Article Source: The Cattleman
Take comfort those still lamenting the loss to agricultural education of Smedley Station training maestro Terry Walters – he's at it again in the Far North, trying to make a difference to young people's lives.
Walters and wife Judy's work at the Smedley training farm in Central Hawke's Bay was so successful that their decision last year to head nearly 1000km north to work made headlines.
He is now seven months into his new job as general manager of Parengarenga Incorporation, a Maori-owned cattle, sheep and forestry enterprise of 15,000 wind-whipped hectares sandwiched between the Far North's east and west coasts.
He was employed primarily to lift the profitability of the incorporation's 5000ha (effective) livestock operations comprising two big farms, Te Rangi and Paua, plus a scattering of leased blocks, but is showing all the symptoms of another burning itch to help young people.
"The opportunity for Northland is massive, but the biggest opportunity for the Far North is training its people. The biggest value anybody can do for this area and its people is in training," says Walters, who started his working life as a shepherd and managed the venerable Smedley Station training programme for 14 years. He was Smedley's stock manager for six years prior to that.
The Walters' new home and workplace is about as different from Smedley Station as imaginable. But the motivations of this long-married couple haven't changed.
"The main reason for coming here was the challenge. The opportunity to make a difference to people would be the second," says Walters, making coffee at Parengarenga Incorporated's offices in a disused school at Te Kao, a tiny settlement on SH1, about 15 minutes south of Cape Reinga.
The Gisborne-born pair have always had a strong interest in the Far North, he says.
For years they've had a getaway house at Cable Bay and "my Dad has bones buried here".
Aside from its natural resource potential, the Far North's strength is in its people's sense of belonging to the land, Walters says.
But trying to harness that strength among the Far North's iwi with a Smedley-type operation wouldn't work.
"We have to identify and have very clear outcomes for individuals. For example we would need to tailor-make training outcomes to suit different people. There are a number of iwi in Northland and it needs someone to drive collaboration on individual topics."
From the glint in his eye, it's clear Walters believes the 3000-shareholder Parengarenga Incorporation, growing by 80 new young shareholders a year, could be that driver.
"We have 10,000ha of forestry and we have all the arenas to train people."
One of those arenas could be aquaculture.
On Paua farm, which last year was runner-up in the Ahuwhenua Trophy for Maori excellence in sheep and beef competition and borders the picturesque Parengarenga harbour on the east coast, is the infrastructure for fish farming. It's the legacy of a past kingfish farming venture.
Any decision to resurrect it will be up to the incorporation's trustees but Walters sees the potential for Parengarenga to still make a go of aquaculture.
Meanwhile, he's percolating ideas for shearing and fencing training courses, exchange programmes for incorporation employees and shareholders with other North Island farming stations, and developing partnerships for teaching basic life skills like managing personal finance.
The energetic and articulate Walters says he's merely bringing fresh eyes to the job. But he's wasted no time winning support for his change programme to fulfil the incorporation's vision statement to be "a world class business of land and sea, growing our people and communities and shaping the future of the Far North". And he's already being asked to join community leaders in driving regional improvements like lifting residents' water quality.
One of his first jobs was to write a business and development plan for the incorporation's farms. It was supported by the seven trustees and a $900,000 farm capital improvement project for 1280ha has begun. This spend won't cover a fertiliser programme. Some areas of the farms have not been fertilised for many years but this budget will be decided year by year.
Paua and Te Rangi farms share a fenceline and were, until Walters' arrival, run as individual entities.
Now they are treated as one, with interacting livestock policies, though each farm still has its own manager and staffing structure. Staff numbers are unchanged with seven permanent workers on each farm.
From a Walters-led analysis of the business' strengths and weaknesses has emerged a big change to stocking policy for the easy/hill country operation, which has only 280ha of flat land, extremes of soil type from sand to heavy and equally challenging extremes of weather from "winter windy wet and hellishly summer dry". Annual rainfall is about 1400mm but the area can get 300mm of this in one hit, Walters says.
He concluded cattle financial performance was good – 70 per cent of the livestock are cattle including a high percentage of angus breeding cows – but the sheep farming side, uncommon in the Far North, was not as profitable as it should be.
Paua farm runs perendales and Te Rangi romneys.
"We determined we need early, early lambing so we're changing to dual-purpose poll dorset-texel cross.
"To capture the (benefit) of the relatively mild winters here we need a sheep to cycle in December, so we can lamb in June to catch the early lamb trade."
The aim is to lift the gross revenue of both farms from the current $550-560/stock unit/hectare, to $700/ha. Profit per unit at the moment is about $55, though Walters reminds there is a high breeding cow component.
The business plan for the sheep will take five years to implement and will reverse current policy, he says. Most lambs will be weaned by the second week of November for processing, with tailenders sold as stores.
