Perilous Times
New Zealand Lambs dying in their thousands as wicked storm bites
6:54 PM Tuesday Sep 21, 2010
The corpses of newborn lambs are piling up in their tens of thousands
as cold weather continues to bite Southland.
Local farmer Donald McCallum says his best efforts are not enough to
keep the lambs alive through the storm which has ravaged the region for
the past five days.
"You try your best to get them going and the hardest thing is you can
bring them in, and bring the lambs in, or get the sheep up and going,
and then you put them back out and the next day they're all dead," Mr
McCullum told 3 News.
While the financial cost continues to rise with every dead lamb, Mr
McCullum says the deaths do more than hit farmers in the pocket.
"I do think its the mental cost that costs the farmer, 'cause he
genuinely feels for his animals," he told 3 News.
He says it is high time Southland gives more focus to farmers instead
of the ruined Southland Stadium.
"You know, everyone's crying about the stadium falling over, but I
think there's a lot of sheep and cow farmers in Southland that wouldn't
care about the stadium - no one got hurt."
Meanwhile, Federated Farmers' national president Don Nicolson says
southern farmers hit by icy storms can do little but wait for a change
in the weather.
"We could really use some 'local' warming in Southland," said Mr
Nicolson, who farms sheep at Waimatua, southeast of Invercargill.
"The snow we've had is the most I have ever seen in September," he said
today during a hailstorm. "After a relatively benign winter, this
system has struck at the worst possible time for southern Southland as
we're lambing heavily.
"While our dairy colleagues in Southland have also taken a hit, it's
the region's sheep farmers that are bearing the full force of this
storm."
Mr Nicolson said that while many southern farmers would lose lambs, his
main concern was for the ewes that were yet to lamb.
Because the snow had not thawed quickly and there was now bitterly cold
driving rain, the combination of it a shortage of feed and high energy
demands put additional stress on a ewe's metabolism before labour.
Farmers were trying hard to inject calcium and magnesium as well as
glucose into the animals most susceptible to metabolic illnesses, such
as milk fever caused by a low calcium levels.
"While most farms have good shelters, the sad reality is that there's
little more we can do now but wait for a change in the weather," said
Mr Nicolson, who expects his own stock losses to be as high as 15 per
cent, four times more than the annual average.
"Losing capital stock is never easy to take and it's a blow to see our
improved genetics wasted," he said.
- NZ Herald staff, NZPA