Captions by Shelley Upchurch. Edited by Ashlee Scholefield. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 Hello, and welcome to Rural Delivery. This week we meet Barry and Julie Crawford, who run an intensive lamb breeding and finishing farm in Southland. Barry and Julie were finalists in the 2014 Lincoln Foundation South Island Farmer of the Year and won the award for best use of technology. We also visit a cropping farmer in South Canterbury who attempted a Guinness World Record for his barley yield. And we find out about research to quantify the outcome of particular pet foods for treasured pets. Barry and Julie Crawford run their intensive lamb breeding and finishing operation at Rosebank Farm in Southland's Waikaka Valley. The farm is a FarmIQ focus farm and a genetic breeding partner for Focus Genetics. The Crawfords use all the technology available to them to produce their high-quality export lambs. Rosebank Farm's 510ha intensive sheep and lamb finishing. We also have another property at Te Tipua, where we run our replacement ewe lambs and surplus ewes. We're a breeding partner for Focus Genetics, and they had EID. We could see the power of EID, so` And then FarmIQ come along using EID, so we grabbed ahold of it and went with it. We have a Highlander ewe flock. They scanned 200% over the last few years, and we're lambing at 160% for the last three years. I would like to try and get more away at weaning time, but we've always been short of feed, because I think we've got too many sheep on. We've got a high-performance flock, so we're trying to adjust our stocking rate to get more lambs away earlier. We're trying to get them away at 18.5 kilos to 19.5 kilos. We've found it's a long job, condition scoring by hand. You gotta individually do every sheep, and it's hard on the hand and the body. So we've come up with a weight to assign to each sheep. We condition score them as a two-tooth and weigh them at the same time. And then that goes through and it's correlated to a condition score and an assigned weight. So it's got a weight built into it to be 3.5 condition score, and we've found that on our ewes, 7.7 is one condition score. So we just put them through and weigh them, and it triggers whether they're under the 3.5 condition score or over the 3.5 condition score. The ones under 3.5 condition score, we can feed them better over the summertime, when the other ones are cleaning up. And we're also doing a programme at the moment, which is a four-year programme, and we're halfway through it, with two... with two lots of sheep, and they get condition scored four times a year and weighed. And then` Cos we're working out an algorithm for the wider sheep industry that we can roll out in time, so people with EID tags can have an algorithm for condition scoring the ewes. Last year our 3.5 and better condition score ewes scanned 221%, whereas the ones under 3 scanned 197%, so there's gains to be made by getting your condition score right. We wanted a purpose-built farm management shed where we had this six-way draft, and this morning, with weaning, we've been weighing five ways. Because they've got EID tags, the females have gone into one pen. Males have gone into another pen that are 37 and above. And then there's another two pens of females and males that are between 30 and 37. And then the smaller ones have all gone into another pen. What we do a lot is we measure our grass, which is not something a lot of sheep farmers do, but we have been measuring it weekly. And that very quickly lets us know if we're trending down or trending up 'and it's time to react pretty quickly.' So if it's` We trended down last year. When we get into that position, we lower our weight in the shed of weighing and get a few more lambs away a bit more quickly. So it just keeps us ahead of the game, and we're proactive and not being so much reactive. Every time the lambs are through the shed, they're weighed and a measurement is taken, and the information is transferred on to the farm management system. After lamb's gone to slaughter and it's killed, we can get back the carcass performance information with all the grades in here for all the lambs. And then we get the hot weights, and these particular graphs are just comparing the clover lambs to our grass lambs last year. And we can clearly see that the clover lambs ` which are in the darker colour ` are better than the grass lambs. And we get the live-weight dressing-out percentage. And then we get an individual analysis of every lamb that was killed, so we get its birth rank and its stock class and days to slaughter and its last live weight and its grade, its sex. So it's all very very powerful information that is just going on top of everything that we do down the shed. We've set up this parental gateway to try and give us some idea of ewe efficiency in our ewe. We've had quite a big gap in ewe efficiency, and we wanted to see what the ewes were bringing to the weaning gate. So the ewes have all got EID, and the lambs, they get the EID in at tailing time. And after that they're put in a couple of paddocks, and they have this gateway set up, so they just move backwards and forwards. And the hope is that the ewe goes through and her two or three or whatever lambs follow her, and, um, with a signif` uh, certain amount of breeds, they can justify how many lambs belong to that ewe. So any high-performing ewes, um, yeah, are treated` Even though they might not weigh very well through our assigned weighing system, they are treated with care, because we know they may have brought two or three good lambs to the weaning gate. When we started with FarmIQ, we were not very technology-savvy. We knew a bit about EID, and, um, we'd used it before in the studs, but as far as a lot of this other technology, we didn't know very little about it. But we've sort of grown with the idea and come to like it, and we sort of feel now, if we didn't have it, we would be a bit lost, and we wouldn't know where we were going. So we know now` cos we're measuring everything, where we're going and what targets we need to hit. We know we need a 2000 cover at the beginning of May, and we try and get there. Um, sometimes it's hard, but, you know, we've had some difficult seasons, but we're getting` we're getting` I think we're getting smarter with the use of the way we're using all the information that we're inputting. We'll be back soon to hear about Warren Darling's attempt at beating the world record for barley yield. 