To top it all off, his crop of ewe hoggets featured prominently in the prize list of this year’s Merial Ancare West Otago ewe hogget competition. James’ ewe hoggets took out top overall honours in a keenly contested event, after his parents John and Margaret pushed him to enter.
Competition judges Callum McDonald (PGGW) and Elliot King look over James Edgar’s Texel- Coopworth-Perendale composite ewe hoggets.
Confident there was enough feed on hand to meet winter balage and hay requirements, James set out to extract maximum dollars from the grass that he grows – because there is the matter of a sizeable bank loan to pay off.
After nutting out in late October where the season was likely to head grass-growth-wise, which paddocks to shut up for balage and silage, and being acutely aware of the opportunity cost of any decline in pasture quality, James says a few extra mouths were needed.
Quick to move, in November 60 340kg liveweight (LW) Silver Fern Farms bulls were added to the stock mix to sort out the pasture quality.
Returning $1.70kg LW they were grown out through the summer to the 550kg LW minimum demanded in the contract.
In January, the decision was made to buy 400 store lambs. They, too, were grown out to 18kg CW. Costing $68.50 store landed on the place and proving to be a good twist, they were a contributor to lifting farm income.
One-third of the bulls reached target liveweight in April, the next cut of 20 were heavy enough to move in mid-May, with the remainder on the truck before the end of June and the winter setting in.
In the meantime, 500 wet tonnes of whole crop silage was cut and stacked away, plus 300 bales of ryegrass, and 300 bales of oats and Moata balage was cut and wrapped in polythene.
James says it may seem like a heap of winter feed, but having it on hand is just part of his risk management strategy.
In the meantime, 500 wet tonnes of whole crop silage was cut and stacked away, plus 300 bales of ryegrass, and 300 bales of oats and Moata balage was cut and wrapped in polythene.
“You just don’t know what the winter will throw at us. You only get one chance in your first year and I can’t afford to bugger things up.”
There is also the option to sell to local dairy farmers or carry any excess supplement forward and wrap fewer bales next year, ploughing any summer feed surpluses into making money from finishing additional lambs or cattle.
Growing Chou moulier and swedes fits in well with James Edgar’s approach to winter feeding.
This year a 14-15t drymatter (DM)/ha crop of kale is being fed off to a neighbour’s 120 rising two-year-old dairy heifers and a similar yielding 12ha crop of swedes is set aside for mid-winter feeding of the ewes.
James intends having much of his ewe flock on the swedes from mid July through until early in September when he sorts them up and set-stocks them in their lambing paddocks.
The mob freezer ewes and all triplet-bearing ewes will remain on their grass rotation throughout the winter. Ewe hoggets begin lambing a month later than the mixed-age flock.
As well as the kale being a cash crop and the swedes filling the mid-winter feed gap, growing winter feed also fits snugly with the regrassing programme.
There is little chance of rust being an issue for James Edgar.
He is more interested in working with his ewe flock and time on the footy paddock than spending time playing around with machinery.
Other than a few essentials such as his trusty ute, a motorbike, a second-hand tractor and a couple of feed-out wagons parked in his shed, along with a few electric fence reels and the odd spanner or two, there is little else of note.
Instead of sitting on a tractor, James calls on contractors to do all his cultivation, silage and balage making and regrassing.
