May Day, May Day

Hi to all our farmer clients!

As most of you will be aware, here at NZ Grazing we have just been through our busiest time of year with grazing contracts ending and new contracts beginning. This all happens around the end of April/beginning of May. Call it what you will – May Day, changeover, busy-period…. It is our silly season!

Through this time our team worked some long days to carry out weighing, managing logistics, phone calls, driving, processing weigh files, reports and invoicing and last but not least carrying out the NAIT movements. In what is largely a 2-week interval we have weighed, arranged trucking, processed and NAIT moved over 250 owner lines of animals which equates into well over 10,000 animals heading back home or out to grazing. A lot of planning well in advance goes into setting up this busy period.

For those of you who played a part in our “silly season”, from us to you, a very big THANK-YOU for helping us get through this time and enabling us to keep to schedule. Add into the logistics around this busy time Covid, and we could have had some real challenges! I am pleased to report I am aware of only one farmer case of covid during our silly season that we had to postpone our weigh. Phew!

We are fortunate to have good working relationships with our trucking Companies that we work in with all over the North Island who kept our trucking arrangements going to plan. The in-calf heifers that headed home from being out on our grower farms went home on average 3% (or 18kg) ahead of their end target weights. Well done to our grower farmers for their efforts for what has been and continues to be an unusual season. This summer/autumn period we have seen some of the most impressive weaner growth rates. On average weaners are 10kg ahead of targets in May, keep up the great work – Go you grower farmers!

As we here at NZ Grazing catch our breath, as we are heading into winter it is a time for us to connect with our dairy farming clients during their dry season before they get back into it with calving! We hope you have a restful dry period and look forward to catching up with you during this time.

We hope you enjoy this newsletter, don’t forget if you come across something unique or interesting you think our farmers would enjoy please don’t hesitate to send it in to us at info@grazing.nz

Cheers

Bridget Clark

Operations Manager