Meticulous record-keeping pays off

Building the perfect ewe: Maureen and David Smith with son Cameron check the details of a lamb hogget.

The Southland Times: 18 Aug 2009

IJon Morgan

T’S coming up Farm’s busy time. That’s not surprising. The lambing season is getting un-der way throughout the country and during the next few weeks the number of warm bodieson farms will more than double. But Holly Farm in the hills behind Marton is no ordinaryfarm. It is a romney stud and the farmers, David and Maureen Smith and son Cameron, goto great pains to ensure they record every foible of their newborn lambs and their mothers.

It is in marked contrast with other commercial sheep farms where farmers leave ewes togive birth undisturbed. The hill country is not a place for weaklings who need to be molly-coddled and long gone are the days when farmers acted as midwives to their fl ocks.

But for the Smiths, recordkeeping is paramount and the most important information isgleaned soon after birth. It is the best way to discover which ewes and rams are performingwell and which of their off spring are worth keeping to breed from. The best males are soldto hill-country farmers as producers of fertile, self-suffi fficient, fast-growing sheep.

In a family tradition going back more than 120 years – Mr Smith has a cup awarded to hisgreat-uncle George Wheeler in 1887 for a prize ram at the Manawatu and West Coast A & PAssociation show – they keep meticulous records and are able to trace their fl ock’s

to

Holly bloodlines back to the English romneys of Mr Wheeler’s Leedstown Stud.

They are expecting a big lamb drop in a month’s time. Scans show a 174 per cent pregnancyrate, with more than 100 ewes expecting triplets. The Smiths have concentrated on breed-ing strong survival traits into their sheep and confi dently expect to record 150 per cent atdocking, three weeks after lambing.

This loss of about 13.5 per cent is well below the 20 per cent or more considered acceptableby hillcountry farmers and includes ewes that die with their lambs unborn. For the pastthree years, the loss of lambs has been 8.5 per cent, a result Mr Smith is pleased with.‘‘We’re higher and colder than most,’’ he says. ‘‘The hills go to 370 metres and we’repretty exposed to the south and east.’’

They are hoping for kind weather for lambing but know to expect the worst. Pasture levelsare low after a harsh winter and they are hoping some warmth will come to stimulate grassgrowth.

From mid-September, every day they will each take a motorbike and ride into the hills towhere the ewes have settled for lambing. Multiple lambers are visited twice a day. The aimis to be there within a few hours of birth to catch the lambs before they get too frisky andrun away.

Each lamb is slung up on a portable scale and weighed and tagged, its sex identifi ed andany faults noted. The Smiths carry a small hand-held tape recorder each and Cameronmakes his notes on a Palm Pilot. Faults are mainly to do with the lamb’s body and legstructure, but any black spots in the wool are also noted.

The mother’s ear-tag number is taken and special note is made of its demeanour at seeingits lamb seized. It is important the ewe remain close by – an attentive mother is essentialto lamb survival. The ewes that stay within a metre when their lambs are being checked aregiven a star by their numbers.

A ewe that runs away is marked for culling, and such is the rigour of the Smiths’ breedingprocess that not only is it sent for slaughter but so are its lambs and any of its previousdaughters still in the fl ock. Such ruthless effi fficiency is necessary to stamp out any trace ofpoor mothering, an inheritable trait, and proof of its eff ffectiveness is that such ewes arenow seldom seen.

Any lambs that die within three days of birth are stored in a freezer. At the end of lambing,Hunterville vet Martin Walshe will dissect 60 to 70 to discover what killed them. Commoncauses are dystocia –a slow or diffi fficult labour – and cold starvation. This information willalso go into the stud’s records and be used for culling.

More weighing and further structural checks are made at weaning late in December, and inJanuary culling decisions are made.

They use the Studfax program to keep an eye on trends in the bloodlines and send theirdata to the industry-wide service Sheep Improvement where it is used to calculate thebreeding values that are a guide to ram performance for potential buyers.

They look for results that show a balance of traits – any ‘‘one-trick ponies’’ strong in onetrait to the exclusion of others are not wanted.

For the Smiths, the lambing checks can be arduous but not onerous.

They look forward to seeing the latest results of their years of eff ffort. ‘‘It’s not an easy wayto make a living,’’ Mr Smith says.

‘‘There’s a lot of mucking around, making sure you have good paddocks and good fencingand then there’s all the record-keeping. It’s more intensive than normal farming.’’

He took over the family farm in 1969 at the age of 21 when his father suddenly died. It wasjust 60ha and the 300-ewe romney stud kept it afl oat.

During the years, as six further blocks have been added to take the farm to 350ha, he andMaureen have concentrated on building up the stud.

Their work was rewarded in 1991 with the Royal Agricultural Society’s prestigious ACCameron Award for leadership and excellence in farming.

They are now one of the few romney studs in the WanganuiRangitikei area and supply 400rams a year to 50 clients, mostly hill-country farmers between Marton and the mountains.

They are breeding a fertile ewe with strong maternal traits that produces hardy and meatylambs. Every breeder would claim the same, but the Smiths’ point of diff fference is that theyaim for a sheep that is also easy to care for. They feel they are achieving this with sheepthat need no drenching as adults, that are clear of dags and have bare breeches.

For the past eight years Mr Smith has been a farmer mentor for AgResearch’s parasitologygroup, which allows him to bring a practical dimension to the science. He decided to cutdown on his chemical drench use when he learnt of the high drench resistance found in in-ternal parasites.

He now drenches his lambs only four or fi ve times in their fi rst year and then they are leftto fend for themselves.

Any sheep that show parasite stress are drenched then culled, along with their progeny.

The sheep are also marked on their susceptibility to dags, a heritable trait, and culled ac-cordingly. In recent years a further trait, that of a tendency to have no wool around thebackside, has also become a selection point and he has worked closely with AgResearchscientist David Scobie on this.

Running alongside the romneys are 160 south suff ffolk ewes, the start of a terminal sirefl ock.

Asked what trait might be next on Holly Farm’s list, Mr Smith admits to keeping a closeeye on the wool industry.

However, what he sees doesn’t fi ll him with optimism. ‘‘It’s a shambles. I was off ffered$1.75 a kilogram for my wool last week and I’m blowed if I will accept that. It’s going intostore till things get better.’’ He describes his fl ock of easy-care ewes and their hardy lambsas contributing to a ‘‘clean and green’’ New Zealand. This work, the retirement of 17ha ofbush under QEII Trust covenants and the planting of steep gullies in pines for erosion con-trol, was recognised in the recent regional farm environment awards.

They have also built a home-stay cottage from scented macrocarpa with views of therolling hills and delight in the favourable comments of visitors. ‘‘A lot of people have neverheard silence before. If you’re in a city there’s always distractions,’’ Mr Smith says.

From the farm’s heights there is a panoramic view of Wanganui, Palmerston North, MtTaranaki, Mt Ruapehu, Kapiti Coast and even the South Island on a clear day.

‘‘For foreigners especially, tramping to the top of the hill or through the bushwalks issomething of a novelty. If you come from the middle of Frankfurt, this is a spectacularplace to come to for a cup of tea.’’