Ability of farmers to assess growth

Press, 13 November 1981, Page 15

Ability of farmers to assess growth

The new first secretary for agriculture and food with the British High Commission in Wellington, Mr Robin Crawshaw, was in Christchurch this week for the Canterbury show. He has only been in the country since early in September but he already admits as a nutritionist to being embarrassed by the ability of quite a number of farmers in this country to estimate the amount of herbage dry matter that there is in a paddock as part of the process of feed budgeting to relate feed supplies and requirements of the grazing animal. It is something that he says people in Britain have tended to fight shy of giving advice about, but he believes that a major effort is needed to equate the supply and quality of feed on farms in Britain and milk production. He thinks that they have quite a lot to learn about grassland management. Mr Crawshaw says that one of the things that he is

very interested in in NewZealand is this country’s pasturelands. He says that he has heard so much about their long growing season. He is also interested in the clover component of these

swards. People had said that many of the hill pastures here had less than seven per cent of clover in them and in that sort of situation he said that in Britain they would tend to think that those pastures would respond to nitrogen rather than phosphate. However, he said he wanted to add very quickly that he would not want to say any particular course should be followed here before he had worked out the economies of it. Still, he did not think New Zealand farmers, or anyone else for that matter, should take up a fixed attitude on something like nitrogen. The , situation might change when New Zealand had a nitrogen plant of its own as part of its use of its natural gas, and while he had heard a representative of that enterprise speaking about nitrogen fertiliser being produced at a competitive price, he would have thought that it should have, in fact, been produced more cheaply than elsewhere with the gas so close at hand.