Trevor Cook made a mistake in his pasture management this spring and he is still suffering the consequences.
I came out of the winter carrying just over 800kg per hectare of liveweight. With them being restricted the daily demand was around 16kg per hectare. That was lifted as pasture growth rates lifted and was over 25 by October. At that point half of them were sold into a beef herd as replacements and the plan was to bring it back to 800kg by purchasing calves.
For various reasons, most of them being my not acting with enough urgency, those extra stock took three weeks to be all on. That meant three weeks of supply being over double the demand. The calves arrived to high green covers but these rapidly changed to high rank covers.
Since then it has been a balancing act of keeping yearlings growing but consuming some of the excess while preparing some quality for their year young sisters. That difference in pasture eating capability between the two age classes is so exaggerated in this situation and makes a mockery of feed budgets based just on dry matter.
Pasture growth rates have dropped but the big pasture bank has provided some buffer. The power of small breaks and frequent shifts has been employed although it has meant that my January time off has been spent putting in new water troughs and running out heaps of poly wire.
At least I now feel like being in control even if it does look like a mess. That activity has provided entertainment to urbanites who now surround this small farm. A network of sticks, strings and cattle being shifted every 48 hours has hopefully demonstrated that farming is not just about having animals wandering on pasture.
A weakness in the primitive nature of my farming showed up when weighing them all up to prepare to destock. The long proven technique of writing the tag number and weight onto paper on a clip board has worked for years and still does work. Except that near the end this time a heifer jumped out of the race before being weighed.
To get it back meant bringing some others into the work yard. It took a few minutes to get in control again but by then my recording sheet had been largely consumed by a bovine mouth. I was left with pieces. It was one of those situations in which you get angry but you are conflicted by not knowing who to get angry with. A small time out was needed to get into the head space to start again.
While this was going on I was also consumed by helping host two large groups of European farmers, half were sheep and beef and the rest dairy. They were exposed to farms, service providers, product outlets, industry bodies and a university. Their response to this exposure has been exceptional. They expressed almost wonderment at the farming systems that they saw, the knowledge that farmers had and their willingness to share that. They were amazed with the level of technical support that farmers get, such as oversight of their forage programmes. They could not believe the true cooperative nature of our nationwide farming product outlet company.
The way that the levy funded industry bodies interacted with its farmer members and worked at a practical level with them they found almost fascinating. And to cap it off to rub shoulders with university people who were happy to share and who came across as being very close to farmer needs left them highly impressed.
This has highlighted that we have extremely effective farming industry structures that link all aspects and with them all serving to support and grow the industry, almost unique on the international scene. Given the response from these farmers and from my observations with my overseas work we do have a very special industry which we largely take for granted and do complain a lot about.
I think that we are extremely well served by technical expertise which is very easily accessed. The standout for me is the seed and forage services. Those companies have some very talented advisers who are always available to farmers.
The European visitors could not believe that the advice that farmers were getting about their crops was free. Of course some of that cost is in the price of the seeds, but that seed seller gets a lot a kudos being associated with a good crop. Or is it more that the damage from being associated with a poor crop.
A real feature of our agricultural industries is how tight they are. All sectors of them are close and most work together. Farmers being the cornerstone of all of those, are so knowledgeable and so open to sharing it.
