Fire ban costs farmers $30m
A fire ban and wet autumn and winter may have cost Mid and South Canterbury’s arable farmers more than $30 million, with several of them showing losses of $500,000-plus.
‘‘I think the $30m loss is true, I’ve done the same calculations. It’s cost me a considerable amount of money,’’ said Federated Farmers arable industry group Guy Wigley, who farms at Waimate.
Wigley said every week of autumn planting which had been delayed had cost him about a quarter of a tonne of yield.
‘‘Four weeks late, that’s a tonne of wheat, and it’s worth about $370 a tonne at the moment.’’
The average wheat yield is eight to 12 tonnes per hectare.
Typically with autumn-sown wheat, farmers looked at a target planting date at the end of March, Wigley said.
A farmer who did not want to be named said he suffered substantial financial losses because he was unable to burn stubble and sow his crops during the Canterbury fire ban imposed during the Port Hills fires.
The dollar amount did not allow for extra tractor hours, costs incurred loosening wet straw rows for it to dry out, further cultivation to bury unburnt straw and slug bait, he said.
The farmer said last autumn the fire index never rose above 45 in South Canterbury, and burning stubble would have posed no threat.
Fire and emergency officials must realise that modern farming relied heavily on fire as an essential tool, especially with direct drilling, he said.
Wigley said there were alternatives to burning such as ploughing or discing, but they had to be planned for at harvest time. The straw needed to be bailed and carted.
Farmers also ended up with a lot more disease, he said. Burning was good for discouraging slug activity.
‘‘If you don’t burn straw, you need to get rid of the trash or stubble so that you can create a seedbed for planting the next crop,’’ he said.
‘‘And if you don’t burn you end up with a lot more slugs which means you have to use a lot more chemicals. And ploughing is slow and expensive to do.’’
Wigley said he managed to get a small amount of stubble burnt in the autumn but had to plant an area of the farm in spring, which failed to yield as well.
‘‘An autumn-sown crop invariably yields better than a spring sown crop - it’s as simple as that. I had to plant 20 per cent of my farm in the spring, and also some of what I planted in the autumn went in a little later than I would have liked.’’
Wigley said the ban on burning stubble coincided with a wet autumn. When he could burn it was too wet, he said.
The other problem with planting crops last autumn was the sodden condition of paddocks which would not support machinery. If the weather had been kind over the winter farmers may have been able to ‘‘travel’’ much sooner, he said.
‘‘But the paddocks were wet through the winter and the first half of the spring. So we had to plant quite late. If you go from autumn to spring sowing normally, you can get planting in early August, but we couldn’t get going until the middle of the spring. This exacerbated the lost yield from transferring autumn planting to spring planting because that yield penalty was worse than an average year.’’
‘‘A $500,000 loss? Seems reasonable to me. I would say that’s the value of burning.’’