Friday, March 29, 2024

Face to face over drought measures

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The Next Generation Deer Farmers Facebook page has proved to be a good forum for sharing pre- and post-weaning drought strategies. David O’Sullivan, deer stock manager at Raincliff Station between Fairlie and Pleasant Point and husband to Chanelle, the instigator of Facebook page Farming Mums NZ – see Boundaries p11 – started online discussions in mid-January asking for thoughts and plans for weaning management given the dry conditions.
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A tongue-in-cheek response from Mt Somers deer farmer Duncan Humm was regular prayer and rain dances. Clearly that strategy hadn’t worked with Humm and wife Lorna still hoping for rain at the start of March.

The couple, who lease 40ha of Humm’s family’s farm run 160 hinds and post-rut wean around May 10. The later weaning usually suits pasture growth and hind demand because of the relatively summer-safe foothills, and to date hind condition has not been an issue.

“We find fawns have good growth rates when they stay on mum and it sets them up for winter, and we have always maintained conception rates above 95%,” Humm said.

However, with virtually no rain since Christmas and lighter than desirable hind and fawn weights, the Humms were contemplating weaning in early April. 

The body condition score of about one-third of the hinds is lower than ideal and fawns were on average 5kg lighter than at the same time last year.

“At this stage we’re sticking to our animal health plan for weaning in May but it’s a tricky one,” Humm said.

They bought 400 bales of silage and have supplementary fed hinds from early January.

“We had to buy it in so we had options. Our main income is from venison and we don’t really want to sell them [as stores].”

Although an unwanted expense, the one upside was paying 22 cents/kg/drymatter (DM), about 6c/kg/DM less than last year because of the drop in milksolids payout.

Humm tagged, drenched, and administered copper bullets to fawns in early February. He will continue drenching monthly and will give two shots of 5-in-1 and Yersinia vaccine before weaning.

“Our key focus is to maintain our conception rates so as to minimise any knock-on effect to next year’s fawn crop.”

A definite decision on when to wean was to be made by mid-March.

With plenty of experience of dry Hawke’s Bay summers, deer farmer Grant Charteris posted on the Facebook group page that familiarising fawns with supplementary feed while still with the hind and weaning early was a tried and proven strategy. Having good quality balage in the racks for hinds and fawns over late summer was also a good idea.

“You are better off to hard feed weaned fawns and you will get hinds flushing quicker and therefore get better and earlier conception rates for the following season.”

O’Sullivan said the Facebook feedback had been interesting and helpful. At Raincliff they had held off from weaning earlier in the hope of rain but had in the end weaned a week or so earlier than usual.

“It’s a Catch 22 – we could have done it earlier but then you get lighter weaners.”

Silage, barley and palm kernel were fed to the 800 hinds and fawns in the weeks leading up to weaning. He’s been mindful of getting the biggest bang for bucks from the bought-in feed, by calculating the daily energy requirements – megajoules of metabolisable energy (MJ/ME) – of the hinds and fawns.

“We were feeding out according to kilograms per head but you really have to do it ME-wise.”

O’Sullivan had budgeted on an 18MJ/ME allowance for fawns to achieve daily growth rates of 190g, and 16MJ/ME to maintain hinds.

In another Facebook post the group was directed to a Stagline (January) article in which AgResearch scientist David Stevens urged farmers to wean early and take control. He said weaning earlier made sense because it conserved water and feed, reducing overall hind-fawn intake by 500g-1kg/DM. 

At weaning the hinds could go on to lower-quality rations such as silage, and the weaned fawns on to higher-quality feed such as recovering pasture or be moved off farm. But farmers needed to go easy on recovering pastures – those grazed at below 1000kg/DM/ha could produce 25% less feed.

“This could be as much as 25kg DM/ha a day. This will be important as we head towards winter as the lost production over a month could be as much as 750kg of pasture cover per hectare,” Stevens said.

The DEERfeed calculator – go to www.deerfeed.co.nz – helps determine the MJ/ME and kg/DM/day required to achieve chosen growth rates. The calculated amounts are slightly on the generous side, developer Stevens said, because the figure included a 15% wastage factor.

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