- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Forecasts are pretty useless in terms of bringing the right stuff at the right time - ours talk the talk... but when it comes to it... they tend to completely overreact after an unpredicted foot or two of snow took out electricity to about a quarter of the south island for a few weeks - now any low in the Tasman comes with warning etc so is worse than no forecast at all for farming info
I have a bit of faith in the Ken Ring "the Moon Man" for predicting trends out a little way
based on how the lunar and sunspot cycles etc influence weather patterns, actually pretty close (but also a little bit like a horoscope)The best preparation for me, and most local pastoral / cropping farms is simply to allow and adjust and prepare for some total failures, explore worst case scenarios.
It is getting to be a different risk, and higher stakes (your signature says it) so much lower input and "hippy" management strategies: no bare soil, companion and cover cropping that will at least be salvageable by livestock if unsuccessful to harvest in the window - just been discussing the use of sheep as a PGR / fungicide replacement for cheaper cereals
Simplify systems to reduce essential time inputs - so bringing in off farm income can be done more easily, and some contracting offsets machinery costs, engineering in the workshop, every drop helps - if not it simply means more leisure
For me, regenerating our soils and leave them alone -! so it works as soil and isn't like 'play-doh' - learning about improving water cycles has been a big one for me, and improving infiltration to handle what comes - storing what we get for when it doesn't.... if our year's rain came in 3 days nothing would runoff the surface, 8 inches per hour it can handle now
Deep ripping on the contour to divert rainwater from natural catchments across slopes to share any mega rain events across more area - like the KeyLine system
Trees - help to create microclimates and raise temperatures at the shoulders of the season to push out growing seasons
Biodiversity - usually some plant will be loving it, whatever the weather, so cover more bases
Better grazing management is obviously the biggest one for livestock farming, longer rotations and longer grass means better chance of success and less unnecessary spending on drugs and crack to bandaid complications from overgrazing
The main one is integration of livestock on cropping farms, it really went out of fashion but it is back with bells on now, even if it isn't very profitable it drastically reduces costs so boosts profits, or reduces losses in the crops
Using that liquidity of stock trading, my intentions of finishing lambs this year went out the window and so did they, and still made my intended margin, saved a lot of feed that way.
Lots of different angles; but mainly environmental adjustments and being more aware that as farmers we create many of the issues by our actions: we wreck natural cycles and then have little comeback from it, and some are too reliant on things being "average" when they never are...
I am setup to prey on those types of farmers with winter feed, and plenty of cash can be pulled straight off the sharemarket to create opportunities, or seize them - I would never have all my eggs in the farming basket, times have changed there.
Expansion is definitely not for me, I bought a small piece with the immediate intention of onselling it for a profit, more farm = more time... we only have so much time
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