A ‘kick up the bum’ from nature
A North Canterbury sheep and beef farmer tells TONY BENNY that continuing drought has already cost him $ 250,000.
When Andrew and Liz Harris went away for 10 days over Christmas, their Parnassus, North Canterbury, farm was covered in lush clover and although drought was taking hold further south, they seemed to have escaped the dry.
But by the time they got home, their paddocks were as parched as those in South Canterbury.
‘‘It just got hot and we had those very hot blustery days and it was back to the old thing of, you know, ‘It’s getting pretty dry’. It was very quick and it caught me off-guard,’’ Harris says.
He responded by off-loading lambs as quickly as possible, even if that meant they went as stores instead of prime.
‘‘We’d put a lot of lucerne in so it wasn’t too bad and then it just kept biting and biting and the intense heat was just incredible. So I thought we’d better start thinking a bit quicker.
‘‘We were shipping more and more lambs off, but then we got really caught and by the end of January the store market had disappeared completely.’’
Before Christmas, store lambs were fetching $2.50/kg liveweight. By the end of January that was closer to $2. And to make matters worse, the prime lamb price started to fall too.
‘‘It was indicated by the meat companies the prime price was going to stay around $5.50/kg, but then it just started sliding. All the companies were pretty bullish early on in the spring. You’d think they’d get it right by now but it’s one of those things that hits us regularly, unfortunately.’’
Once the price dropped below $5, store lamb finishers lost confidence, putting further pressure on store prices.
In a normal year, 90 per cent of Harris’s lambs would go away prime; this year that dropped to 50 per cent.
With winter now taking hold and still next to no rain falling, Harris sent 1000 hoggets to grazing near Ashburton a fortnight ago, grateful to have found a farmer down there with excess grass.
‘‘We were pretty lucky, really,’’ he says, drawing a deep breath. ‘‘Otherwise we’d be in big trouble now.’’ In a normal year, 850 dairy cows would be winter-grazed on their farm, One Tree Hill, but this year there’s no feed. With dairy grazing usually earning about a quarter of the farm’s income, that’s another significant loss.
Some winter feed – fodder beet and kale – has grown, but the crops are much smaller than usual.
‘‘We had quite a good strike with the fodder beet. It’s not a 20-tonne crop but it’s still some feed – there’s a crop of seven or eight and one of 14, so that’s been a bit of a saviour.’’
That crop’s being grazed by 350 of the neighbour’s weaner steers. Normally Harris would buy steers himself but with feed so tight, grazing someone else’s seemed a better option this year.
He considered keeping the hoggets on-farm and feeding them the fodder beet but was worried he didn’t have enough baleage on hand to give them a balanced diet, having been feeding out baleage since February.
‘‘I liked the idea of them grazing on grass and bringing the neighbour’s steers in, it seemed logical really. It covers the cost of growing the fodder beet, perhaps a bit more, and there might be a margin.’’
Other feed crops, sown in autumn, are now only a few centimetres high when normally they could be at least 600mm – so at best they may provide lamb feed in spring.
To feed his 4000 romney ewes, Harris has bought 110 tonnes of barley so far. ‘‘That’s been quite lucky that the price has maintained where it is, about $400/tonne landed.’’ Between losing the dairy grazing income, buying barley and grazing out the hoggets, the drought will probably cost the couple $250,000 in lost income and extra costs – assuming the rain finally arrives.
Most years around this time Harris is in the market for 300 weaner deer which he fattens, aiming to have them killed by March the next year. He says he’s not too worried about that yet and can buy them as late as August – if the feed is there.
Andrew and Liz Harris bought One Tree Hill in 1989 and in their 26 years they’ve seen other droughts and were hit by the disastrous snow of 1992 too, but Andrew reckons this drought is probably the worst he’s experienced.
Brought up in Christchurch, he went to Lincoln University and graduated with a BAg Com, after which he went to Melbourne where he worked for a mining company as a financial analyst. He met Liz, who is English, in Melbourne.
‘‘Before I left Melbourne I went through the stockmarket crash and I remember saying to my boss, ‘What do I do now?’ and he said, ‘Go and buy some land’.
‘‘I said, ‘Righto’, so we went to England and I worked in the banking industry there for a while and then came back here at the end of ’88 and we bought this place.
‘‘My plan was not to be here for very long – I was going to buy some land and go back and live in Melbourne, but we got here and stayed for a year and children appeared and we thought, ‘Oh well, what’s the point of moving’?’’
Supplementing his university-learnt technical knowledge with practical skills learnt from a farm manager, Harris gradually took over the 980ha farm that in a normal year carries 8500 stock units.
‘‘We learnt pretty quickly, a few things came to light, and the biggest learning curve was the ’92 snow. That’s when everyone around here sat up and went, ‘We’ve got to change how we do things here’. We got hammered – this whole valley did – we lost about 700 ewes from sleepy sickness.’’
There were two big snowfalls and the second coincided with the start of lambing. And that was followed by days of freezing rain. ‘‘We ended up with 50 per cent lambing that year, which was interesting.’’
Harris joined other local farmers and formed a machinery syndicate to buy a baleage baler and a wrapper in 1993. ‘‘This property had always made silage but when it snows it’s very hard to get silage round so baleage was the logical step – it’s high quality feed in a parcel you can cart around.
‘‘We all looked at putting more winter feed in, higher quality feed pre-spring so it was available for the lambs to go on to rather than doing the old traditional September set stock, you’ll be fine. That year showed that didn’t work, that’s where we got caught out.’’
Growing more feed as well as having a variety of income streams, including lambs, deer, dairy grazing as well as fattening cattle, has made One Tree Hill far more resilient, but when the rain just doesn’t come, like this year, the options start to disappear.
‘‘If this winter really wants to bite us on the bum and we don’t get any growth between now and September and without any reserves of hay and baleage to go onto, that is a big risk we’ve got to be pretty careful of.
‘‘Hopefully nature does its thing and looks after us, as sometimes it has the way of doing. It gives you a big kick up the bum and then it comes back and is very nice to you.’’
Having been through drought before, Harris says he doesn’t lose sleep most nights. ‘‘But the odd night you wake up and think, ‘Where the hell are those sheep going to go tomorrow?’’’
He says talking to other people during stressful times like this is essential. Several meetings organised by the Rural Support Trust have been invaluable.
‘‘Getting off the farm, talking to everyone around you, not getting bogged down and hiding yourself away is the key to it, I think.
‘‘There are a few long faces at the meetings and there are obviously a few young guys fairly new to farming who haven’t seen this before, who’ve been going fivesix years and had some pretty good seasons.
‘‘This is hitting them particularly hard, but a lot have got family support who’ve seen it. But they’re going along to the meetings, that’s the main thing.’’
Now Harris is concerned that Niwa climate predictions still suggest there won’t be much rain in coming months.
‘‘We’re going to need significant rain between now and September somewhere. The concern is, if we don’t get any, then the spring will be pretty short-lived.
‘‘As long as the feed is still available to buy then that’s some comfort going forward, but if the barley price suddenly jumps to $500 a tonne and there’s no baleage left to buy or it’s $150 a bale, that then gets a bit tricky.
‘‘Everyone had the faith – it’ll rain before the end of March. We got to the end of March so it was, ‘It’s stayed warm so it doesn’t matter, if it rains by the end of April, we’ll be fine’, and then we got to the end of April and we went, ‘This is getting a bit serious now’.
‘‘Breaking even would be a nice scenario this year – I’m hoping.’’