Farmers not sitting on hands

23-08-2010 | Steve Wyn-Harris

Over sixteen years of columns, I've made a good living out of pointing out what was wrong with the meat and wool industries. I'm probably the only sheep and beef farmer to have profited from the dismal shambles we've watched unfold.

Now it seems every commentator throughout the land has finally realised that indeed there is a hidden crisis out there in the hill country and that there are folk struggling through heavy workloads and undue stresses to merely stand still.

However, what has annoyed me recently are the pronouncements by the news media, commentators and representatives of the meat industry that it is farmers themselves who are creating the difficulties for themselves by their short term and blinkered time horizons.

Well I want to strongly refute this rubbish. Farming as we know is a long term planning event. You front end load farm management practices such as applying fertiliser, fencing and breeding programmes that may take many years to recoup. The initial property purchase alone can take most of a career to produce payback.

On National Radio's Morning Report last week a "leading agricultural expert" as they were titled trotted out the companies' line that it was all farmers' inability to commit to a single processor that was the root cause of much of the industry's woes.

A column I wrote a couple of weeks ago put the case that in fact the majority of us do commit to a single meat company and it is the companies themselves who incentivise rather than deter the balance to shop around.

Judging from the resulting email traffic most of you agree and are equally frustrated that we are all tarred with the same brush and that the minority aided and abetted by the companies are doing little good to our industry.

And then there is this nonsense that we are production-led and pay no heed to what the markets actually want.

When I started my farming career this was absolutely true. But boy have we come a long way in that time. Farmers are incredibly adept at responding to price signals. If you offer to pay us more for a better product we will produce it.

The classic example is that the average carcase weight of a lamb in the 1980s was 14kg and last year in a drought year it was nearly 17.

We have spent considerable time and money in breeding programmes over that time to not only be able to farm greatly more productive animals but also to respond to the consumer's wishes.

Examples in my own modest dual-purpose sheep stud of the former productivity goals on top of the usual striving for productive trait increases are being involved in intensive survival and efficiency trials with AgResearch, breeding for facial eczema tolerance and now scanning DNA for traits of interest.

With the consumer in mind my fellow Coopworth breeders and I have for a number of years made it compulsory to ultrasound scan our hoggets to improve the meat contribution of the carcase and now we also collect a selection of sheep from most breeders on to "The Muscle Bus" and send them to Lincoln for CT carcase scanning so that we can continue to improve the offering to the consumer.

When I select the terminal sires for my commercial ewes I get them from terminal breeders doing the same type of meat improvements. I select from the better end of the offering and I am prepared to pay for it.

It is only now that the meat companies are finally putting in technology that will reward the progeny from these type of sheep.

So don't keep telling me and my mates who have dramatically responded to market-led signals over time that we need to adopt a fork to pasture outlook rather than the reverse - we are already doing it.

YOUR VIEW

*Steve Wyn-Harris is a Central Hawke's Bay sheep and beef farmer; swyn@xtra.co.nz

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