Closing out the Year

Put too many animals together for too long under tight conditions and the stresses soon begin to surface. It’s the same with people, Nick Loughnan writes.

Seeing another calendar year drawing to a close at the end of December never seems to be the right time to call it finished when all the seasonal stuff on the farm is anything but.

With the longest day right on us as well, it’s always full on with pastures, crops and animals hopefully in peak production mode, alongside the necessary work to keep it all happening. And the traditional end-of-year Christmas thing is always an extra that has to be fitted around whatever else needs attention on the farm as well.

The real time for hanging back from a busy and productive year surely has to be in autumn. The pressure is off, the harvests are over, the lambs trucked off, and the weather here in Central Otago is usually stunningly beautiful, often with weeks of calm and settled days as the changing foliage colours display such a striking contrast beneath the bluest of clear open skies.

I’ve always thought the Americans had it right with the timing of their Thanksgiving traditions. They wrap their harvest celebrations in with the start of their ‘holiday season’ which also includes Black Friday to kick off the Christmas shopping burst for retailers. 

Rural and urban folk can all ease back together, and it’s healthy that city people there still acknowledge the importance of harvest.

So here in New Zealand, we just follow along with whatever’s going on around the world. Xmas cards, with deep white snow on rooftops and chimney pots that the fat red man has to squeeze down, all seem pretty odd to be giving when it’s approaching mid summer.

Yet it will be great to put 2021 behind us. It has been an extraordinary year, and NZ is not alone in the high levels of growing discontent showing up in populations worldwide. The parallels between behaviours in any species are understood intuitively by livestock farmers. Put too many animals together for too long under tight conditions and the stresses soon begin to surface.

As farmers, we can make all sorts of calls on the way we run our livestock. The choices of species, breeds and stocking rates, animal health remedies including the often very necessary use of vaccines, and sire selection for desirable traits are all at our disposal. 

Not so for the human population unfortunately! Rampant population growth and failure to manage how those populations are all able to access such basic needs as adequate food, clean water, shelter, healthcare and education is delivering major challenges to our world leaders on so many fronts. Little wonder that democracies are also struggling, especially in countries where the ‘market’ is left to deliver these social outcomes.

And now with a digital soapbox available to everyone with a connection, those noises of discontent, misinformation, and all sorts of other nonsense under the guise of free speech can be spread far and wide.

But if nothing else, we humans are a resilient species, and our intelligence gives us the capability to solve problems at many levels. Goodness knows that we have the odd pressing one to be worked on. 

And beneath it all, we need to wake up each day with something to look forward to. We all need hope. It’s what leads us all along. Hope for ourselves, our families, our communities that we live in, our country and our world.

So whether you’re a glass half empty, or a glass half full type of person, just find the time to top the thing right up at year’s end and enjoy yourself. 

Here’s to the future!!