continued from page 11
flexible grazing plan, we were able to almost eliminate most of the scours in 2004. Time will tell whether we have solved this problem or not.
profit. Those years we lost money were because of the poor decisions we made. Today, most of the cows on the ranch are calving in June, and we don’t feed hay to them in the winter time. Though they are calving late spring, this ranch has experienced tremendous scour problems from 1998–2003. In 2001, we lost five to six percent of the calves despite treating over 50 percent of the calves for scours. With advice from the veterinarian and creating a very
Are you still using Holistic Management today? We don’t refer to the Holistic Management® model all the time if that is what you mean. However after 20 years, I believe we have the process figured out. I still do the financial planning on worksheets and the grazing planning. When you have over 60 paddocks, you need to use this planning process to keep everything straight. What has been your biggest discovery or
Never Underestimate Change
Lana Litter—Money in the Bank by Nick Reid & Karen Forge Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from a draft case study farm publication, the research for which is funded by the Land, Water & Wool Program—a joint initiative of Australian Wool Innovation and Land & Water Australia. The article was written by Associate Professor Nick Reid, Ecosystem Management, University of New England Armidale, and Karen Forge, Southern New England Landcare Ltd, Armidale. The full article title is “Wool Production & Biodiversity Spin a Yarn for Tim & Karen Wright.” For further information about this publication, contact Nick Reid at 61-2-6773-2759 or nrei3@metz.une.edu.au.
T
im and Karen Wright’s property, “Lana,” is 3,350 hectares (8,342 acres) in the Gwydir River Catchment near Armidale, New South Wales, Australia. Their average rainfall is 769 mm or 30 inches. They carry 7000 Merino sheep and 650 breeding cows and have divided their land into 240 paddocks of approximately 10-25 hectares (25-62 acres). Each paddock is grazed an average of eight days per year (approximately two days each season—fall, winter, spring, summer) with at least a 70-day recovery period. Their main enterprise is easy-care, low-cost Merino sheep with an average adult micron of 17.5.
Resource Issues In the 1960s, Tim’s father, Peter, began aerially seeding “Lana.” “Using pasture improvement like this, we lifted our stock numbers from 7,000 DSE (Dry Sheep Equivalent) in 1980 to 20,000 in 1991,” says Tim. But the Wrights were losing money with this form of management because they barely
12
IN PRACTICE
*
broke even over five years after “improving” a paddock. In fact, after the 1981 and 1994 droughts, the lowest yielding paddocks were the sown paddocks. In the early 1990s, Tim and Karen attended Holistic Management and Grazing for Profit schools. Tim experimented with cell grazing between 1991-1993 and then began planned grazing in 1995. With planned grazing, stock numbers across both “Lana” and “Kasamanca”—their 780-hectare (1,942-acre) property—have been maintained between 15,000- 20,000 DSE ever since, with only one-third the fertilizer inputs of the 1980s. This includes years with rainfall as low as 400 mm (15.6 inches). At any given point 95 percent of the land is in recovery mode.
Planned Grazing Tim has learned that sheep and cattle are generally best grazed separately. “We keep sheep and cattle separate to get the right balance between finance, livestock, and range condition. Cattle always do better if they are on their own. They also open up the pasture for the sheep and take the worm burden out. Cattle and sheep don’t mix; they don’t like each other. Sheep are more selective, and would otherwise take good feed away from the cattle. The two together didn’t work in the first year,” Tim says. For this reason, he employs a leader-follower approach. “In a leader-follower system, cattle run two days ahead of the sheep. This solves the worm burden problem. For the leader-follower system to work, you’ve got to have the same size paddocks, 15-17 hectares (37-42 acres) in my case,
N ove m b e r / D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 4
learning over the last 20 years? 1) The power of communication and learning how to negotiate; 2) Marketing—being more imaginative; 3) Being open minded and a self learner; 4) Holistic Management offers no magic bullets or quick solutions; Holistic Management is a process that you need to evolve with over time; and 5) We live in the best country in which to conduct business. If someone was just getting started in practicing Holistic Management, what advice would you give them today? First, get a handle on your finances. Your
so cattle get two days then sheep get two days so that the paddock experiences a four-day graze period,” says Tim. For Tim and Karen, the number and type of stock in each farmlet (cell) varies with country and class of livestock. “A good number of ewes is about 850 in a farmlet because you get less mismothering than with larger mobs. It’s also a better number in terms of lamb marking and labor. You can mark 700-800 lambs in a day,” says Tim.
Fencing & Water Tim and Karen put in a lot of fencing and stock water development as part of their planned grazing effort. “I installed permanent fences— suspension fencing, four barbs, steels 15 meter (16.5 yards) apart, one dropper between and steel end assemblies—for AUS$800/km (US$928/mile) including labor,” says Tim. “We made our own end assemblies. We could do one kilometer (.6 miles) per day, so it was pretty cheap. Each subdivision involved about 3/4 kilometer of fences (1/2 mile), so eight paddocks meant seven to eight kilometers (4-5 miles) of fencing. We try to fence parallel to the slope, on the contour, not up and down. That way you get stock to move nutrients off the old camps. Twelve months ago, we fenced the western paddock like this; we’ve seen a big change in 12 months already. A year ago, the pasture there looked dead. Those areas are now running three to four times the stock they used to. “In the first and second years at Tilses, the water was already there in the creeks and dams. Since it was just the sheep and heifers, it wasn’t a big drain on the water supply. In the third or fourth year, we put in a tank system to water the new paddocks. The dams were already here, but we went to troughs. The cleaner the water, the