Farmer Focus: Bottleneck in lamb processing causes chaos

It has been a tough 18 months, with floods, a dreadful wet harvest and another tough winter of unending rain.

Cold and wet, cold and dry and now hot and dry has been our spring weather and grass growth across all of Canterbury has been abysmal.

See also: New spring oat variety attracts miller for 2023

About the author

David Clark

Farmer Focus writer

David Clark runs a 463ha fully irrigated mixed farm with his wife Jayne at Valetta, on the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand’s south island. He grows 400ha of cereals, pulses, forage and vegetable seed crops, runs 1,000 Romney breeding ewes and finishes 8,000 lambs annually.

Read more articles by David Clark

Little did we know when lambs came off greenfeed and on to grass seeds what chaos lay ahead.

We forward contract all our lambs here. A million dollars is invested in buying these lambs during autumn.

Dedicated forage crops are grown to winter them and then we put them out on to grass crops. We have a very finite period of time to get them to weight.

The crops are grazed to a very even short growth condition, prior to the node leaving the plant base and before the lambs cut their adult teeth.

We cannot be caught by the vagaries of the market and as a result we have a very loyal relationship with our co-operative processor.

Our forward commitment locks in the number of animals to be supplied in each given week over two months of spring.

Ensuring we meet our obligations is something we take very seriously.

The perfect storm made landfall in a combination of Covid absenteeism (a pitiful excuse to dodge work) and poorly planned plant maintenance shutdowns across all processors, which resulted in a tidal wave of lambs to be processed across Canterbury in the last two weeks of October.

Lambs held back by other farmers due to slow grass growth also had an impact.

We were disappointed to get caught up in this as we had met our supply numbers consistently according to our contract.

As the grass seed crops reached closing dates, we ran out of feed.

Luckily, a neighbour came to the rescue with an 18ha field of grass that was otherwise going to silage prior to ploughing for forage kale and we pinched some feed from our ewes and lambs.

We have bumbled our way through better than many farmers, with some resorting to grazing barley crops in desperation.

Those not forward contracted really are in a pickle.

The great thing about supplying a co-op is I get to offer some constructive feedback, which I have done, so we will look forward to next year.