With 12% of our land out of production for pasture renewal feed levels are well controlled. Its been a cool and dry spring. The dry is not affecting our lucerne but to our surprise the available feed at second rotation of the lucerne is significantly less than we were expecting. Its just too cold for the lucerne. Mid October sees half of our yearling stags gone at an average 100kg liveweight, 57% yield. The remaining stags recorded 600 grams/day live weight gain in the first week of October grazing on lucerne. We plan to carry this second cut through to heavier weights to be sent to the venison plant in January. A contractor came in with an air seeder to drill our paddocks of new lucerne, lucerne and prairie grass mixes and red clover/chicory mixes. We hope to have these paddocks back in production by December.
The weather remains kind and lambing is in full swing at the start of the month. Due to synchronizing with the teaser rams its a tight lambing with 80% lambing on the first cycle. With school holidays starting on 21 September its full swing into tailing lambs and tractor work as the ground is prepared for pasture renewal. First grazing of all lucerne paddocks commences - lush, high quality feed for yearly deer and mobs of ewes and their lambs, mobbed up after tailing. A visit by the FarmIQ team of Steve and Aaron rounds up the month as we try to get Lyndon, Eldon and Mel up to speed with this cloud based farm management system. To be fair Eldon is the principal driver of the project. We have an open mind on what it will do for our business as we cannot see the cost benefit return, at this point in time.
It continues to be a dry winter allowing good feed utilisation. Stock are in good condition and we have pregnancy tested our maiden hinds (first fawners) and the hinds that were artificially inseminated. We were pleased with the result especially the 150 first calvers that achieved a very pleasing 94% in calf rate. Weaner stags have now come off kale and onto autumn sown pastures. In addition they have access to an Advantage Grain Feeder allowing ad lib access to barley as we seek to maximise their spring growth rates. Meanwhile lambing is now underway with the 2 tooths being ahead of schedule - looks like there was a "real" ram amongst the teaser rams in March. It does explain the relatively low scanning of the 2 tooths - they had taken to the ram a cycle sooner than intended. All other ewes have now been set stocked including 5-8 triplet bearing ewes mixed in with the twin bearing ewes in every lambing paddock.
A period of settled weather initially allowed good feed utilisation as the mud dried out. The weaner stags are now on winter feed crops of kale supplemented with lucerne baleage. Weaners hinds are being break feed on ryecorn supplemented with lucerne baleage. TB testing of all hinds has now been completed.
This year for the first time we have separated the weaner hinds and stags into 2 separate sex mobs. Our past experience suggests that red weaner hinds do not tend to grow over the winter months but stags will do so. We wanted to ensure all stags get the best feed available for the winter in order to maximise the growth over this period. The weaner hind mob would get lesser quality feed and we will monitor the mobs with EID (Electronic Identification) and weighting. The 3rd weaner mob remained mixed sex. It contains the fawns from the AI hinds and first calvers. June also started off extremely wet for us, receiving 100mm over 2 days, however we got off lightly as some areas not too far away got 200mm over the same period of time and were seriously flooded.
The final month for autumn growth rates in our weaner deer and we anxiously, expectantly want to see what their 1 of June weight will be. How successful has autumn been? The results were some what perplexing - there was no difference in live weight gain between the mob that had been supplemented with grain and those who had been on lucerne paddocks alone. The only thing that was consistent across all the mobs was that overall autumn growth rates was about 5kg down on previous seasons. We are putting that down to the very wet April where there was little live weight gain
It rained and rained and rained. We received 125mm in April. 2.5 times more than our long term average of 53mm. This rain was very welcome for autumn pasture growth but the lack of sunshine caused weaner growth rates to slow right down with little overall gain throughout April. At the start of April we completed the A.I. programme for 2014 - artificially inseminating 90 hinds of superior genetic worth. 50 of these hinds will be 2nd calvers with the balance being 3 - 5 years old as we seek to speed up the rate of genetic gain.
March is traditional when the "roar" starts and the sire stags get active, rounding up their harem of hinds and keeping other stags at bay.
Weaners have now settled and made good growth rates though autumn. One mob has ad lib access to a grain feeder with barley in it. This barley has been grown on our farm, and we hope to increase live weight gain by feeding it. The Autumn rains came early this year, 33mm on the 5 of March got pastures (especially lucerne) away again. In the middle of March we were busy selecting hinds for our AI program. February has been a very busy month with hinds and fawns being brought into the yards for the first time. At the start of February they were brought through the shed for tagging of the fawns, DNA sampling of the A.I bred fawns (for sire and dam identification), and a parasite drench as the fawns diet changed from milk to grazing pasture, at the end of February when weaning took place. It was very exciting to see just how much the weaner deer had grown in the 3 weeks since being tagged, the benefits of the Deer Improvement genetics clearly shown up in the fawns of the younger mixed age hinds. With two of the weaner mobs we returned them to the same paddocks as where they had been with their mothers. This was familiar surroundings for them, just no mum!! They settled reasonably quickly. The third mob were weaned into a paddock in a different part of the farm where they hadn't been before. Two days later they were everywhere!! Thankfully after a week we were able to round them up and put them back into a paddock of Red Clover and Plantain. We look forward to seeing what average weight gains they make of this high quality feed!!
January is a time when we start to mob up the hinds and fawns and start moving them from their fawning paddocks, rotating them through paddocks of lucerne, or summer forage crops (rape or ryecorn). After receiving 75mm of rain between Christmas and New Year, the farm is well set for the next two months with the deep tap root of lucerne able to take full advantage of the rain.
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AuthorLyndon Matthews is the farm manager and one of the directors of Puketira Deer. |