Apologies for the delay in getting the next blog up ... have been doing lots of different things which probably don't amount to much in a single blog. I will try and recapture some of the activities.
In New Zealand, on 6th February, we celebrated Waitangi Day. For many of us, it is a holiday but also a chance to remember the signing of the treaty. For more information on the day visit
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/politics/treaty/waitangi-day. For us it was pretty much a holiday, and we even managed to have a break from farm work. That evening our shearing gang 'Clayton-Greene and Welch Shearing' had their cut-out shout for clients at the Waikaretu Hall. Well attended and an enjoyable evening.
Much of the month has been moving stock around and putting stock on trucks for a terminal ride. This included the balance of our older cattle and 372 lambs. The 2-lines of lambs averaged 15.5 and 16.3 kg carcass weight. A bit disappointed in the 15.5 kg CW but could have been something to do with the distance they had to travel.
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| Mob 2 of Dairy Heifers just before shift |
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| Mob 3 of Dairy Heifers being shifted |
We have also started some gorse spraying but have quite a bit still to do. Whilst the property does not have a lot of gorse, it is important to keep on top of the small patches before it takes over. You can read a bit about gorse at
http://www.biosecurity.net.nz/gorse.html. We have a varying population of feral goats on the property and whislt they do some control, there is a need for spraying. Most of it is in our steeper hill country, therefore using a high pressure pump with long lead-out hose is ideal for most of it, followed by knap-sack in non-accessible areas. This will be an on-going project for us.
With work in Otaki 12th - 13th February, we decided to take Alice on her first plane trip which inevitably got delayed then cancelled, so instead of flying Auckland - Palmerston North, we flew into Wellington and bused to Levin. The reason we were in Otaki, was a retreat for the AgDialogue Group which I have mentioned before (check out the blogspot -
http://agriculturalemissions.blogspot.co.nz/p/about.html). This is being co-ordinated by Motu (
http://www.motu.org.nz/) and involves representatives from a wide background but all have an interest in what or how we can make any form of 'ETS' work for the whole of NZ. At the retreat there were 10 ideas put into a pot to work with so watch the above space. Our flight back home on Valentine's day was as predicted but a bit bumpy. Mum didn't like it much but Alice didn't seem to mind.
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| Alice excited about her trip home! |
Recently was also the annual Limestone Downs Field day. A large property on the coast south of Port Waikato. The topics of this years field day included plans for dairy conversion, hogget mating (Paul Kenyon - Massey University) and parasite management (Bill Pomeroy - Massey University).
Mal managed to sneak off the field day, between rain showers and between mustering our terminal ewes and pre-tup drenching them. In addition to this our Discussion Group meet at AgResearch (
http://www.agresearch.co.nz/Pages/default.aspx), where we were able to catch up with a number of scientist and have great discussion about pasture persistance, animal welfare, epigenomics, future research regarding FE and pastures and other current research. It was a great worthwhile day. As a group we benchmarked our lamb selling for the past 3 seasons (not this) and looked at store and prime sales, along with running an analysis on Farmax to compare enterprises.
The 2-tooth and light ewes also came in for their pre-tup drench. A sample of the ewes were weighed and condition scored. The 2-tooth were 62.6 kg average and 3.9 condition score (CS), whilst the light ewes were 63.5 kg and 3.4 CS. Whilst in the season we have just had, that doesn't sound overly high, to put that in perspective, the first tupping season here, albiet after the 2007/08 drought, our ewes only averaged 50 kg, so we feel we have made great progress in a short time. We just hope that it extrapolates out into a good lambing %.
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| The muster |
Although 4 days earlier than planned, we decided to put the rams out with the 2-tooths. A shown in the pictures below, the rams were obviously showing an interest.
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| Sniff me then I will sniff you! |
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| Who is that sniffing my bum! |
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| 2 rams showing an interest in the 2-tooths. The one at front being submissive, the ones at back continue eating! |
So far we have had 141.8 mls for January (139.1 mls av) and 54.75 mls of rain for February (73.8 mls av), although the February rainfall so far is greater than the last 2 seasons and January was marginally less than last 2 seasons. NIWA is predicted a normal autumn so will see what happens.
