Book: Serious Fun, the life and times of Alan Gibbs

This book's a good read for farmers, a sort of swashbuckling, but serious champion of capitalism.
Its always interesting to see how the self-made mega-wealthy got to be so, and I found his life path through the recent history of NZ economic development, from the days of rigid import control, through the Roger Douglas, Ruth Richardson years, detailed in the first half of the book, immensely so.
The second half of the book gets a bit languorous, as others who've read it have also commented, as it details Gibbs indulgences in mega art, and pursuit of the amphibious vehicle, the latter a credit to his tenacity, and an object lesson in product development.
Still, its a significant read, and good on him for letting/getting it be written.
Most of us ordinary mortals never get to experience what he has, his depth of reading, and travel and experience in over 130 countries visited. We need to rely on opinion of his ilk to test and formulate our own.
There's a closing piece in Serious Fun that's a little ominous, he's saying western democracies are now the most coerced societies, given our penchant for letting governments grow unrestrained. I guess he infers that because, although the intent of regulation is protection of the vulnerable, it mostly ends up as a another jobs arse to be protected, and consequent  impediment to the entrepreneur.
Us food producers world-wide are so much contributors to this, victims of our own success, we've fed our people so well they've become ever adept at riding on the backs of others, ie us, eating the hand that feeds them, rather than themselves create something that never existed before.
Like Mr Gibbs has, and continues to do.

Getting Dry......

The view out my kitchen window

With drought declarations springing up all round the country, we're keeping a close eye on feed supply, and on the weather maps too.
I dusted off my old feed budget program and arrived at a deficit of 8kg DM/day, which, all said and done, is what I expect this time of year.
The important thing, I think, if you're a seat of your pants stockman like me, is not to divert from the annual flight plan formulated from a lifetime experience on your farm, keep picking the plums as they ripen, sell them on whatever's the best market available, take the loss on the chin, and dont play for time in hope of things improving.
Recently I took a price on the place for some finished lambs, with an indeterminate delivery date. Theyre still here, chewing through my ever increasingly valuable crop, denying the rest of my lambs the luxury of a finishing feed, and free grazing for the works buyer as he tends to demands and pleas more vociferous than mine.
I'm reminded why I vowed never again to be a committed supplier to a processor, when my lambs at the time of my 4th week of delayed delivery triggered my walk-out. By then the lambs had got to 8 weeks from their last drench, contracted an internal parasite attack, leaving me powerless to drench them to stop the loss of health in case I did get a call, but jiggered by the drench withholding period.
Best of luck to all and sundry getting this closer association industry PGP whatever plan off the ground, I wont be a participant.
With the average age of sheep-farmers here still hovering around mid-50's, I think the ground-swell enthusiasm for it will be similarly conservative. What we'd all like is a set season base-price per kg, maybe with bonuses around seasonal demand, bit like the dairy farmers operate, but I doubt it'll ever happen.
Meanwhile, we watch the weather maps closely. After a copy-book summer, I reckon it always rains on 20th March, and right now a tropical cyclone is ripping down the higher Tasman, and the current anti-cyclone sitting over the country is weakening off to the east.
Ken Ring, the moon man, reckons its going to rain on the 20th too, according to some drinking buddies last Fri night, and with some vigour too.
I hope we dont get a crash of weather systems if the crap far to the south gets up here at the same time, like we got for the 2004 floods.
And further meanwhile, I've got the contractor's digger out deepening a couple of stock-water dams that have finally got low enough to get into. Apart from that, the water supply is actually in quite good shape over the rest of the place.
Pretty near all my "hill" paddocks are 30ac in size, and I want to get to a situation of 2 good dams in each.
Feed crops, pasja and Hunter, are standard component of my dry summer strategy. They can be oddly inconsistent performers, but have come into their own this season, sown late for here, mid Dec, but have kept growing right through, and holding in the face of quite a heavy stocking load.
I think its the sheltered aspect of this valley keeping them safe from the wind, and making the low-lying most of the dews we've been getting.

