MILKING PLATFORM MATAURA
Good things TAKE TIME Onlookers seem stuck in the mud on wintering livestock in Southland, Suzanne Hanning writes.
M
y older brother Our Southern Dairy Hub held a field always used to day last month and shared some of the say “patience results of the pilot study. There is a link is a virtue”. I to the hand out on our Hedgehopeused to counter with “You’re not Makarewa Catchment Group Facebook very virtuous then, are you?” The page if you would like a look. The study word ‘virtue’ means ‘behaviour showing was both surprising, interesting and high moral standing’. Sadly the word most certainly a lesson in patience. ‘signalling’ gets stuck next to it from time My second biggest lesson from this to time and corrodes this into something project is that this is much bigger and dripping with sarcasm. more complex than anyone could have This is all too commonly seen on social dreamed. Finding a better way to winter media when it comes to the opinion of animals in Southland or anywhere with people who have nothing to do with similar conditions to us is going to take a agriculture on what farmers should or lot longer than any politician or activist shouldn’t be doing. As I’ve mentioned will be comfortable with. To be fair, the in a previous column, everyone seems real problem is the three to five rain to have plenty of opinions on wintering events that happen in the 90-day winter livestock in Southland, but they have period that seem to cause all the issues. very little in the way of solutions. What was obvious was the participants Our fellow farmers down here in who paid close attention to detail, Southland have been patiently waiting methodically followed their plans, for the results of our Hedgehopecarried out careful daily observations Makarewa Catchment Group and and acted on those observations had Southern Dairy Hub Winter Cultivation significantly better outcomes. Pilot Study funded by Thriving Southland My first, biggest lesson is we need to Working hard to gather data for the and finally, we can start to share what have more faith in humanity. The people wintering pilot study. we’ve learned. who made this study possible at every The key word here was “pilot study”. Wintering animals level are not special or brilliant in any way. They are ordinary outside, on crops in situ is, to my limited knowledge, a individuals who go about their days rather unremarkably, unique method practised nowhere else in the world. Due to performing ordinary tasks and achieving ordinary things. this uniqueness, it has never actually been studied in any What occurred last winter was not ordinary. We had a great detail. voluntary gathering of wills to achieve something greater We didn’t know what we didn’t know and hence cast a than the status quo. From the 17-year-old apprentice huge net over a huge area and tried to have a look at what mechanic, to the agronomist, to the farmer who just tried we caught. What we ended up with was a monster project something a little different. The culmination of their efforts with thousands of data points, pictures, and recorded resulted in a certainty that we will figure this out. observations. All this took until very recently to sift through It won’t be perfect immediately, but we will get there. It and even now, there is still a huge amount of collected will just take a little time, patience and require a bit of virtue information that is being pulled out. and not of the signalling kind. 10
Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | August 2022
