Thursday, March 28, 2024

At home on the free-range?

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I’ve mentioned before my dismay that while New Zealand lamb is grown in a relatively natural environment it seemingly can’t be sold at a premium price in spite of its provenance. This is particularly true of countries where most of NZ’s lamb is marketed and where their equivalent product is reared indoors. This combination of not being outside and not getting pasture is diametrically opposite to the production and quality of this country’s lamb. 
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Maybe overseas consumers don’t place much value on the background of their food after all. Given my mindset that these consumers aren’t really capable of recognising quality a recent chance meeting caught me quite off-guard.

At a social function a woman from the city was extolling the wide variety of free-range chicken options she could choose from because, of course, she could eat nothing else but free-range. This was a subject I had little knowledge of so could not really comment. 

She was aware of my background so thought it appropriate to ask me about similar free-range options. Did I know where she could get free-range lamb from? I thought she was joking so in jest asked did she mean the vegetarian variety as well. To my surprise she said yes. I was not sure how to respond without being rude but felt the urge to play along a bit more. 

I told her I was familiar with a farm not too far away where lambs were allowed to graze outside at will. 

She was surprised and wanted to know more but added an important detail that seemed to outweigh the freedom and pasture-fed factors – it was red meat, as if I had missed the point. It seemed this was the real barrier to her eating lamb. Her enlightenment then moved on to other topics and she eventually drifted off. 

I imagined I heard her asking someone where to find free-range cabbages that shared their spot with flaxes and dandelions. 

Is the urban-rural divide really this big? It was frightening to think this woman could stand for a regional council some day on a city ticket of preserving native bush and cheap transport and that her opinions could have the potential to affect farming practices. 

But this does not get away from the reality of outside influences on farming that are occurring in so many areas of the country. 

This woman had made reference to how cute lambs were early in our conversation so she no doubt would have loved her young children to rear a lamb or two despite her reluctance to eat red meat. If she stepped into her local farming environ she could easily find lambs for rearing because high-intervention lambing is common. Targeted orphan lambs are very profitable for some farming businesses and getting a triplet-born lamb on to a bottle and selling it at three or four days of age is a way of helping its siblings thrive and for triplet ewes to be more profitable. 

On that note, at a recent workshop on lamb survival I was surprised at the level of negativity towards triplets or the perception that hill-country lambing of tripleting ewes cannot be successful. I shouldn’t be too surprised though because many of the approaches used to achieve successful triplet lambing have in fact had unsuccessful lambings. 

A triplet ewe is a very delicate animal and is on a metabolic knife-edge as she approaches lambing. This level of frailty is exaggerated if the ewe is fat. 

The first mistake often made is that straight after a ewe is scanned to be carrying triplets she is preferentially fed so by lambing she is fat. Her susceptibility to falling apart at lambing is then high. 

The next mistake when close to lambing is to put her on the best pasture available. This could be the new grass from last autumn or high-quality pasture on flats on very fertile soils and in a great growing state. Just the sort of pasture that most farmers would instinctively avoid calving the old house cow on because of the high risk of her falling over at calving. 

That triplet ewe is just as susceptible yet in the quest to allow her to consume high-energy pasture it’s forgotten there are often demons in that pasture. 

Any ewe with a risk of metabolic crisis at lambing has a heightened risk of dying, or her lambs dying, or being born weak. Triplet-carrying ewes with space on not-too-steep hills can safely deliver lots of live lambs. 

Giving them access to higher-quality feed once lambed is necessary to deliver the weaning weight. It is almost the ultimate in feeding efficiency.

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