"I stood upon the hills"

Tennyson said that.
"I stood upon the hills as heaven's wide arch, was glorious with the sun's returning march."
I always get a buzz out of early morning muster, sheep snort somewhere in the mist and slope off around their hill trails as the dogs do their ancient caper, sending their booming bark and howl down the gulleys.
The NZ huntaway was bred from crossing labradors with hunting hounds, hence the howly bit, and the penchant to run down their next feed, if you dont keep an eye on their training.

2th Keeper Rams Selected

One of the best times of the year in the stud flock, selecting the 2th keeper rams.
Selection was initially done using SIL eBV's, but the candidate group were also DNA sampled for the Ovita 5K Beta test, and gBV's for that have since been returned.
gBV's are the result of blending the estimated and the molecular BV's.
The mBV merely confirms or endorses the eBV already known for physical traits of high heritability, eg. live wts and fleece wts, but its real value is making selection more robust in traits like NLB or SUR with low heritability that only come to full measure over some years:
Or feasible, in the case of traits where no observation is done at all in this flock, eg. carcase yield measurements for shoulder, loin, and rump; internal parasite resistence; and dag score.


61/11   1st DPG+A  4th DPP



89/11   1st DPW

125/11   1st DPG  2nd DPP  3rd DPG+A

150/11   1st DPX

152/11   2nd DPG

234/11   4th DPW

247/11   3rd DPR+S  3rd DPX

311/11   1st DPM

315/11   3rd DPG  5th DPM



 The dark stain in the fleece on the side of some sheep is from the parafin used during ultra-sound muscle scanning, nothing permanent.

Rational thought on the Quad Bike safety Issue

At last somebody is applying some rational thought to this issue, and how pleasing it is coming from Fed Farmers own spokeswoman on Health and Safety, Jeanette Maxwell.
In a recent Dompost article she asks the question why the intense media scrutiny on farm quad accidents, 7 fatalities and 84 serious harm notifications last year, on around 100,000 machines on NZ farms, while on the road, there were 42 people killed and over 1000 seriously injured, on significantly fewer machines.
She dosent say how many road bikes there are, but looking up the govt stats it looks around 65,000.
At least that was the figure in 2007, and it dosent appear to have changed much since, despite a rush of new bike registrations in 2008.
That's around 7 times more road deaths per 1000 machines than on farms. Good point.
Simple conclusion is coroners and OSH staff havent got enough to do.
Farmers are always a good captive audience to wring a few more bucks from.
She goes on to quote other sectors such as water safety that say education is crucial, and excessive regulation, such as road machines are subject to, dont necessarily improve the stats.
If us farmers are going to be subject to more regulation, we're entitled to know why and what for.
Of course the nation could fix the accident rate over the whole spectrum in one fell swoop by getting rid of ACC so accident injuries become user pays, and businesses and vehicle owners could save a packet in ACC levies.

Facial Eczema Dose Test Results



9179, passed best of the bunch

 21 day GGT test results are in for the 5 stud sires I had dose tested under the Ramguard program.
Facial eczema, (commonly referred FE), is an insidious disease of all pasture based animals here, caused by a toxin produced by a saprophitic fungus, pithomyces chartarum, that thrives after summer dry has browned off pasture.
Fortunately, sheep have a genetic resistance to the effects of sporidesmin toxin, with quite a high heritability component. The Ramguard program involves administering a very carefully calculated dose of sporidesmin and measuring the response indicated by blood test before, and 21 days after.
By this means, the resistance factor can be identified in pivotal individual animals, and spread through a flock relatively quickly, capturing and ensuring a safe and non-chemical avoidance of what can be a highly debilitative challenge to both flock, and bank account.

