in the afternoons, so the group runs from 10am until about 2pm. As it was raining in the morning the discussions began in the kitchen with a review of the past season for all farmers in the group. This involved sharing all performance indicators with each other, including total milk solids and milk solids per hectare, number of deaths, culls, lame cows and mastitis cows. A discussion was also had as to how the cows were planned to be overwintered at Brightview. In previous years when there were only Inverdale ewes at Brightview, Chris used to grow kale and swedes for wintering dairy cows. Now that they have more land including the milking platform, but less sheep, the land on the sheep farm (and some on the dairy farm) are now used to grow winter brassicas for their own cows and heifers. Chris has enough experience of this, and even though he creates a written feed budget to work out how much crop and silage is needed to keep the cows through the winter, he knows that the best way of really looking after the cows is to go by eye and make sure visually that the cows are not hungry.

Brad and Tracy planned on running groups of 80-90 cows, as the land gets very wet and they doubt that the land will hold any more than this. Louise suggested that 80 cows is not the best number, as this would mean that there would only be one bale of silage for the cows per day break, meaning that 20 of the fattest cows would eat all the silage and would continue to get fatter, while the thin cows would miss out and only get thinner. She suggested that 100 would be a better option as they can have two bales per break. The other thing to consider is how these groups should be made up; should it be based purely on condition score or should it be combined with calving date? One farmer in the group said that he uses 4 or 5 different coloured tail paints on cows due to calf at different times, and groups them accordingly. He suggested that they could do this and then split each group again according to condition. However the cows start grazing crops at the far end of the sheep farm and move closer to the milking platform as calving gets near, so they could always seperate the cows according to calving date later on if needed.

After a thorough discussion and many different suggestions, the weather cleared up enough for us to have a drive around the farm. Some of the cows had already been dried off and were on pads (a strip of a field) with access to silage only. These were looking well and were due to move on to crop over the next day or two. After a good look around the place and discussion of what is happening at the farm, it was back to the kitchen just in time before a thunderstorm broke out. Back in the kitchen, a final discussion was had on different options for the farm in the future. Production at Brightview Dairy was lower for the year than the other farms and on par with some, but this is a large operation on a newly converted sheep farm, so you would expect it to take a while for things to be operating at a top level. Chris being Chris he wants to be the best, and is looking at different ways of speeding up the process of improving production on the farm. Louise believes that this improvement will come from management (mainly grazing the cows correctly so that they have enough feed and leave the right residuals), not genetic merit of the cows at this level of production. One farmer in the group told Chris to stop looking at big expensive things such as DNA testing the cows, but instead to make small, cheap changes that will really make a big difference. This is one point that I think Chris really took on board.

At the end of the meeting, Chris asked if everyone in the group could give two criticisms of him and two of Brad and Tracy, to encourage them to move forward in the right direction. This involved some really good feedback from Louise and the farmers, with some good ideas in terms of management of staff, grassland management and nutrition advice as well as personal weaknesses or things that the three of them can work on, such as improving communication among themselves.

During my three and a half months in New Zealand, this discussion group meeting has definitely been the most educational part of my trip so far, and one of the most enjoyable days I have had. I can't even begin to explain on here how much I learnt from it, but it is definitely one day that I will not forget, and I will take away with me much from the day that I joined in on a dairy discussion group meeting!

The calm after the storm!

Here are a few photos that I took  in Southland on Wednesday. This came after 63ml of rain over three days (with fields and roads flooded), thunder storms, hail storms and snow on the hills.

I made the most of the break in the weather to take these photos, just as well as the rain came back that night!

 Overnight snowfall on the Takitimu mountains

Shifting a mob of ewes onto a new break

A new break on the kale crop for these dairy bulls