1 Welcome back. Warren Darling runs a cropping operation in South Canterbury. Following a trip to the UK, he adopted the practice of minimum tillage and the use of retained crop residue for building soil structure. The change allowed Warren to produce a crop of 13.8 tons from a hectare in January 2015. In doing so, he broke the Guinness World Record for barley yield. It was a record that had stood for 25 years. We caught up with Warren in October 2015. What we learnt from the record crop, we're taking and putting into our commercial crops, commercial barley. I can see the potential already. I know it's a dry season this year, but I can see some of the` I guess, the recipes that we had for the record, we've used this year. And I think, um, we're still gonna come through with a reasonably favourable season, even with it being a little on the dry side now. This is a paddock of wheat ` a variety called L45. Wheat is another crop we could look at for a record. It'd take a pretty favourable season, considering where the record level is at now. But I think that these varieties have got the potential to do it. To do a record, you can actually register with Guinness, if you wanna do a Guinness World Record, and they send you the guidelines and then you follow those guidelines through. On the day, it was reasonably low-key, so we did it all ourselves. I was the combine guy, trying to get as much grain as we could in that tank. Um, then the three boys were involved. One was doing the paperwork and keeping that up to scratch. One was on the chaser bin, and the third boy was doing the transport to the weighbridge and back again. I had no contact with the guys on the ground. I didn't wanna know anything ` how we were going ` until we were all done. Um... and when we finished, the last truck` two trucks were away getting weighed, and I said to Craig, the boy that was looking after the paperwork, 'How are we going?' He said, 'We're over the line now.' So it just depended on how much was in those last two trucks that got us to the 13.8 ton. I think it's a combination of a lot of things ` what we've been doing for the last 10 years with our soil, with our residue management; incorporating all that back in; working the ground to a consistent profile; getting an even nutrient balance through that soil to get it even across the ground; and then what we did on that year's attempt. It was really no secret recipes. It was just getting everything timed perfectly, best advice we could, using variable-rate fertiliser application and all that. That's all available anyway, so it was nothing secret to it. And then we got the favourable season. Um, that's really what, I think, got us across the line. Well, as you can see here, we can see all the organic matter that's been building up over the last 10 years we've been incorporating our residues. That's keeping all this top 4 inches to 5 inches free. And you can see the root mass. Going back, we were conventionally tillaging ` multipass ` burning all our residues; basically compacting the soil with cultivation and the number of passes we were doing. So I was lucky enough to get a trip to the UK to get a look at what they were doing in their min-till system. And once we seen it, we came home, and we started to adapt towards that, and that's basically where we've gone to from there. So all our rapes` uh, rape residue goes back in, all the wheat, and we do bale some of the barley straw. But everything else is all incorporated back into the soil. Agronomy Solutions are doing all our precision soil testing, so every hectare's tested, and they provide us with a prescription of our base elements. From there we just do the normal nitrogen application. In the record crop, we only used 22kg of N per ton of grain produced, which is at the lower end of the scale. Everyone says 25 and above. Oh, the other area we're using is we're using the micronutrients now ` zinc, copper and all those. And I feel if we can start getting plant nutrition right ` get a healthier plant ` uh, I feel we can cut down again on our` our nitrogen per ton of grain produced and also fungicide use. This is our oilseed rape, which is` A third of our area is in oilseed rape. And it's grown for Pure Oil NZ. It's all delivered up to their processing plant in Rolleston. As you can see, it's just past peak flowering. Um, we've had some pretty good pod set all the way up. Um, pretty good taproot on the bottom. Um, that's mainly because our, um, cultivation allows the soil` being free down that, you know, 300 to 400` 300, anyway, um, that's getting down there and getting every little bit of moisture there is. So a couple of good rains now and hopefully we're in for a good crop. This is our tractor that we use all the time for cultivation. As you can see, it's on the tracks, and it's part of our soil management. The tractor itself weighs about 24, 25 ton, but it's the area of track that's on the ground. If you want to equate it to a car, it's half the pounds per square inch, or per square metre, of a car as it's running down the road. So it gives you an idea how light it is on the ground. Yeah, it was a significant investment, but to be in the minimum till system you need a big cultivator. So I know it's only 5m wide, but it's the power required to pull that cultivator with the ripping legs, incorporating discs and the packer roller, all in one pass. Um, we only have a one-pass system. That's all we use. And then we come back after our volunteers have sprayed off and use the cultivator drill. So it needs the horsepower. We needed to avoid that compaction. We've been on tracks now for seven years. I think our rotation is sustainable. We're not into high-value crops. We don't use grasses or any of those other specialist crops, mainly because pollination here is an issue in December. So we've found that this rotation that we're in, um, works pretty well. It's financially viable. And I also believe it's sustainable, as far as our soil health and everything, for years to come. We'll return soon to learn about research that's assessing the real impacts of feeding high-value pet foods to cats and dogs. 1 Hello again. Pet food is a high-value market, with pet owners prepared to pay big money to keep their pets in peak condition. But the nutritional value of high-end pet food for cats and dogs has rarely been quantitively assessed. A study at AgResearch's Grasslands is aiming to add value to top-line dog and cat foods ` and the meat industry as a whole ` by testing the various claims of superior nutritional benefits made by niche pet food manufacturers. Pet