FARMING IN NEW ZEALAND

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28268, 4 May 1957, Page 9

FARMING IN NEW ZEALAND

Impressions Of Visitor

“GRASS STANDS OUT A MILE”

Other crops are grown there, but grass stands out a mile as the crop in New Zealand. From this grass, the most valuable product is wool, representing almost onethird the total value of. all farm production. Add to this the value of meat from sheep, principally fat lamb, and you get a figure that is within sight of being nearly half the total production from New Zealand farms. Add also the value of butter, cheese and beef and you have covered a very significant proportion of their farm production. The foregoing occurs in an article on New Zealand farming methods contributed to the “Farmer and Stockbreeder” (London) by a prominent British farmer, Mr T. H. Turney, who was a member of the British delegation to the International Grassland Conference in New Zealand last November.

Pigs, poultry, cereals, potatoes, market garden crops, grass and clover seeds, taken together, are of some importance but represent only a small part of the whole, said Mr Turney. It is by a simple farming pattern, built round the grazing animal, that New Zealand has accomplished so much. Can we in England learn something from this pattern? One example of this simplicity is that nearly all the ewes in the Northern Island are Romneys. They are bred pure in. the hill country and crossed with .South Devons (Southdowns) for fat lamb on the better pastures. Romneys It is sometimes asked, he continued, why have Romneys become the predominant breed? It may be that like their forbears on the Kent Romney Marshes they can be run thick on the ground and get away with it. They are criticised, even in this southern hemisphere, for not producing a very prolific crop of lambs. Seventy to 90 lambs from 100 ewes are considered normal and a 100 per cent, lambing is seldom exceeded on the best farms. They are also said to be only moderate milkers.

The Massey Agricultural College, near Palmerston North, have shown that on a seven-year average the crop of lambs from halfbred Cheviot Romney cross gave 30 per cent, more lambs. In addition, five of these halfbreds could be maintained on land that would carry only four Romneys, and each fat 1 imb was of equal value. These additional lambs more than compensated for the reduction of 131 b of wool from the halfbred. Nevertheless, the Romney ewe still prevails. In the South Island the Merino and its crosses, often with Romneys, come into the picture. The wool has been so valuable that dry shogp have often been kept for several years for their wool alone, before being sent to the meat export works, probably for export to England. The Merino and their crosses can stand the more rugged and harder conditions met with in the South Island.

There is a wide variation in the stock-carrying capacity of New Zealand grassland. On a yearround basis some of the best will carry ten ewes to the acre with their lambs in season. On the other band, some land will carry one ewe to ten acres. In each case the carrying capacity is greater than an English farmer would expect. Impressive Wool Sheds On the larger sheep farms, and some of them may run to several thousand acres, there is usually a very impressive wool shed. Those who saw, at the 1956 Newcastle Royal Show, the New Zealand type wool shed with its many sorting pens, now on the Durham University , farm, will appreciate what fine buildings they are, with their accompanying dipping baths and sheep drafting yards. More than 90 per cent, of New Zealand milk goes to the factory, principally for butter and cheese making, and nearly all this milk comes from Jersey cows. The cows are fed on grass, consumed for the most part where it grows, only a small proportion being made into silage or hay. The only building on the farm is the fixed milking parlour. No cattle, not even the calves, are housed at any time. The factory supplier endeavours to calve all his cows within six weeks' of the early spring and they continue to milk through the summer and autumn, on grass, after which they are dried off for a rest during the two winter months, ready for calving again in the next spring. Beef cattle break lo some extent the simple farming pattern. As in so many parts of the world, the final selling price of beef seldom

covers the total cost; but like some hill country in the United Kingdom, cattle are needed on the hills to keep down bracken and other rank growth that sheep alone will not control. Mixed Stocking For this purpose they are run at a rate of about one beast to three sheep. If the cattle are driven rather hard in the winter months they make a better job of cleaning up the coarse growth ready for the spring grass. This annual winter punishment may reduce the development of the beef cattle to some extent. They calve in the spring on the hill, are single suckled and remain outside till they are finally finished on the better pastures at about 3 to 3J years old. Superphosphate covers nearly all artificial manure requirements. The ideal appears to be 2cwt super on each acre each year. The better farmers are now approaching this figure. The immediate effect of phosphate is to encourage the wild white clover, which in due course supplies nitrogen to the grasses, thus encouraging a fnore vigorous growth of grass. This calls for more stock to consume the grass, and their residue passing directly on the land encourages greater growth requiring still more stock, and so the snowball of fertility and wealth grows. This process would be less effective in England for the growing season here for white clover is about half' as long as in New Zealand, where their climate and this white clover-grass combination gives in the year, practically without bag nitrogen, twice the output per acre, whether it be milk or carcase meat, that would be obtained in the home country even with generous applications of bag nitrogen.