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On Farm
FARMERS WEEKLY – farmersweekly.co.nz – July 4, 2022
Changing with the times Waikato hill country farmers Jon and Fiona Sherlock are changing their business as the climate changes, matching stock and trading decisions to stay in tune with the evolving seasons. Gerald Piddock found out how they’ve done it.
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LIMATE change’s impact is there for Jon and Fiona Sherlock to see when they look out their window at their hill country farm during the summer. Looking about at 1100ha Waingaro in northwest Waikato farm today the green covers – a result of persistent rain throughout June – are deceptive. Grass growth is still on the low side as it slowly recovers from a fourth consecutive dry summer. Rainfall over the past four years has been 10% down on the previous seven to eight years and rainfall for the combined summer and autumn seasons has been 28% down over the same period. Not only is there less rain, when it does fall it tends to happen in big events. “When you start talking about climate change, it’s right in our face at the moment,” Jon says. Farming through it was, he says, “bloody challenging”. What has made this past season unusual is how late into autumn the dry weather continued. Going into that summer, he felt like the farm was well positioned to meet whatever nature would throw at it. “We were set really well and despite that, it’s still a costly drought.” It has forced them to change their farming style to adapt to the
WHAT’S UP? Fiona and Jon Sherlock get an update from farm manager Leo Jecentho.
changing conditions, switching to breeding lambs and selling them as store rather than trying to finish them. They have also switched from farming beef breeding cows to finishing trade heifers, giving them greater flexibility throughout the farming season. The farm is hard hill country, dominated by steep class six and seven paddocks. It sits in two blocks and is 970ha effective. The home farm Otorohaea is 595ha effective and has been in the Sherlock family for three generations with Jon’s grandfather buying the property after the
ADAPT: Jon and Fiona plan to put their more marginal land into forestry.
Second World War. The second 375ha effective block, called Kerr Road, is about 20 minutes’ drive away and was bought in 2016. The home block is used as a breeding block for their 2400 Romney breeding ewes and about 700 two-tooth ewes. The rest of the stock are their rams and 265 two-year old beef heifers. These cattle are bought mostly as yearlings and are finished as two-year-olds. The lambs are sold as store at weaning at 27kg. They keep the best of the ewe lambs as replacements and these
Photos: Stephen Barker/ Barker Photography
animals are grown out on the second block. “At weaning, everything goes off store and our ewe hoggets head on over to Kerr Road from the home farm and the two-tooths come back here at the same time,” Fiona says. The new block has a kinder contour and was purchased to give them more options. There, the Sherlocks finish 430 Friesian bulls. Lambing starts in late July for the mixed age ewes, followed by the two-tooth ewes at the end of August and the hoggets from the second block in mid-September. Jon has also fed the ewes sheep
nuts and maize on occasion to maintain condition during the leadup to mating. This is something that was started to manage the increasing number of very dry summers. They are able to cut 200 bales of grass silage on the Kerr Road block, but the steep terrain on the home farm prevents them from using a mower there. This has made them turn to deferred grazing, which takes a selected number of paddocks out of rotation and letting them to reseed and build up root reserves before being grazed in late summer/early autumn. The Sherlocks volunteered to be part of an AgResearch trial on this system and found it worked well because it provided their stock with good maintenance feed in late summer. “Those [trial] results showed that if you deferred properly and get the seed set and rejuvenate that pasture, you can get 25% more growth in that pasture in the 12 months after that deferral,” Jon says. It has proven to be particularly useful for maintaining weight on their heifers during the dry summers. Facial eczema is also a massive challenge. Over the years, Jon’s father Rory has bred in facial eczema tolerant genetics into the ewe flock to make the sheep more resilient. This policy has continued with Jon and Fiona, but they have noticed that despite flocks becoming more tolerant, the sheer numbers of spores and the length of time these counts remain high means it is still an issue. The Sherlocks employ two full time staff. Chris Kereopa oversees both the home farm and the Kerr Road block while Leo Jecentho works
