Curious Cockie Club

July 4^th 2024 Aorangi Curious Cockies, Fairlie, Canterbury

The group visited a substantial award winning irrigated dairy farm.  Their ratio of owned to leased land significantly lifted their ROC.  They’re trialling different beef breeds for dairy beef but have kept pasture mixes and crops simple.  They’ve invested heavily into nitrate monitoring waterways and found nitrate levels only spike 24 hours when it rains and that’s fertilising up to 190kgN cap.  Created more quality pasture by reducing pivot arch from 360° and 270° and inserting another pivot.  Second farm was being leased to finance infrastructure development.  This arrangement was allowing both partes to get ahead.  The lease holders are focusing on non-traditional ways to get ahead like grazing contracts for branded livestock.  Grazing contracts cover leasing costs by grazing mature animals on hill country while finishing younger stock on crop. 

July 3^rd 2024, Central Curious Cockies, Middlemarch, Otago

The Central Curious Cockies visited a couple passionate about production and environment.  They invested in hybrid vigour to push growth rates and also milking abilities of sheep and cows to push growth.  They’ve trialled lambing older ewes twice as a way of securing extra income.  They’re also involved with wetland management in helping to establish impact of different management strategies which helped them win recent environmental awards.  Then a property that has changed quite a bit from one generation to the next.  The previous generation ran one of the largest single livestock mobs in New Zealand to balance fertility across hill country, reduce labour and improve grazing management.  The next generation has down-sized and focused on reducing labour but gaining more productivity through smaller multiple mobs with a higher cattle to sheep ratio for better flexibility. 

July 2^nd 2024, Southern Curious Cockies, Winton, Southland

Sometimes a book is all it takes to make a change.  A farmer we visited had read Brown Trotter’s Book, Rape of Our Heritage and that had led him on to making his own drenches in the 1970s.  When converting to dairying, a visitor from the UK challenged him about superphosphate use and P levels have remained fine despite not applying it for a decade.  In recent years he’s focused on accessing an industrial contaminant, lignite ash, as a fertiliser alternative for sulphur.  He also uses a bacteria to significantly reduce effluent solids and retain nitrogen.  The second property was a nice balance of flat, hill and tussock where trading cattle was expanding over sheep.  A great story was encouraging children to run their own livestock enterprises outside the family business.  This involved leasing paddocks and money from their parents at market rates to run flocks for six months and doing their own spreadsheets and negotiating contracts.  Lots of good business lessons which extended to the community as well.  The 10 year old daughter told one livestock agent to take his first selection of ewes back to the vendor as they were too skinny. 

June 25^th 2024, Hawkes Bay Curious Cockies, Palmerston North, Manawatu

The first property we visited testified to the impact of persistence with genetics.  Over 30 years selecting for what works they now have hoggets scanning 150%, ewes doing 200%.  Their observations of animal behaviour are worth noting, with mothering behaviour, what you cull cows for, give two ticks for ewes.  They’ve even noticed ewes with quads will plant a pair either side of the paddock to ensure two can drink at a time.  Many health issues are genetic, might have 3-4 animals fly blown but no matter where they are on the property, they’ll have the same dam or sire.  Next property was another example of persistence but this was for farm ownership.  Finding ways to create enterprises which didn’t require much labour and took advantage of location or landscape features was key.  Farming people brings more than financial benefits as it builds community.  A key was finding services that accumulate wealth or other synergistic advantages while getting a wage. 

June 20th 2024, Northern Curious Cockies, Kerikeri, Northland

Visited a large property with big ambitions – produce New Zealand most resilient sheep ideal for any farmer to go down the organic path.  Starting with a Romney base, they’ve been up various cross with hair and woolless breeds.  They are measuring a wide range of production and productive traits from performance and weight gain to resilience to current diseases and parasites as well as technologies such as vaccines.  They still have a number of breeds to import to develop the programme further.  Then on to another property trying to save agricultural tools and machinery disappearing to China as scrap.  Tractors under the roof included Fordsons, Farmalls, David Browns and Allis Chalmers.  Equipment included various milk separators, old shearing hand pieces and the power plants prior to electricity, and farm staple, chainsaws.  In the eighties, the bank left him alone because he owed more than the farm was worth.  Through luck, determination and an illegal (farm based) activity, he did the one thing the bank never thought he would achieve, farm ownership. 

June 18^th 2024, Waikato Curious Cockies, Mangatarata, Waikato

The group visited with a couple selling their own organic meat products preservative free.  They’ve developed a small farm system allowing them to run two other businesses which help fund on-farm projects to fit with their brand including a wetland.  They’re exploring methods to improve pasture production and practices to minimise problems with heavy soils.  One observation they’ve noticed animals do not look for shade when nitrogen not being used.  Have plenty of farm shade but animals do not seek it when given opportunities.  The second was an organic dairy which uses their herd home to maximise pasture growth.  Soils are silt/peat over marine clay, easily water logged and neighbour is one of the largest swamps in Waikato.  Multi-species mixes drive pasture production.  A local DairyNZ group facilitator held a field day there and was so impressed with the amount of grass grown without urea, he left the agency because he couldn’t find anybody interested in what this family discovered. 

June 11^th 2024, Canterbury Curious Cockies, Kaikoura, Canterbury

We met a master today.  The first in three generations to own the family farm outright while involved with community politics, multiple enterprises and getting four kids through boarding school.  So how do you gain ownership without cranking up production?  Set up a simple system to allow for off-farm opportunities, farm every season for drought and accumulate and sit on any excess feed to sell in the dry.  Use location and property features to take advantage of tourists and carbon credits while creating enterprises to allow the next generation a way in.  Then on to a couple creating their own cash cow to drive development in their business after realising conventional systems were not going to work.  They’ve worked hard to create the right animals for their operation but know they need more.  They’ve started developing their own products with the aim of marketing to all traffic passing through Kaikoura, a million opportunities per year.  With over half the farm in native bush, another big challenge is how to generate an income from that.