First day of docking

Yesterday we had our first day of docking.  We mustered the ewes and lambs into the home set of yards.

These ewes are 2-tooth and 4-tooth (2 & 3 year olds) with the 2-tooths having lambs for the first time.  Our ewes are from a Romney base, and have had Coopworth introduced, so range from full Coopworth to half Coopworth. 

The ewes and lambs are drafted, with the lambs into a small catching pen, and the ewes straight ahead.

Once the lambs are separated we 'dock' the lambs.  In the South Island it is known as tailing.  So, what to do we do when we dock and why:

1. We have someone picking up and putting the lambs in a shute.  Their job is to keep the shute full at all times.
2. The lambs are treated for ticks, as this area is prone to them.  They can cause paralysis and death in the lambs if the infestation is great.
3. Each lamb is given an earmark.  This does two roles - it identifies who the owner of the lamb is by it's unique mark, and ewe and ram lambs are marked in different ears.  In our case we mark ewe lambs in the right ear and males in the left with our 'station' mark which is a 'Y' shape at the end of the ear.  The ear marks also help for drafting later when separating the sexes.  Later on at weaning we will age mark the ewe lambs, so that we know what year they were born in.
4. Finally, the lambs get their tails removed.  We do this by a gas iron.  The tails are removed as there is a high risk of lambs/sheep having 'daggy' or dirty bottoms.  In the warm months of the year this can lead to an infestation of 'fly' which lay their eggs in the wool and cause ill-health to the animal through being eaten alive and irritated.  To prevent fly in the sealed wound, we apply a treatment, Vetrazin.
5. Once the lambs are 'docked' they are then reunited with their mums and back out into the paddock.

There are many different 'docking' routines or systems, often depending on animal health issues in your area such as Scabie Mouth, some vaccinate ewe lambs and/or all lambs with a 5 in 1, some drench, some use rubber rings, some castrate the males ... so there is no set system.

Yesterday we had the girls helping and managed to get the first 200 lambs docked.  Tomorrow with weather permitting we hope to do another small day.

Soil testing

Yesterday afternoon I spent it with our fertiliser rep, Teresa, from Ravensdown (http://www.ravensdown.co.nz/).  It has been two years since we last soil tested, and in that time due to economic pressures and priority given to infrastructure development, we have only put fertiliser onto crop or regrassed paddocks and strategic use of N (nitrogen).

At last soil testing we took GPS points of transects around the farm on blocks that reflect aspects of the farm such as finishing area (different rotations), any trouble paddocks, any paddocks we have cropped, extensive hill country etc.

To start things we needed to refresh our memory where we had taken the samples before setting out on the quad.  Once we were in the near vicinity of the soil test we refer to the GPS point to get us to the start.  To take a soil sample, a soil auger is used, which for normal pasture is to a depth of 7.5 cm.  For cropping paddocks it is recommended that a depth of 15 cm is used.  In a transect a number of samples are made (between 6 - 12 on average).  The number of samples will allow for some variation such as historic dung and urine patches, different slope etc.  When taking samples to avoid stock camp areas, troughs, trees, gateways etc.  Follow the transect until you get to the second GPS point. The soil samples are then placed in a plastic bag which is labelled with the site (most fertilser companies have their own bags which can be supplied if doing it yourself).

Being a hill country property it takes quite a while to get around the 1200 acres - yesterday it took us 5 hours.  The person taking the samples gets quite a bit of exercise as it involves walking up and down hills, and often in all kinds of weather.  Yesterday we had 3-4 layers of warm clothing and woolly hats to protect us from the rain showers and wind.

These soil test will be sent to the laboratory for analysis.  In this case they will be sent to ARL (Analytical Research Laboratory) which is part of the Ravensdown group (see more information at the following link - http://www.ravensdown.co.nz/nz/pages/services/testing/types-of-testing/arl-our-testing-centre.aspx)

There will be a week turn around before we get the soil tests back and we will be making our fertiliser decisions for spring based on these results, compared to our previous results.

Whilst out and about we snapped a few photos of the ewes and lambs.  The first are a set of Suffolk x Romney lambs, and the second some of our Coopworth x Romney Ewes with their lambs 3/4 Coop 1/4 Rom.  We are looking at starting docking this week if the weather holds.

Feed Budgeting

At the end of August/beginning of September we do farm covers for the whole of the property.  These are taken in the same spot each time.  We don't manage to do 100% of the covers each time, but on the whole would do about 70%.  We use a Pasture Probe to do this.

This data is entered onto a spreadsheet which has all the paddock names and sizes and calculates the total pasture cover.  We also break this down into two blocks (geographically seperate), and our finishing country v's other. 

Once we have the whole farm pasture cover we enter this into Farmax (http://www.farmax.co.nz/) which is a decision support tool that we use for tracking how the farm is doing and what opportunities/actions need to be taken depending on pasture growth rates and animal weights. 

The last pasture cover 1256 kgDM/ha, with our average being 1208 kgDM/ha.  The graph below shows the pasture cover over the last 3.5 years.  As you can see it follows a similar trend but there has been large variation between years.  Summer 07/08 was a drought, spring 09 was a drought, autumn 10 was also a drought. 

Many perceive this as too much monitoring, but by recording data - pasture covers, rainfall and animal weights, you can get to a level of prediction which many who have farmed the same piece of land get to.  

We feel that this data allows us to make decisions and react before hand that allows us to minimise the impact or to take opportunities that others might not see until too late.  It is also a good benchmarking tool for the property, comparing year by year production and other key indicators.