Farmers in the south of the South Island are hoping a blast of cold weather at the weekend will be the only chill snap during this year's lambing.
If that is the case, says Otago Federated Farmers president Grant Bradfield, lambing losses might not be too bad.
Yesterday and early today cold
winds had been blowing in the area but it had not been raining and lambs had not been dying because of the weather, he said.
The big losses had happened on Saturday through to around lunchtime on Sunday.
On those days parts of Otago and Southland were hit by snow, sleet and hail, leading to high lamb losses in some areas.
But today Mr Bradfield told NZPA many farmers were just at the start of a lambing period, the bulk of which took three weeks.
"If that's the only cold snap we have over the next two to three weeks it won't be too bad," he said.
"Yesterday and today we've had basically cold winds but there hasn't been the rain. We're not losing lambs because of the weather, which is good."
He was concerned about more rain forecast for this evening and because grass was not growing as fast as it should in the cold conditions.
Farmers normally expected one or two cold snaps during the lambing period, and the biggest concern would be a cold period that lasted for days, Mr Bradfield said.
The number of lambs lost because of the weekend weather would vary considerably from farm to farm, but on an average farm with 2500 to 3000 ewes, losses of 50 to 100 lambs were possible.
Yesterday Slink Skins Ltd manager Ray Watson said he expected to have up to 100 staff busy collecting the lambs lost to the weekend storm.
He estimated lamb losses in areas such as central and northern Southland, south and west Otago could have been as high as 40 per cent, with snow and chilling wind doing much of the damage.
But the setback had been nothing compared with atrocious spring weather that hammered southern farmers two years ago, when more than 500,000 dead newborn lambs were collected around the region.
- NZPA
