Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Lanercost open to all farmers

Avatar photo
The first Future Farm is contributing to the rehabilitation of a bruised Canterbury farm and community. Tim Fulton reports.
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Visitors to Lanercost can see its potential as a sheep and beef demonstration farm, the lessees say.

The North Canterbury hill country property near Cheviot is 1310ha modelled on a farm at Lincoln that has allowed the dairy industry to assess innovation.

Farmer Carl Forrester and Mendip Hills manager Simon Lee have a lease to run the 1310ha Lanercost in partnership with Beef + Lamb New Zealand and Lanercost’s owner, the T D Whelan Trust.

They were about the settle a lease on the property in their own right until they heard about the Future Farm concept and decided a partnership with B+LNZ was a good chance to operate alongside top advisers with like-minded goals and potentially adopt innovate farm systems and technology.

“We’d done a lot of due diligence on Lanercost and we were going to take it over and farm it anyway. 

“So, we had the property but we thought this would be another string to the bow, personally for both us and for the community.”

The Cheviot area is shaking itself off after three years of drought followed by the Kaikoura earthquake.

Lee and Forrester look around the Cheviot area and see signs farmers and businesses are picking up after the thumping loss of land, livestock and traffic on State Highway 1. The evidence was anecdotal but there seemed to be a resurgence of young farmers, contractors and tradespeople in the area, including shops and pubs.

They hope Lanercost will continue that impetus, giving local farmers a focal point for innovation. 

Meantime, they appreciate the opportunity ahead of them and sympathise for the previous lessee, who faced some of the most trying farming conditions imaginable.

“I don’t reckon I would have wanted to be leasing the place. The drought was terrible and you’ve got to rope things in, pull everything back just to carry on. We’ve just got to hope that the three-year drought was a one-in-100-year job.”

The farm needed TLC on fences, tracks and yards but the bones are good, Forrester said.

It has a good stock water system though many of the pastures need renewing and they will be looking to grow 90ha of crop annually to get some decent pastures and forages in the ground as quickly as possible. 

Overall, Forrester expects they’ll spend no more on it than any other comparable commercial property.

“It wasn’t 500 grand to get things up to scratch. It might have been 100 grand’s worth. Probably on a normal farm of similar size for repairs and maintenance you might spend 20 or 30 grand in a normal year anyway. We’ll probably spend $20,000 on repairs and maintenance in the next two years and it will look bloody tidy.”

Forrester has a farm of his own in the area and worked at Lanercost fresh out of school. 

“I worked there for three years when I was younger, under previous owners and a manager. I was only about 17 or 18 and I just loved the property.

Aerial footage suggests the terrain is as gentle as a dairy farm on the better country but has some fairly extensive hill and tussock country to go with it. It is generally typical of the terrain from Hawke’s Bay to South Canterbury. The variety is one of the reasons B+LNZ thinks it will make a good demonstration farm.

“It’s just the layout of the farm from real nice easy front country with heavy dirt then quite steep, harder hill country in the middle and then back into some reasonable clay-type downs out the back. 

“It’s got enough scale for a long-term lease and the infrastructure’s excellent.”

Lanercost is managed day-to-day by Digby Heard and assistant Tim Waghorn on a renewable lease term of 5+5+5.

The Future Farm partnership, encased in a company called Future Farm North Canterbury, has detailed operating plans for management of people, land, livestock and forage. 

There’s no lack of plans, advisers or prospective suppliers of goods and services. 

Forrester almost gasped at the memory of the prep that went into setting up the project but looks forward to having detailed management systems and any numbers of advisers. 

“I’m not sure if we could put any more plans in place than what we have now. 

“It’s pretty well documented.”

The farm runs 3500 mixed-age Romney-based ewes and 300 Hereford/Angus cows but because the partnership started from zero it’s still in a building phase in terms of livestock.

To get the farm up and running the management team has completed a Farm Environment Plan, put in place a Farm Safety Management System, animal health and biosecurity plans, done a comprehensive soil health assessment and nutrient programme and completed a Farm Assurance Programme audit.

The lessees had to source ewes from different places. The ram went out the day the ewes arrived and they have performed well scanning 186% in the mixed-age mob and 158% in the two-tooths. Lambs through the pen at tailing was 146%.

Forrester said Lanercost will host and try new technology.

“We have to be prepared to take some risks but we don’t want to be a straight-out trial farm.

“We would rather use new technology that is semi-proven to help increase production and document what changes it had on our business, be it good or bad. That is what farmers need to see so they can get something out of this.

Any management decisions and purchases over certain spending thresholds have to be approved by the future farm board. Any innovation or new technology will be reported to the board through a stakeholder advisory group. New technology will have to be at least semi-proven before the farm will implement it. 

“We’re going to have to try a few things, we know that, but we’re not going to try something if it’s ridiculous.”

And it’s not about getting handouts.

Commercial credibility is vital and details will be openly disclosed through either a website or some form of network farmers see at the click of a mouse to follow what is happening on the farm day to day.

“It’s not about getting everything for free because how does that reflect on whether we are going the right way about things?” Forrester said.

Lee said Mendip has had plenty of experience hosting monitor farm groups but Lanercost will be thoroughly transparent, publicly releasing and discussing all sorts of information. 

Regular field days and visits from retailers including overseas supermarket chains are on the cards. 

“It’s a levypayers’ farm, it’s the country’s farm, it’s not just ours.”

As lessees they went through a rigorous application process before being selected, he said. 

After interviews with B+LNZ, consultants AbacusBio and advisory panel members they were chosen ahead of about half a dozen other applicants expressing interest in offering a farm for the project.

A Future Farm webpage is up with an full, stand-alone website envisaged. It will have management updates and farm data such as pasture growth rates and livestock performance.

B+LNZ chief executive Sam McIvor said the organisation’s vision for the Future Farm is to inspire vibrant farming communities by demonstrating farming excellence.

The Future Farm concept is moving away from a focus on single-component change to looking at the impact of management and technology changes on the whole farm system.

The farm aims to be in the top 5% profit-wise for farms of a similar class, to develop people who become industry leaders and demonstrate best-practice environmental management. 

A board comprising McIvor, Lee, Forrester, Kate Acland and Hamish Fraser will govern the team on the ground.

Total
0
Shares
People are also reading