How many lambs and beef cattle will you finish per hectare this year?
In southern Wairarapa Mike McCreary and Liz Casey did 2.5 bulls and 54 lambs/ha last year – that’s 1400 bulls and 29,000 lambs across the 540ha (effective) they own with Mike’s parents on the eastern shores of Lake Wairarapa.
Admittedly, it’s a specialist finishing operation but the numbers are impressive nonetheless off an unirrigated silty-sand farm that’s been transformed in the seven years they’ve been there.
Hump-and-hollow drainage has been flattened and Novaflow-piped and high-performance forage has largely replaced crops. The farm is barely a metre above sea level and nearly surrounded by water – Lake Wairarapa to the west and the Ruamahanga River cut-off to the east – so drainage is an issue.
“It can get very wet here in October,” Mike told a New Zealand Grassland Association field trip earlier this summer.
That can create problems establishing crops so when they found a 30ha trial of Techno grazing not only beat cropping for return on investment and turnover, but minimised soil damage through back-fencing, the die was cast.
Now, more than half the farm is subdivided into lanes with three-strand high-voltage fences, and each lane is split again lengthways with a single strand for grazing bulls.
Most pasture has been renewed in the past five years with either plantain-clover or ryegrass-clover. Standard flowering ryegrass Request and later-heading One50 help spread production. The focus is more on quality than quantity and cattle take covers down to 1100-1200kg drymatter (DM)/ha.
“That way the second, third, fourth and subsequent rounds are usually 12 or more ME [metabolisable energy]. That beats everything.”
Last year 13,000 stores were bought through spring and finished December-June. Another 16,000 through autumn to finish July-November.
