9 THEME MUSIC www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 Hello and welcome. Productivity and efficiency are attributes that can be assessed to establish the performance of a particular class of animal. At Massey University's Tuapaka Farm, these are currently under investigation in a number of research projects. This week we look at research on beef cow production efficiency as beef cows are moved on to the hills to make way for dairying on the easy country. We meet father and son Alistair and Daniel Ormond, whose farming operation in Central Hawke's Bay was awarded the East Coast Ballance Farm Environment supreme award for 2015. And we go to the Marlborough Sounds to visit Clearwater Mussels, one of NZ's biggest greenshell mussel producers and the 2015 co-winner of the Lincoln University Foundation's South Island farming award. Beef & Lamb NZ and Massey University are currently funding research investigating beef cow performance on hill country breeding herds on the university's Tuapaka Farm. The study began in 2012 with the aim of producing guidelines for farmers around the production benefits of differing cow types. For a long time we've been selecting for heavier steers and heavier carcass weights, and alongside that we've increased the cow live weight. And what we're seeing is that perhaps we're going too far along those routes and we're getting cows that are really big. And in terms of the calf output, we're actually seeing that cows are bigger; the increase in cow live weight is greater than the increase in calf size. So basically, we're looking at how do cows of different live weights compare in terms of calf output, and also how is the role of milk production of the cow involved in that as well. So, performance of the beef cow isn't great compared to a lot of the other livestock classes on a farm. She's there doing a lot of other roles, and when you look at her value to the system as a whole, generally, she is adding value. But our average calf weaning rate is about 85%, and it's been that way, you know, since I was a kid. This trial isn't really about the breed of cow. We've gone for the dairy cross because it was a really quick way of getting, reliably, cows that were heavy, medium and light and that produced more milk than a straight-bred beef cow. There's a huge value in terms of weaning weight to be gained from a bit of extra milk, in that a big cow can produce the necessary extra calf live weight so long as she's got the ability to turn that` to produce that milk, then she'll wean that extra calf size. COWS MOO These cows were all produced through a set of insemination. So there's four Angus bulls that have sired all the cows, so they're all half-siblings, from a range of herds to get the different dams that we needed. So these cows were born in 2008, and so they're now 7 and they've got their sixth calf at foot now. The first thing we measured` The calves all came on to the property at weaning, so that was three months for the dairy crosses and six months for the straight Angus. So at that point we started measuring onset of puberty. And so these cows, their ovaries were examined from 8 months of age right through up until the bull went in at 16 months. And we looked at when the cows had their first oestrus. Throughout their life, we've been measuring live weight every month, and we do body condition score and rib fat measured by ultrasound. We do that every three months. And we measure live weight of the calf basically at birth, and then right up until weaning. And then the first three cohorts of calves, we kept the steer calves right through until slaughter, so we've measured growth of the calves right until finishing and then some carcass quality traits as well. OK. (MOOS) When the cows had their first calf, we looked at post-partum and oestrus, so how long was it taking them to come back into heat. One of the things we did was count the number of follicles that we could see on the ovaries, and we looked back at that data at weaning of calf number five. And we saw that the cows that had a lot of follicles then, we've got most of those cows still in our herd. Whereas the cows that had one follicle six weeks post-partum, nearly twice as many of those cows have left our herd. There's no culling on production; it's simply fertility. (MOOS) 30. 