Lockdown issues building for farmers who face feed, cost and animal welfare issues as the seasonal pressures build, while the Government and MPI blithely assume these issues are not serious

It seemed slightly bizarre that the biggest news to come out of going from Alert level 4 to 3 was the queues at the takeaway fast food outlets and cafes - even to the point where police had to instigate traffic controls. There must be a lot of very poor cooks and coffee makers out there.

What I had been hoping to see happen, along with many others, was the instigation of saleyard sales. For our region, and I imagine the rest of the country is the same, it is now six weeks since stock last went through the saleyards. So the news that we could be in alert level three for potentially three more weeks came as a bit of a shock. I do have a bias around this situation as we have several hundred sheep on that we hadn’t planned to have by now.

Ewes were booked into the works over six weeks ago and show no sign of moving and with the  lambs are about to make serious inroads into saved winter pasture. However, I know other farmers are in a similar situation and this is being repeated up and down the country.

This is being severely compounded by what has now become a very dry autumn. We have neighbours around on the Central Plains Water Scheme who are still irrigating. Admittedly if they were having to pay for pumping they would probably be thinking twice, however, it does illustrate to dry situation of the soil.

Talking with our local stock agent he mentioned that they are having a conference call soon to discuss the situation and his tone sounded distinctly stressed. Given the ‘rules’ do allow for livestock selling, it is looking that there has been a lack of imagination or leadership somewhere to have let things progress this far. I just wonder, given the lack of decent transportable feed around the country, how the powers that be think farmers are going to keep stock fed, especially as they seem to think agriculture is going to achieve greater importance in helping to get New Zealand out of this economic bind we are heading into.

What bugs me is that this should have been a very predictable situation and some-one should have acted. I believe it should have been industry as we have been shown plenty of times in the past that MPI do not have the expertise to act promptly in situations of urgency and don’t seem to be well connected to grassroots. It would have been nice to think a positive spin off of the M-Bovis eradication programme would have been a better understanding of farming systems. This may be happening at the farm level but whether it is working its way up the chain seems doubtful.

Beef + Lamb along with DairyNZ sent out a joint press release (see here) providing advice to sheep and dairy alike. However, given that they recognise that there is already a problem here I wonder why there has not been a greater emphasis before now on getting yards working. Given the potential space and controls that could have been put in place a workable solution could have been put in place before now.

The options for stock feed are now starting to be limited to PKE (sheep are not a fan of this in my limited experience) and grains. Both of these are expensive options when it comes to looking at maintenance diets and unfortunately, although the schedules held this week (even venison which still has a $7 in front of it despite my gloomy predictions), prices have been falling and so even if farmers can hold condition on stock their values are not going to be increasing. And the reality is most stock will be losing condition. With the ‘works’ way behind catching up to demand, yards closed and what feed available being expensive at best and inappropriate at worst farmers have very limited options.

The one redeeming feature at present is despite things being dry at least the temperatures are still very mild for the time of year and at least some grass growth may persist for longer than would be normally expected.

The news that the Government is to invest a further $15 million into upgrading rural broadband is welcomed. Up to this point in recent years communications has been an area where the rich have been getting richer. The deficiency in coverage has been highlighted by some rural families being unabled to utilise the online teaching services.