9069 and 9269, good passes also

Having your flock resident long term in a district where FE is more prevalent is a distinct advantage, as the sub-clinical effects of the disease whittle away at fertility, and indirectly assist building a resistant population of those sheep unscathed.
In my recorded nucleus ram breeding flock, I also GGT blood screen from free-range pasture, all in-coming replacement females, eliminating those showing early intolerance, and therefore contributing to the robustness of the FE/DPX selection index.
Waione 75-08 posting a "slight" reaction, was a bit of a disappointment, as I have big raps on this ram for his growth factor. He was actually 35kg heavier bodyweight than the mean of the other 4 rams tested, on which the dose rate is based, so he got a proportionately far bigger "drink".

8075

One could argue, being a growth spec sire, that he neednt eat as much grass au naturale per kg liveweight, and therefore ingest as much toxin, to maintain and grow, as the others.
It is a known that animals laying down protein, dont succumb to toxin challenge as readily, as conversely do those losing it.
I would expect gene-lines that have a high muscling factor would be less susceptible, and this is born out in my experience with rams I've used, from Norman Early's Ashburton flock, and the highly muscled 544/07 from Lincoln University, both Canterbury flocks where FE is virtually unknown.

Book: The Great Divide, by Ian Wishart

I've put this slant on the Treaty of Waitangi in the farm blog under 5th Dimension stuff, rather than where I normally do book reviews on my jreb blog, given that security of tenure, the foundation of our Kiwi brand of capitalism, has an elephant in its room in the form of indigenous peoples (aka Maori) aspiration, originally over land issues, but now bounding over coastline, water, and air.
Us farmers with our land-holdings and proximity to the latter two, can be forgiven for taking the occasional glance over our shoulders.
You have to hand it to Ian Wishart as being one of the most prodigious researchers in the country, even if he's regarded as too much of a conspiracist in some quarters. His work on climate issues in "Air Con" is monumental, and he's sure made a good dig into the archives with this book.
One of the misfortunes of history is its propensity to be re-invented depending on the world-view of its interpreters, and I think a lot of that goes on with the Waitangi Tribunal. "The Great Divide" wont make any in-roads on that score, rather its benefit is as a good back-grounder for those watchful of us having to make a living under the elephant.
As a whakapapa'd (identifiably lineaged) blended Kiwi myself, (can get to Hawaiki, the original homeland of Maori, in 21 generations), I agree with Wishart's conclusion that the Treaty was embraced at the time, 1840, as the best opportunity for security of tenure for the locals in what was an increasingly "wild west" scenario, with the gun trade taking tribal conflict to an horrific level, and the French and Americans sitting in line for de facto authority, bleak alternatives if ever, particularly when you look at their respective poor record of colonisation and dealing with indigenous peoples.
Indeed you have to ask what Maori left Hawaiki for in the first place. Go to any established Pacific society and you'll find our rangatira level were subordinate to at least two higher levels of society, and often a royal family. Maybe it was they left because more than the heat of the tropics got too great, and not just sailing off for the sake of adventure, but actually to secure turangawaewae, "a place for their feet", somewhere else.
While a number of chiefs and tribes maintained a never say die 'its all ours, bugger off whites' stance over what they considered constituted Aotearoa, and the call still taken up today, Wishart points out the little credited and remembered hui at Kohimarama where the majority of chiefs ratified their defence of the 1840 Treaty and allegiance to the concept of Crown, 20 years later. He argues this as evidence of a desire by the chiefs to advance individual land title, and once enshrined, to enable whatever disposition desired, including sale.
Dunno.... the plot around land sale by chiefs gets pretty thick outside of this investigation.
You can argue back and forth on the legitimacy or otherwise of both sides of the from then till now issue ad infinitum. What I think it comes down to is where NZ society wants to take it to today.
Simply, put it to the vote.
Wishart's concluding plank has much merit too. Do we want a written constitution holding Maori aspiration and the Crown, as jointly superior to the wishes of the people?
That's no constitution at all. If it was to be one, the people would be at the top.
Otherwise, why bother with a Parliament.