15. (MOOS LOUDLY) I think we're gonna get twins. We've used a number of different sire breeds over the years. So we've included Hereford, Simmental, Angus, and obviously this year the calves are Charolais. We've taken the first three cohorts of calves through for slaughter. And what we see repeatedly is at weaning the calves from the straight Angus cows are the lightest. They're a little bit lighter than the calves from the Angus-Jersey cows. Um, and within the dairy cross cows` So the Angus-Friesians' calves are the biggest, the Angus-Kiwi are middle-sized, and the Angus-Jerseys are the lightest, and then the straight Angus calves sit out the bottom. What we see post-weaning is that lighter weaning weight of the Anguses was because they were getting less milk from their mums. And post-weaning, we do see some compensatory growth from them, and they end up` by slaughter they've usually overtaken the Jerseys, and they're similar to the Angus-Kiwi. They never have caught up to the Angus-Friesian, uh, but we do see a correction to their potential mature size that they're growing to. In terms of carcass composition, so, the Anguses dress out a fraction better than the Angus-Jersey in particular by about half a percent. But statistically it's significant, and it does mean that for the same live weight you are getting a marginally heavier carcass. And the meat samples that we've taken back to the lab are pretty uniform across all of the breeds. So we've looked at intramuscular fat, we've looked at fat colour, meat colour. And we've measured that` fat colour in particular, we've measured really objectively. The most efficient cows are the ones that are producing a lot of milk. And as long as those heavier cows are producing a heavier calf, they're just as efficient as those little cows producing a proportionately smaller calf. But some of our cows, the straight Angus being the example here, so they're high live-weight cows producing low live-weight calves, and they're certainly not as efficient. There's no difference among any of the breeds in terms of reproductive performance. so, you know, the Angus cows are consistently carrying about a condition score to a condition score and a half more condition than the dairy crosses. And we sort of wondered early on was that going to translate to more longevity or better fertility, and it's not. So the breeds are basically the same for reproductive performance, and so it's just converting` those dairy cows are converting that extra feed into calf as opposed to body condition. We'll be back soon to meet Alistair and Daniel Ormond, farmers with a long-term commitment to planting on their Central Hawke's Bay property. 9 Welcome back. Alistair and Tracy Ormond and their son Daniel farm sheep and beef at Hatuma in Central Hawke's Bay. The Ormonds won the supreme award for the East Coast Ballance Farm Environment Awards in 2015. 620ha, is Te Umuopua. It's quite a steep property, sheep and beef, and it's sorta limestone` it's got a lot of different soil types. It's quite a difficult property to run in that it's got little fingers of good land, so the little fingers are what we develop. The strengths of this farm are that it's got superb water, uh, we've got a lot of natural water, being limestone country, and we've got a community water scheme on the country which is free-draining and doesn't hold water. That's definitely one of the strengths. Another strength is our location here. Our height gives us a rainfall average of about 1200mm, 1300mm. We still are prone to droughts in bad droughts, but at the moment we've got feed coming out our ears. Some of the weaknesses can be strengths as well. The weaknesses are contour, so our susceptibility to erosion. The fact that we've got a little creek running right through the property is going to impose challenges for us in the future. The property has been in my family for three generations, but I'm the first person in our family to live on it. I came to this property in 1978. We've done a lot of development. There were virtually no trees here. There were a couple of shelter belts and the 2ha of gums, and that was about it. Our house site was a bare paddock, and none of the other trees were there. So we've done all of the planting, really. I was brought up with a love of trees and birds and that sort of thing. But first of all, you survive, then you thrive, then you sustain. And the sustainability thing is really coincidental. We happen to have done some things which, when people look back on it now they say they were good. But it wasn't at the forefront of our thinking as it is now. The farm planting is basically in three parts. There's pine planting, then there's native planting, then there's regeneration. So the pine plantings we planted on steep slopes for shearing shelter and possible production stuff, and we've got 33ha of that. And then the native planting basically started at our house site that was a bare paddock. We planted a cover crop, and then we introduced natives. And then out on the farm, that's a more recent thing with natives, and that's part of this riparian planting that is around us here, and that's our effort to start retiring the waterways, which is difficult on this country. A lot of this waterway is less than the required scale that needs fencing, but we're trying to do it anyway. We're planting a variety of natives, and we now use little protectors around those plantings. And the third aspect of our planting, if you like, is in this native block here. We have a big debate as to what we introduce into that. That's basically fencing and pest control and allowing that to regenerate. And that doesn't require intervention from us. The environmental award's given us an increase in awareness, I