ANZCO Foods new online calf request system

This season ANZCO Foods is introducing a new online system for requesting calf pick-ups. The online system replaces all existing ways farmers have previously used to arrange calf pick-ups, so if you’re supplying calves to ANZCO you’ll need to use this system. You’ll be able to request pick-ups via the ANZCO Livestock App (available on Android and iOS) or via ANZCO’s Producer website: producerportal.anzcofoods.com with it slash and causing surface flooding.

Farmers are moving stock from heavy, saturated flats to drier hill country.

ARMERS on the North Island’s east coast appear unable to buy a trick.Jim Galloway, the Feds’ Hawke’s Bay chair, said rainfall in the past year on his farm was 50% above average – and in the past week another 50mm fell.

Philip Duncan, a senior forecaster with WeatherWatch, said it was far from ideal that rain was expected over the weekend, but long range forecasts for the rest of winter and into spring indicate the North Island and upper South Island could trend drier than average. The lower South Island, however, could be wetter than average.

Between 80mm and 200mm was expected to have fallen on North Island’s east coast over the weekend, with the East Cape and Hawke’s Bay ranges hardest hit.

This follows persistent rainfall since late summer, including up to 50mm the previous weekend.

The north of the South Island has so far this winter tended wetter than usual, while the south of the South Island is experiencing normal rainfall but is warmer than usual for winter.

“What’s missing at the moment are the southerly weather patterns,” Duncan said.

He described current weather systems as chaotic but said an El Niño weather pattern is forming, which tends to bring more westerly weather that tends to make it dry in the east of the country and wet in the west.

Duncan said this is not always the case, and of the last three El Niño systems to hit NZ, only one has created that pattern.

He said long-range forecasts indicate an El Niño is forming in Australia, which is starting to tend drier.

Given this and other trends in the weather systems that influence NZ, Duncan thinks a change is imminent.

“There could be long dry spells coming into the North Island but I still think we will see messy weather patterns across the country as we go into spring.”

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ANY day now Dan Russell expects to have tipped 3m of rain out of his east coast rain gauge for the year to date.

Usually, Puketiti Station at Te Puia Springs inland from Tokomaru Bay records between 1700mm to 2000mm a year, but the rain since February, said Russell, has been “relentless”.

Cyclone Gabrielle inaugurated a period in which, Russell estimates, 50-100mm of rain has fallen each week.

As well as bringing sodden soils and damaged farm and public infrastructure, the weather is testing people.

“Everyone’s morale is being worn down,” he said.