Thursday, March 28, 2024

Basic farming brings rewards

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Nick France admits to being pretty stingy in his sheep and beef breeding operation as he sticks with old-fashioned philosophy of attention to detail at key times.
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He told farmers at the Beef + Lamb New Zealand farming for profit day he runs his beef operation as cheaply as possible, aligning practice with the philosophy of having bulls that perform well under commercial conditions and produce well-grown, profitable offspring.

“What we do here is cheap and commercial. The cows are a tool. We use them for growing and managing pasture for our commercial sheep operation and selecting bulls for the stud,” France said.

He and wife Penny have been running Okawa, a 780-hectare property in the Mid Canterbury foothills since the retirement of Penny’s parents David and Rosemary Morrow in 2014.

The Morrows were known for their Okawa Hereford bull stud established by David’s father in 1954 with Penny now a third generation farmer on the property.

The couple’s farm management was based on building on the performance and quality of their young stock in the stud bull operation.

“Our plan is to carry on with the core values of the stud and continue improving performance and quality,” France said.

“I am trying to grow animals out that will last 12 years so we give the young cows every chance but we don’t mess around when it comes to culling.”

The policy was best practice commercial management incorporating wintering on the hills, using cattle to manage summer pasture for set stocking of the breeding ewes and the heifers had to prove fecundity, fertility and maturity by mid-November to be in with a chance to stay on.

The pressure was on to test the constitution and the wet winter was challenging this year.

“You see them on good feed here now but the way they looked when they came of the hills was pretty embarrassing after a really tough, wet winter,” France said.

“Mating is a culling tool for inclusion in the cow herd. We have plenty of time to grow them out so we are doing it as cheaply as possible and we still calve at 96% and wean mid-March at weights of 200-240kg.

“The key performance indicator is at next year’s weaning as a second calver. Did she get in calf, raise a good calf and is she condition score 6-7?”

The sheep were run in much the same fashion.

Okawa ran a split Wairere Romney flock with two-thirds straight Romneys.

France bred his own first cross TefRoms this year using Cheviot and trialling the Dorper ram with the hoggets.

“I’m impressed how it is going so far,” he said. 

The breeding flock consisted of 3380 mixed age ewes, 1120 two-tooths and 1200 ewe hoggets.

“It’s nothing fancy. We do a good, old-fashioned lambing beat. We mother on and we target attention to detail at key times such as late pregnancy.

“It’s worked for years and it still works. We lamb late September, scan mid to late 170s, wean in the first week of January though we are flexible with that around feed management.

“Lamb wastage is minimal at 10%, weaning percentage is 153% with 30-40% straight of mum to the works.

“The key message is condition score, shelter and lambing beat,” France said.

The field day coincided with the B+LNZ Northern South Island Farmer Council annual meeting at which chairman James Hoban was re-elected as was Hugh Dampier-Crossley.

Both the regional extension manager Sarah O’Connell and Hoban reported a year of many challenges for the council and farmers in the region as they managed the aftermath of the Kaikoura earthquake hot on the heels of several years of drought.

But the council still managed to meet the regional delivery plan and now looked forward to better times ahead O’Connell said as she presented a snapshot of the 2017-2018 year.

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