foods come in two to three major, sort of, formats. You get your dry, or your kibbled, diet ` the pellets that you can buy. You can buy canned pet food, which is largely meat-based. And you can buy what's called natural pet food. So that's minimally processed, very high meat and offal content. There is a lot of research that gets done on pet nutrition globally. A lot of that is done with the multinationals, the global multinationals, so they have very big R & D budgets. For our particular industry partners, they're small, they're in a niche part of the pet-food market, and their R & D budgets are quite small in comparison to the manufacturers of kibbled products, for example. So there is a real lack of understanding of how a diet that is actually natural for a pet ` so lots of meat and animal products ` benefits the pet. The money has come from MBIE, which is the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. And we've also got Cashco funding from our industry partners. The major issue for our industry partners is there's no scientific evidence, so what we're hoping to do is publish results so that the industry has some science to actually back up what they say. So for us, it's about getting top-quality, peer-reviewed science published in international journals. That's ultimately the outcome that we're aiming for. Because our companies have slightly different variations on the theme of a natural, red meat diet, we're not feeding specific products; we're feeding a format, if you like, so a red meat-based diet, to our animals. We're not product testing, as such. (WHINES) What we'll do is feed dogs and cats raw red meat diets and then assess how it affects faecal quality, how it affects their coat quality, um, and some other parameters around their general health. We've done some preliminary funding ` AgResearch core funding ` and industry helped pay for a study we completed last year. What we've found so far is that the raw red meat diet, compared to a extruded kibble ` dry food ` um, improved faecal consistency, faecal bulk. So we've got nice` nice poos coming out of the animal. And we're finding that, um, protein digestibility is very very high in the raw red meat diets. So it's, um` the animal is getting more protein out of its diet than what it would otherwise. We're working with three companies. We're working with Jimbo's, K9 Natural and ZiwiPeak, and they're basically the cornerstone of the NZ natural pet food industry. They're the three major players. Jimbo's is a raw red meat product that you can find in the chiller in the supermarket. K9 Natural do a frozen or a freeze-dried product that you can find in the supermarket or in specialty pet shops. And ZiwiPeak do an air-dried product format and a canned format that you can find in specialty pet stores. Industry standards are largely based out of the States. There's a set of essential nutrients that we know that they need. The difference between the more expensive premium end and the` and the budget end, you probably won't really see on the ingredient list. The ingredients tend to be the same, but the quality of the ingredients are greater on the more expensive diet, so the` the nutrients are more digestible, and the animal will be able to get more nutrients out of those diets. The filler in most of these diets is generally the fibre content. You need a certain amount of fibre to produce the stool at the end of the digestive tract, so if you don't have that fibre then you get those hard bullets that you tend to get on some of the home-kill type diets. So if we start with the dogs, a lot of the people that have` that feed this kind of format look upon dogs as close to their wolf ancestor, um, so it would be fair to say that these kind of diets attract that kind of owner. We're working at the moment to understand what dogs would actually choose if they were give a high-protein, high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. So the outcome of that will lead in to hopefully this kind of research as well. When we look at cats, we really consider them as obligate carnivores; they need to eat meat to survive. Um, the number of nutrients they actually require is significantly more than the dog, and if` It's possible to fully synthesise a synthetic diet for cats but very very expensive. I think that there's a realisation that human nutrition influences buying behaviour of their owners. People are going gluten-free or grain-free and wanting that for their pet diets as well, and that kind of feeds in to this natural format as well, so, yes, we're seeing that trend. In terms of wet food versus dry food, we're doing quite a bit of work around moisture content of diet, so, um, dry food contains presum` normally about 5% to 10% moisture. Um, from a cat point of view, we think that there may be issues around that low level of moisture. They're naturally designed to consume diets that have got about 70% moisture. They get a lot of the moisture from their diets, so we think that maybe wet food and the natural format may be more suitable for cats, but we` we haven't got the data to actually support that at the moment. This project is aimed to maybe try and keep some of the money associated with the raw materials and add value to them within NZ, rather than exporting them as raw materials to be turned into super-premium pet foods overseas. The most exciting thing about this project is you've got three relatively small companies in the same space working together for the good of the format, if you like. The three companies which are producing this pet food within NZ have got access to overseas markets, and these markets in North America and Europe are a lot more developed than within NZ, and the` their products can command significantly high amounts of money overseas. For more information about these and other stories we've covered, as well as other primary sector information, visit our website. You can get there via... You can also catch this and previous episodes on TVNZ ondemand. Next week we find out about the development of a new detection device that's been trialled to help identify cows on heat. We look at the challenges of milking sheep in this nascent industry at Antara AG Farms in Southland. And we visit the home of Blue River Nutrition, producing infant formula and artisan cheese from its Invercargill factory. Thanks for watching. We hope you'll find the time to join us again next week. Captions by Shelley Upchurch. Edited by Ashlee Scholefield. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016