guess, in what people are after. We'd never entered any award prior to this. Um, and we are very much a family-orientated farm, and so our development was for our family and for future generations. And, as I said, it's coincidental that it happened to coincide with environmental codes of conduct. Now that we're more environmentally aware, we are shaping things and doing things slightly differently. Succession's a big thing for us. I'm 63 years old now. I first wrote a written succession plan aged 52. Because I have five children; Tracy has two. My five children are four girls and a boy. So Daniel being the only boy, there was a challenge, if he was going to farm, to make that succession happen. And in fact, we found we had to grow a little bit to make that succession work, and we've chosen to do that outside the farm. Hence, Daniel is going to be the only one in the family that will farm this property. This farm, the focus for us is definitely the sheep. We have a breeding ewe flock of 3300 ewes. We put the best 2500 of those ewes to a maternal-breed ram. The remaining 800 go to a terminal ram. After the first cycle, everything goes to a terminal ram. We also have about 1000 hoggets. We lamb probably half of them. Um, in` Well, in the future we'd like to get that up to be lambing all of them. Currently, we finish probably 80% of our lambs. With the increase in our new forages of the clover and the plantain and whatnot, we're looking to finish everything. Our cattle policy here ` the last of the breeding cows went off the property probably two years ago. And now we're just bulls and a few steers. We probably winter about 250 to 300 bulls, a mixture of R1 and R2 bulls. They're mostly wintered on the intensive cattle system. We'll finish the heavier of the R2 bulls before their second winter, just to make sure we're not carrying cattle that are too heavy for our country. With our terrain, we have very few flat paddocks, so the areas that we've put into plantain, it's stuff that you can just get a tractor over, so we really have to make use of the good land we have. If we can show where our produce comes from, possibly videos or pictures of the farm and the plantings that we've done` As Dad said, we started out never intending for that to be the case. We did it for the love of the land and, um, a lot of the dams we planted were because we're mad duck shooters. Um, so we've just` we've always been into planting trees, and now the way things are going, it's becoming more and more important, and we'll continue to do that. We'll return soon, to the Marlborough Sounds to meet one of NZ's pioneering mussel farmers. Two almost identical fridge-freezers, so what's the difference? The Smiths chose a fridge-freezer that's Energy Star qualified. That means it uses up to 40% less energy. Next time you need a new appliance, look for one displaying the Energy Star. 0 Hello again. Clearwater Mussels began as a sideline to a farming business. Founders John Young and Lyn Godsiff then formed a partnership with Talley's Group to not only grow NZ greenshell mussels but further process and market them. Today the company harvests around one-seventh of NZ's total mussel crop, producing around 1000 tons each month. These mussel businesses started off as cottage industries. The market was probably the same as what it is now, the price, and there was a need to increase the economy of scale. So that's what Clearwater Mussels is about. It's about producing the most mussels, the best mussels, most efficiently and making efficient use of all our boat resources. Innovation is the key to any growth, but that's only one factor. The other factor is that you must be able to work in an environment` an environment that allows you to do things. And so far in NZ, we have been in that situation where we are able to get on and be farmers and to create systems. This is biology in action. The market's 67 different countries and a variety of products. We have a product that's restaurant-ready boil in the bag in a sauce; we have marinated mussels; we have whole meat; we have half shell, which is the premium product, which possibly 65% of all these mussels you're seeing harvested go into; we have nutraceuticals ` very high-end, very high-value and a very vibrant and growing market. This started off basically a cottage industry with a system copied from Spain. One of the first innovations was making a biodegradable cotton using a child's French knitting plastic Magic Knitting set. And that was the innovation that really gave us substance. Instead of seeding a few metres a day ` you know, putting the mussels back on the rope a few metres a day ` we could do hundreds and then thousands of metres. Currently 20,000m a day. The purpose of putting them on the rope is that the ideal density is 178 mussels to the metre. Grow any more than that, the mussels will get stunted. They'll starve. Grow any less than that, it won't be economic. So that's the target. And so this is a system of getting accuracy. I mean, all farming is about ` as