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INSIDE Page 02
Tax changes to encourage conservation on private land Page 10
A triumph of ingenuity and determination.
Pages 22–24
Supplementary Feed
CONTACT US Canterbury Farming 03 347 2314
March 2013
Feds shopping for ship to break North Island drought By Hugh de Lacy Federated Farmers will hire a ship if necessary to get straw for stockfeed from Canterbury to the drought-ravaged North Island. Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy, declared the entire North Island a drought zone on March 16, and a massive effort is being mounted by the Feds, led by Mid-Canterbury Grain and Seeds chairman David Clark, to get ryegrass and barley straws across Cook Strait. But it’s not being helped by the virtual disappearance of roll-on/roll-off ferry services out of Lyttelton over the past few years — Pacifica Shipping no longer runs such a service — and by the shrinkage of coastal shipping capacity as overseas vessels plying between New Zealand ports soak up the local demand for space. There is little or no spare capacity on the Inter-Island and Bluebridge ferries on the Picton-to-Wellington run, and such as there is has already been cornered by existing freight companies and stockfeed traders. As a result, Clark and the Feds find themselves in the market for a ship. “Federated Farmers doesn’t normally give the nod to an elected member to go and hire a ship — it’s not in the Federated Farmers handbook — but if I can find a ship to hire, we’ll hire it,” he said.
He added that, “This is not a charitable exercise — we are not in an emergency situation. “This is a communal undertaking of putting buyer in touch with seller, and facilitating the movement of feed on a commercial basis.” Clark could not give a figure on the amount of stockfeed that could be shifted across Cook Strait in a hurry, but told Canterbury Farming it was “far in excess of the ability of the transport industry to shift in standard form.” An instance of the demand he was his receiving from the North Island, and passing on to suppliers in Canterbury, was the two unrelated orders each for 50 truck-and-trailer loads of big bales that he received in a single day this month. Though not of high nutrient value, ryegrass straw — known as ryegrass hay in the North Island — it is a good filler feed for cattle when presented along with a compound or other supplementary, or mixed with hay silage. “It’s as good as, if not better than North Island hay,” Clark said. Barley straw is more of a filler, and is fed to cows with a compound. Clark said there were good supplies of straw available in Canterbury at present, even though much of it was burned
Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy, has declared the entire North Island a drought zone.
or chopped for lack of a market immediately post-harvest. “Supply’s good at the moment, but it will run out — make no mistake about it. “Unfortunately the straw market has been closed down to a very low level by in-market activities, and that resulted in a huge amount of straw being chopped or burned,” he said. At the same time as the North Island drought has reignited demand for Canterbury straw, South Island buyers have begun scrambling to secure additional supplies as the drought’s impact works its way down the country. “The coming winter will not be one in which you can ring up your local supermarket baling contractor and expect that straw will be available to you,” Clark said.
“It’s going to run out, and just as a prudent sheepand-beef farmer de-stocks and reduces his feed demand early, the early decision made by the dairy farmer to secure winter feed supply will be the good decision.” Primary Industries Minister Guy’s declaration of drought gives North Island farmers access to welfare and tax relief similar to that which Canterbury farmers were granted during the droughts of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Canterbury media has characterised the effort to get feed to the North Island as a grateful response for the aid that Canterbury farmers received from the North Island during the big snow of 1992. The heaviest snowfall in 30 years arrived right in the middle
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of the 1992 lambing season, a month after the previous fall which had been the worst in 20 years. A million stock died and the event cost Canterbury farmers about $65m in today’s money. North Island farmers organised the shipment of hundred of tonnes of relief feed to Canterbury, and Clark conceded there was an element of reciprocal charity in Federated Farmers’ efforts to help the northerners through their drought. However he saw it as mainly just a commercial response to an opportunity created by the driest weather in the North Island for 70 years. “Let’s just call it farmers helping farmers, and that’s what people do,” Clark said.