A 500-Acre Light Land Farm

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32303, 22 May 1970, Page 7

A 500-Acre Light Land Farm

His aim would be to have the whole farm in lucerne, said Professor J. D. Stewart, professor of farm management at Lincoln College, in outlining to the conference of the New Zealand Grassland Association this week a suggested management system for a 500-acre lightland farm running about five ewes to the acre.

The acreage in lucerne would be, of course, less areas in the course of renewal through a forage cropping rotation. Professor Stewart said there had been occasions in the past when he had vacillated on the matter of having a totally lucerne farm because of doubts about balance and flexibility in feed supply, but this now seemed unnecessary. “With lucerne we have a pasture which produces more feed, of higher qualiity, with less inter-seasonal variability. It is resistant to grass grub and porina, which will be important in the post-D.D.T. era, fertiliser requirements appear to be moderate at high stocking rates, and stock thrift is excellent provided trace element deficiencies are identified.” Professor Stewart said that lucerne renewal would be through a simple rotation of greenfeed to turnips to new lucerne, sown in the spring. The spring sowing of lucerne was a weakness in the system, since this area was then out of production during the Septem-ber-October feed bottleneck. Given reasonable moisture conditions in January or February, however, the undersowing of winter forage with lucerne was possible. and they were now

having a fresh look at this practice. It was expected that about 50 acres of lucerne would be renewed a year. Prelambing greenfeed would be provided by “the 50 acres in the rotation and by overdrilling in autumn 50 to 100 acres of old lucerne stands, the area depending on the autumn moisture conditions. The greenfeed variety, assuming the price of the seed was reasonable, would be Tama ryegrass. He would expect that there would be surplus hay in some years and a deficit in others. This would be buffered by periodic purchases of threshed straw and grain. If there was land on the farm capable of growing at least 40 bushels of barley per acre, he would consider growing this and bulk storing it. A variety of stock breeding and replacement policies would be practicable. A Corriedale flock, with replacements bred, or purchased as two-tooth or cast-for-age ewes, was common, while the first cross Border Leicester Corriedale had adherents. A recent computer analysis of alternative sheep policies on light land had demonstrated that at current wool and lamb prices there was little difference in profitability between many of these alternative policies. “Because my 2500 ewe farm is to be a one-man unit, with some casual and contract labour only, I would opt for the simplest, leastlabour system, with easy care sheep. This would be a first-cross Border-Corrie-dale flock, with replacements purchased as ewe lambs as it is unlikely that satisfactory lines of older ewes would be obtainable. I would look for early-born ewe lambs, which could be mated in late April. These ewes would be mated with prime-lamb rams with high performance backing in respect to lamb growth rates. A feature of management would be late lambing (mid to late September) aiming for a full synthesis of feed supply and demand. On the winter saved areas of lucerne he would expect a good bank of growth by this time to facilitate an intensive rotational grazing system with the ewes and lambs. -Lambing -would be synchronised to minimise

spread, and he would expect to be drafting lambs at eight to 10 weeks and to be weaning at the Arne age. If there were feed stresses obviously building up lambs would be weaned at six weeks. It would require a substantial premium for early lambs to encourage him to depart from late lambing, except perhaps with oneyear ewes. It had here to be emphasised that this viewpoint related only to high lucerne farms and not to light land farms with a high ratio of conventional pastures. The final point that he would have to resolve would be paddock size in relation to size of mobs and grazing frequency over the lambing to weaning period. He had previously understood that for maximum efficiency of the lucerne plant rapid grazing was desirable. This created problems in relation to cost of subdivision, water reticulation, sheep disturbance and labour requirements. If, as he understood they might now be advised, the productivity of lucerne would not be impaired if the grazing period within the rotation was longer, then these problems would be less important. Given reasonable capitalisation a 500-acres farm carrying five ewes to the acre as a one-man unit would be “handsomely profitable,” with lambs at $5.50 each and Corriedale wool worth 28c per lb net.