Works start ewe kill

Press, 4 March 1978, Page 3

Works start ewe kill

Freezing works in Canterbury are starting to kill ewes, but there is still heavy pressure to cope with lambs. The stock buying manager of the Canterbury Frozen Meat Company, Mr G. R. Burling, said yesterday that his firm had begun to kill ewes but only in limited numbers. The firm’s three sheep and lamb killing works hoped to handle about 20,000 head next week, and hoped after that to be able to kill a higher proportion of adult sheep. However, considering the time of year, works were still under unprecedented pressure to kill lambs, said Mr Burling. It appeared as though there had been a bigger lamb drop this season than in 1976-77. Also, farmers were more interested in killing ewe lambs as well as wether lambs: they were were pleased to get “mouths” off their parched farms. It was difficult to estimate how much stock remained to be handled, Mr Burling said, but it was obvious that at least IM sheep and lambs would come from normal suppliers.

To last week-end the company had killed 2,066,507 lambs, which was 1518,05 more than at the same time last year. But at that time it had also killed 306,249 ewes, and this year the ewe tally is only 20,224. The livestock manager of Waitaki N.Z. Refrigerating, Ltd, Mr G. H. Steel, said his firm would also start to kill ewes in small numbers at all its South Island works next

week. But Waitaki also was still under severe pressure to kill lambs. Because of the drought and the feed shortage farmers were having to quit lambs at much lighter weights than normal, and in a condition where they would not grade so well. Thus the works were being asked to kill lambs that they would not normally process until April or May.