Farmers forced to face lamb losses

Press, 20 September 1977, Page 10

Farmers forced to face lamb losses

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an agricultural reporter

Whenever a storm occurs about lambing time — and in the last year or two there seems to have been one or two each season — many city people become upset by reports of losses. Their concern is increased by harrowing television pictures of dead lambs.

It is understandable that they should wonder why this should happen, but it would be quite wrong to assume that fanners are indifferent or unconcerned about the situation. For a sheepfarmer, lambing is like harvest time for the arable fanner — it is the culmination of many months feeding and care — and every farmer worth the name is interested in saving every lamb he can. and the more so when they may be worth $ll or $l2 in two or three months time. When it is remembered that by January this year the sheepfarmer was having to pay more than 51 per cent more for his goods and services than three years earlier, he cannot afford to see lambs die unnecessarily. A few years ago, Mr P. G. Stevens, a wellremembered and respected former member ot the staff of Lincoln College, who had not long returned from a trip overseas, showed slides of his trip to an audience of sheep men and women. One of the slides was of an English shepherd looking after his sheep. When lambing came on this English farm, with its typically small flock, the shepherd's hut or whare, on wheels, was pulled into a corner of the paddock and he lived with the flock throughout the lambing.

When he went around the sheep he took with him in his hip pocket a bottle of milk so that he could give a feed to any lamb that was lagging a little. It was a magnificent example of shepherding.

But the same sort of care cannot be given to his flock by the average New Zealand fanner, with 1000 to 2000 ewes under his control. One of the fundamentals of the New Zealand pastoral farming system is that it must be low-cost — that is, if anything is low-cost these

In other words, he cannot afford to have a team of men looking after his flock. When it is likely to cost more than $l5 to get a lamb from the farm gate to the market in Britain in the coming season, the residue left to the farmer is not great, unless the British housewife is prepared to pay an astronomic figure for her meat. Hence the need for economy; and this is one of the facts of life of farming in New Zealand so far away from the main markets for our produce.

But often the fanner’s wife joins in to help; and some fanners put the rams out with the ewes at a time that should have the lambs dropping when sons and daughters are home from secondary school during the August holidays. At lambing, farmers and their limited teams of helpers spend long hours out with their flocks during daylight hours, often in unpleasant conditions. Ewes are helped to lamb,

and orphan lambs and weak twins are brought in to the farmyard and even into the kitchen to warm up and be given a drink. The farmer’s wife soon finds she has a new family to feed, and sometimes for quite a period. Ewes that have lost a lamb are also brought in, and as an orphan is taken away from the housewife’s care an effort is made to induce the ewe to mother a strange lamb. And so the process goes on. At night, there is little that can be done in the paddock; and at this time visiting the flock can cause more trouble than good.

Because of the need to use a minimum amount of labour, there is emphasis today on breeding sheep that need the least possible care at lambing — the appropriately named easy-care sheep which can lamb almost without any attention. The prudent fanner is conscious of the value of good shelter and in recent years, under the impact of the farm forestry associations, there has been an increasing appreciation of trees for shelter, as a source of posts and timber, and as a source of nuts, too; and also as a means of enhancing the environment. But there is still a great deal of room for more and better shelter. The regional advisory officer of the Ministry of Agriculture in Christchurch (Mr D. G. Reynolds) said that there now seemed to be a great deal more consciousness of the need for shelter. He forecasts that a lot more attention is likely to be given to it in the future. To prepare itself better to meet the demand for advice on this subject, the Ministry will hold a “shelter advice workshop’’ in Christchurch in November for 20 of its farm and horticultural advisory officers and sheep and beef officers. Mr S. H. Henry, one of the direct-. ors of the course, said that it was hoped to have someone there from most Ministry offices in the South Island. The object is to improve advice on this important subject. Mr Henry is a member of a working group on shelter that includes farm forestry and other interests. This winter, a course on farin forestry and shelter was held at Ashburton for farmers. In many other ways, too, farmers are active in trying to save their lambs. Some have erected banks of shelter, like mini shelter belts, out of old bales of hay. Others have even gone to the expense of open-fronted sheds. Lamb covers are used on some forms; and some farmers cart sacks about with them to pop a newly born lamb into for its first few hours.

But w’hen a sourtherly storm with a chill wind backing rain, hail, and sleet goes on for days without much of a break, when sheds and yards are full, and when the ground is waterlogged, there is a limit to what can be done. Lambs born at night on to wet ground under such conditions do not stand much of a chance.

Some people have asked why fanners do not lamb later when the wather is better, but this year farmers who had their flocks lambing in August had a much better run of

weather th«n those who lambed more recently. On some of the lighter country there is a risk, if lambing is left too long, of problems in feeding ewes and lambs adequately later if it turns dry. It was not so long ago that there were reports of farmers considering having to kill one lamb out of pairs of twins so that the surviving member would have a better chance of fattening to the stage where it could be killed for export. Because of the nature of their job, both for economic and climatic reasons, farmers have sometimes to put up with stock losses, and an unseasonal snowstorm occuring in the midst of lambing, with serious losses; but it certainly does not mean that they are unconcerned, or like it — who would?