On the Farm – Time for a rethink

With recent temperatures still up around 19 degrees and high humidity, we could be forgiven for thinking we were in early autumn, rather than nearing the solar minimum. The recent rain has certainly given the grass a much-needed boost. It’s the best rain we’ve had since the New Year storms, and just in the nick of time for lambing, too.

I had my first lambs last week, which is the earliest for my flock by well over a month. My Wiltshires normally start lambing mid to late July, but I have been pulling the date forward to try to combat the dry period that seems to be setting in earlier and lasting longer each year it seems. We’re fast becoming winter breeding country and struggling with late finishing, more like the East Coast.

Wiltshires, being a wool-less meat sheep, which therefore don’t need shearing, have finally come into their own this year, with demand reaching new highs. Fortunately, they’re robust sheep – able to cope with extremes in conditions – which they’ll certainly need to be, going forward.

Getting supplies of many kinds is proving trickier in this mid-pandemic world. Fertiliser was affected by supply and import issues this autumn, so we missed out on getting our RPR fertilizer on here. According to some commentators, this resource shortage was becoming apparent pre-Covid, with a slow-down in the biggest economies and shortages in crucial resources like energy materials (coal, oil, etc), minerals and the freshwater used to extract or make them. The pandemic may have masked these effects that are thus likely to resurface and prevent the expected global recovery.

This has significant implications for our farming economy in New Zealand, as it is heavily import dependent on agricultural and technological inputs, as well as for our transport energy needs. We are one of the biggest per capita importers of oil in the developed world, a fact that at first glance seems quite surprising considering our much-vaunted high renewable energy grid power system.

So, we may need to get quite a bit more creative in many ways down on the farm. One suggestion being touted is for an increase in biofuel use to replace some of our dependence on oil, especially in the heavy vehicle sector, which would include farming.

This isn’t as straightforward as it seems, though, as to grow biofuel, something else has to give, but it may well have legs for using waste like slash from forestry, as well as for planting up some of those steep areas on the farm that don’t grow much grass anyway.
Diversification and thinking outside of the box certainly seems to be the new order of the day. One thing’s for sure, life’s certainly not getting any easier, so we’d better start thinking smarter not harder, as the saying goes. And those methane emissions need much closer scrutiny too; but more on that next time.  Meanwhile, the ewes are looking content, and so all’s well down on the farm, for now.

Bev Trowbridge