Wellington

The first meeting I had in Wellington was with an organisation that has a number of focus farms working with EID technology. The aim of the seven year R&D programme is to make the industry more sustainable. There are currently 8 focus farms and 250 farms using the database (cattle, lambs and deer). They are planning on increasing the focus farms to 12. The focus farms are a cross section in terms of geography and farming type. The focus farmers are the drivers, making decisions what they would like to get out of the project and they get assistance on how to achieve it e.g. what information they need to record etc. Most farmers are recording weights and animal health, DLWG, groups of animals, forage and animal health. These farms host a couple of field days a year where they discuss financial issues and implications, animal health and agronomy. The focus farmers also meet a couple of times a year. The database holds information from the abattoir on individual lamb basis including Grade, x-ray weight, rib count, % hind, % middle, % fore. It was interesting to see how this varied. Other things they are looking at is taste, tenderness, aroma, colour, juiciness. It was interesting to see the taste panel results from a number of forages. On two crops the females were a lot worst than the males for taste. They were slightly better than males on some other crops. But not to the same extent.

The second meeting I had in Wellington we discussed the importance of agriculture in NZ and this is the reason why so much focus is on reducing green house gas emissions. There are some options but they are to expensive and not significant enough. The cost of them does not make practical sense. Their three main aims are to enhance productivity, reduce methane and nitrous oxide and explore international opportunities. Discussions revolved around similar topics covered in Palmerston North.  We discussed how the sheep decreased from 55 million in 1999 to 33 million with the same number of lambs produced so emission intensity has decreased in the sheep industry, however dairy cattle have increased from 3.5 million to 6 million, while beef cattle have stayed similar. Generally dairy are responsible for 40-45% emissions while beef and sheep are responsible for 55-60%.