we know ` is about accuracy. This netting is what set the NZ mussel industry alight. We had a way to mechanise. And what happens is this is fed on to a tube, and the rope goes down the middle of the tube, like my hand is at the moment. The mussels are fed into the end at the right density ` exactly 178 to the metre. This is a mature mussel, obviously, but you see the byssus, which is the hair, the beard, as people call it, has been torn out. The beard is produced, like in this one, with a special gland inside the mussel. And what happens is you can seed the mussels temporarily on to the rope, and within seconds they are reproducing this beard and reorientating themselves and attaching themselves at the density you put them on. That's the key. The stocking's function is to hold the mussels in place at the right density until they get a chance to reattach. This is a biodegradable product. This'll be gone sometimes within one week, sometimes three weeks, depending on the water temperature. The mussel buoy was an innovation being used in Japan to grow scallops. We brought that here ` a version of this ` and then manufactured it ourselves in a rotational moulding process. It's a marvellous thing because what it does, it enables the small person to get started with a few buoys. You don't need the huge capital structure. It's much more robust in a turbulent ocean environment. The other thing is we are recycling these buoys ` some of them 40 years old ` and turning them into new buoys like you see here. Flotation is your big cost in mussel farming. So what you want to do is endeavour to use that flotation strategically. When you first seed your mussels, they're very small; there's not much weight on a line. You might have 20 of these buoys. Then you revisit at a later time and add buoys as you go. So the buoys are continually rotating through your farms, always doing a job. This particular buoy, I love. This is a new innovation. So, the new opportunity for mussel farming in NZ is to farm offshore, whether it's offshore in Coromandel, Banks Peninsula, Golden Bay, wherever. Opotiki. This buoy enables our company to do it. And the reason is that the older-style buoys are lashed on with a lashing ` bound to fail in a turbulent environment. This one has an innovation where we put the rope ` this is the backbone rope, if you like ` and this pin, which is then just driven... past the rope. And you can see that that is held incredibly tightly. There's no chance of this breaking loose and causing a problem. We're in Yncyca Bay, which is in the Pelorus. This isn't a particularly good line, but it's probably returning us about 6.5 kilos per metre of grow rope that you've just seen hauled. And this one longline that we're on, which is the one structure in the water, is going to produce 46 ton of product for processing. This is a dedicated harvester. This is the biggest harvester in the industry, and can carry 126 ton in 1-ton bags. It can harvest that each day. It's capable of harvesting 24 ton an hour. We try to keep under that because of quality control. This is a beast of a machine. Since the '70s` We were new, and worldwide the industry was new as far as knowing what the quality of the waters were like. Now, shellfish` As we know, we eat the gut of the shellfish, so the bacterial level or the toxic algae level can't be over a certain limit or it will affect humans. So we developed a gas spectrogram process with the Cawthron Institute. It's now accepted; it's used worldwide looking at toxic algae levels. We have a series of rain gauges automated all through the Sounds. They show how much rain falls in each catchment. Different catchments close for certain times; open for certain times. This harvester's wired into that programme so they never ever exceed the harvest criteria. The value of this industry is that we could take these lines out tomorrow; we could remove these farms tomorrow and you wouldn't know we'd been here. I've been a diver all my life. I swim through these farms, I check our anchors. There is nothing there. Now, what other farming system, what other human endeavour can you have where you could actually remove these buoys and lines and you wouldn't know we'd been there; there would be no imprint? So the future, to me` The future to me is immense. For more information on these and other stories, as well as other primary sector information, visit our website. Or you can also watch this and previous episodes on TVNZ OnDemand. Next week ` we meet a dairy farming couple who developed a device to prevent water contamination and subsequent waste of milk as a result of cleaning lines after milking. We visit Pencoed farm in Manawatu, a property that was involved in a district-wide water management study. And we catch up on the progress made at The Village Press, having grown considerably over the 15 years since it began. Thanks for stopping by. We hope to see you again next time. Bye for now. Captions by Tracey Dawson. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 (BARKS, GROWLS)