Arable farmers pay the price for fire ban
A year on and South Canterbury’s arable farmers are paying the price for the Canterbury-wide fire ban put in place during the Port Hills fires.
Federated Farmers arable vicechairman Colin Hurst said farmers, especially those south of Waimate, were experiencing a poor harvest because they were unable to burn stubble during the fire ban.
‘‘This, along with a couple of other factors, resulted in poorly established crops last autumn,’’ Hurst said.
The fire ban was put in place because South Canterbury’s firefighters were deployed to the Port Hills, leaving no one to fight fires at home.
‘‘We can understand how serious the fires were, and we wanted the resources where they were needed. But we are a couple of hundred kilometres away from Christchurch - ours is a different climate. I guess farmers just went along with it but then the [fire] ban carried on a bit too long,’’ Hurst said.
‘‘We’re happy to go along with it but as time went on it kept getting wetter down here and the harvest was underway.’’
There were other ways of dealing with stubble, such as discing it into the soil, but they required farm management system changes that could not happen overnight, Hurst said.
‘‘Some farmers don’t burn. We rotational burn - we don’t burn every paddock every year. There is a good demand for straw, even more so this year. The great thing about burning is that it destroys most of the weeds and bugs.’’
Hurst said by the time the fire ban was lifted it was autumn and the straw sodden. ‘‘We wouldn’t have got an ideal burn because the straw was so damp. There would also have been a lot of smoke, which is never good,’’ he said.
The unusually wet autumn and an infestation of slugs also contributed to the poor uptake of crops. ‘‘It was so wet we couldn’t turn our crops around and re-establish them in a timely manner,’’ Hurst said. ‘‘I’ve been farming 30 years, and that was the worst autumn I’d ever had.
‘‘Our cropping programme is to establish everything in the autumn. We don’t do any spring sowing. Because it was so wet last autumn, it turned everything around, and we sowed in the spring. Normally a spring crop will yield quite a lot less.’’
Spring crops are harvested later and generally at a lower yield than autumn sown crops. But Hurst suspected this pattern would be turned on its head this year. The spring crops got timely rain between hot, sunny days - an ideal growing climate.
There was also ‘‘huge pressure’’ from slugs last autumn, Hurst said. They existed beneath the damp, unburnt stubble and ate crops as they came through the ground. Many applications of slug bait ended in crop-failure around the district, he said.
‘‘They caused a massive amount of grief, and the amount of chemical we had to put on was significant - more than I have used before. I do know those who grew oilseed rape struggled because of the slug pressure.’’
Burning stubble removed the environment for slugs to flourish, Hurst said.
‘‘We can’t do much about the weather, but when bureaucrats make decisions, they have to be mindful of us.’’