The final tally won’t be known till docking is completed sometime in October, Hawke’s Bay Federated farmers president Jim Galloway said.
The numbers were patchy at this stage and losses around 80,000 were also possible.
“It was just bad luck to get caught when they did.
“It was wet and muddy and people worked like hell to get things right but you couldn’t really move stock in those conditions because it could have caused more problems with ewes and lambs who were together.”
The rainfall was right along the east coast with the worst impact from Hawke’s Bay to Wairarapa.
Early lambs born in July and a good part of August, during what was an excellent winter, coped well with the storm but for the main part of lambing it came at the worst time, GlobalHQ analyst Mel Croad said.
Word around the region was that it was the worst conditions during lambing in 20 to 30 years.
“Some farmers were saying they’d lost 15% to 20% of the lambs being born. It’s a double blow when you think what lambs are worth.”
Wallace Group processes slink skins at its Feilding plant.
Group chief executive Graham Shortland said numbers are commercially sensitive but significantly higher than would be expected in a normal week at this time of year.
The biggest numbers were from central and northern Hawke’s Bay. Numbers had normalised as lambing moved passed its peak.
A Beef + Lamb NZ chart shows from September 2 to 9 the east coast weekly lambing rate is about 300,000 lambs at the start and rising to 500,000 at the end with a peak of 750,000 about September 16. By then conditions were fine again.
B+LNZ figures also show 19% of the national ewe flock is farmed in Hawke’s Bay and Wairarapa, nearly 40% of the North Island flock.
In Hawke’s Bay, 2.422 million ewes were estimated to be mated for this lambing season and in Wairarapa the number was just over 658,850 ewes. That is down on the previous year because of the number of older ewes killed for the high mutton value last summer.
A lambing rate about 130% would produce about 3.9m lambs. The storm loss would be about 2.5%.
B+LNZ expects about 22.8m lambs to be born in NZ this year, with a 100,000 loss being about 0.5%.
That’s very low on a nationwide scale but the agency has forecast an average lamb price of $132 this season, meaning up to $13m of gross value loss for farmers.
