Thursday, March 28, 2024

FROM THE RIDGE: Be careful when talking about stock losses

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Last week I wrote about the storm that ravaged the east coast of the North Island and the impacts on many people’s lambing. I wrote: I’ve been a little guarded on my own radio show and in interviews on others as to the stock losses as we need to be more careful in what we say to a wider audience. We are under enough scrutiny now without inviting it upon ourselves.
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So, I didn’t dwell on numbers lost because, with 130,000 readers, there will be a range of opinions and thoughts on the matter. But this is a rural publication with a rural or rural-friendly readership. We understand what we do, what we can do and the realities of life.

To our city-dwelling compatriots our businesses and experiences are an alien concept compared to how they live their own lives.

Shows like Country Calendar are terrific in giving them a glimpse into our sector but they can be forgiven for thinking we are mostly horse-riding, organic farmers living in a world where the sun always shines and the scenery is breathtaking, such is the proclivity and mastery of the producers of that show.

Just after the storm I had a radio interview to do so I rang my mate Lon Anderson who is the regional co-ordinator for the Rural Support Trust and asked him if he’d had any media training in how to talk about lamb losses without talking about lamb losses.

He was perplexed at my reasoning to begin with and said no. Later he told me that not long after he, too, was rung for media comment and given our conversation was more guarded than he would have been.

Last week a reporter wrote about the lambing storm on a general website.

Several of my own readers pointed me in the direction of the resulting comments. There were a lot of them and most weren’t favourable.

I don’t partake in social media as life is too short and there are more fulfilling activities to be had and reading through the opinions, beliefs, suggestions, bitterness, ignorance and anger I’m pleased with that decision.

Much of it was driven by a genuine concern for the welfare of stock but their lack of understanding of the realities of life, nature and farming mean they had a naive and simplistic view of the issue.

There were more rational views trying to point out how things actually work and they were from folk who were farmers themselves or had lived in a rural environment.

Many of the city folk wanted to know why we lamb at this time of the year and not later towards the summer. Their wish for a later lambing overlooks that this year August was a benign month and great lambing weather and I still remember a very bad storm in October that caused many stock losses a couple of decades ago.

They couldn’t understand why we didn’t build shelters in every paddock or bring them back to barns like they do in the northern hemisphere.

One wag countered that when Aucklanders take in the 700 homeless they have in their own city he would house his stock.

Many of them used the event as an example of why animals shouldn’t be farmed or used for any purpose at all.

That website did follow up with another piece explaining the reasons why farmers do what they do but that still attracted a great deal of vitriol.

We know from our scanning results and what is weaned what the loss rates are.

Last year I had the absolute perfect lambing with very few ewe and lamb deaths, good weather, good feed levels and my own management was good, even though I say so myself.

And yet when working out the losses I was disappointed to have 20%. But that included triplets with a flock scanning well over 200%. When I worked it out but counted the triplet ewes as carrying twins, it came in as a very low 6%.

Most of those are born dead so there is nothing we can do to get that any lower.

And, yet, the fervent social media commentators still find that unacceptable.

We must keep working on strategies to improve survival and be mindful of the audience in our dealings with mainstream media.

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