May 2018

Its been another great month – regular rain and mild conditions. As growth on the Lucerne paddocks has now slowed deer and sheep are grazing the paddocks bare before the paddocks go dormant for the winter.

On the 11 May we sent a further draft of the South Otago lambs to be processed. These averaged 20.1kg carcase weight so the yield is coming back from the previous month. It looks like we have sufficient feed to graze the remaining 230 for one more month then they will simply have to go.

One Saturday about the middle of May it was our pleasure to host a visit from Heidi and Jeremy Geske from Minnesota. Heidi is lecturer is Agribusiness at the University of Wisconsin while Jeremy has a background in soil sciences and is involved with environmental sustainability initiatives.

It seems that environmental awareness and looking at ways to achieve sustainability are just as topical in Minnesota as they are in New Zealand.

We enjoyed showing them around Puketira Deer and are quite excited as Heidi hopes to bring a group of university students from Wisconsin to visit New Zealand on a study tour in January 2019.

It seems that after 21 years it time to do some remedial fencing on the first part of the property that was deer fenced. The deer have finally worked out that some fences are not really deer fences at all. We have replaced about 1000m now with 1.8 metre high deer netting and have also put an electric wire on outriggers along several more fences to stop fence line erosion.  This fencing has made a significant difference to managing stock on the existing deer unit but does no allow us to get onto what we really want to be doing – getting the final 60 hectares of the property fenced.

As the end of May approaches – so does winter. It’s a really wet, cold grotty finish to the month and it time to start thinking about getting the animals onto their winter feed  breaks.