Science has farmers busy making same old mistakes

By CLIVE DALTON*

I went into the King Country hills for a recent Sheep Council Seminar. The hills were covered in feed and it was great to lean against a wool press with the rain belting down on the roof, listening to an expert address about 30 local sheep farmers.

Our guest speaker, veterinarian Trevor Cook, certainly was an expert because of all the research he has done on sheep health in the Manawatu.

I was delighted to see the good physical state of farmers - nobody had two crutches or a lop-sided gait, and nobody had a bent back they dared not straighten.

The hills had surely changed for the better, and this new generation of farmers were swallowing terms such as metabolisable energy, pythomyces chartarum and sporidesmin like Minties.

The main subject for the day was hogget lambing - how to turn your hoggets into productive animals rather than letting them have a year off enjoying some good feed and a decent view.

The pressure is now on these young ladies to grow fast, get pregnant, keep growing, lamb without problems, be good mothers, milk well and wean good lambs before really coming up trumps as a two tooth. Whew!

It's all mapped out in the Sheep Council booklet A Guide to Hogget Lambing.

I well remember in the 1970s being involved in pushing this message.

And as public servants we had to save farmers from ruin and the nation from economic disaster by pushing new developments under the belief they've got to be good for you. We really did believe.

Sitting in the Mairoa hall I started to think how many of the things we pushed had, indeed, been good for farmers. I couldn't think of many.

Hogget lambing was one of those topics and we talked about bonus lambs from hoggets and also about bonus calves from mating yearling heifers.

We boffins didn't like getting too deep into economics and told farmers they would have to decide if the changes we pushed would make money on their individual farms.

We believed all our ideas were money makers!

I was concerned to hear the same arguments again that we used with the help of piddly partial budgets to show that hogget lambing was a real money maker.

We never did any difficult long-term sums on the impact such a new practice would have on a farm system over a decade or more.

We didn't have the skills or the computers to do simulation work, but the gear and bright young folk to do this are around today.

When you start mating hoggets and turning them into priority stock, and all the other age groups on the farm are priority stock too, and as you keep up the pressure on production something has go to give!

We could never work out what that was, but it's an urgent priority now before the same mistakes we made are repeated.

When you hear the term extra bonus lambs beware - there is no such thing. Of the 30 or so farmers there, about half a dozen were mating their hoggets.

The chairman should have asked who had given it away and why. But then boffins don't like to hear what they don't want to hear.

Again it sounded as if hogget mating has got to be good for you! And that's a real worry.

It just might not be.

* Former scientist Clive Dalton is technical editor of lifestyleblock