"We're killing around 10 per cent of lambs off mum at the moment, the rest are sold as store. We set the early store market for lambs but want to get away from that. We don't want to be subject to a store market which last year (2015) was all over the place."
The change plan calls for a final tally of 5500 mixed-age ewes, 2000 two-tooth ewes, about 1700 in-lamb hoggets and up to 600 dry sheep.
On the cattle side, the business will end up with 750 July-calving and 600 autumn-calving cows, 350 in-calf heifers and 765 yearling heifers. Paua farm's sand country will host 1275 rising-two-year bulls while 1000 home-bred yearling bulls, acclimatised by birthplace to Northland's challenging pasture, will be run on Te Rangi farm's heavier country.
Autumn-calving cows will go to a charolais bull with the aim of finishing the resulting big calves before their second winter. Heifers will go to a low-birthweight angus bull.
"The plan calls for 1000 bulls to be farmed on Te Rangi and when they hit 12 to 13 months they will go to Paua to be finished at around the 300kg carcassweight. We want to grow them as fast as we can on Paua to be killed in the winter months when the schedule's at its highest. We want all the big cattle gone by December 10-15 when it gets dry."
Walters says the cattle plan is mid-transition with just 60 R2 bulls still on the property.
There's also a new focus on grass and crop types. One reason the business has a high breeding cow count is because of Northland's trademark African grass kikuyu.
"It grows like billyo in the spring and all but shuts down in the winter. Optimum pasture covers on June 1 are 1800kg (dry matter/ha) so it's good quality feed but the challenge is keeping it like that and the master of all topping machines is the breeding cow," Walters says.
He's keen on introducing winter-active clover grasses given that's production peak-season, and says while kikuyu is a strangling plant it has to stay because it's important for some areas.
"Providing it's kept at low covers it actually binds the sand. The sand has evolved on this peninsula through wind. There's silica sand on the east and ordinary sand on the west (it's just 7km from coast to coast) and all the forestry here is planted on sand dunes which move, so we don't want to kill the kikuyu off because the sand will move again."
The plan is to oversow it where applicable.
A direct drill is being purchased.
"If we cultivate this land and we get a weather event all the topsoil goes straight into the harbour. We're aiming for long-term, sustainable land management so I'm happy with direct-drilling, even cross-drilling with a direct drill, and zero till. Then we can pick and choose the pasture species we can handle in this environment," says Walters.
The business made about 600 bales of baleage last year but Walters aims for a third of that in future.
"For breeding cows it's expensive feed. The cost works out at $46 a bale, then there's the lost opportunity cost of shutting land up. As our fertility and fencing develops there will be less need to cut as much baleage. We are going to be gearing up to grow all stock during the winter and cut down to a bare minimum in the summer."
Chicory crops will continue to be grown "strategically" for weaning ewe lambs onto but only using direct-drilling, he says.
"Once it's got to a second and third year it'll be grazed hard and direct-drilled over the top. The chicory will still come through whatever grass we put in. Fescue also grows well here. It's a summer grass but because of the relatively mild winter soil temperature here it doesn't shut down."
That winter soil temperature is 8-9 degrees, compared to Smedley's 3-4 degrees, Walters says.
He's engaged an agronomist to help create the "cocktail" of grass and feed the business needs.
The farms got 20-30mm of rain a month in the last quarter of last year but day after day of evaporating wind almost wiped out any benefit to the soil.
Walters says the ground has been "like concrete" for more than a month, though the wind has a plus: flies don't like it.
"A lot of the sand country won't hold water. And the heavy soils have a rock-hard sand pan. Fencing contractors use tungsten-tipped augers but it can take them 20 minutes to bore a hole."
The development plan includes major water infrastructure improvements and five-wire and two-wire electric fencing and shutting off big scrubby gullies. It also provides for an environmental protection and sustainability programme.
"We get cyclonic weather events. All the water that flows from our land, 95 per cent of it, goes directly into the harbour. The plan is to mitigate the run-off of nutrients. They had already started this, we're just ramping it up," says Walters.
Other new experiences for Walters are Northland's infamous livestock ticks and an internal parasite problem exacerbated by mild winters and no frosts.
"Sheep worms get to stage three larvae probably year-round here."
Freight costs and isolation are also challenges, says Walters. Te Kao is more than six hours north of Auckland and 80km from Kaitaia. The distances turn simple tasks like getting a tractor tyre fixed into a major mission. One of his innovations is a big machinery workshop with its own internally-promoted manager.
A big wrench for the couple has been separation from two daughters and two grandchildren still in Central Hawke's Bay. To this problem Walters is applying his trademark steely focus, resolving to "get better" at managing that situation.
Meanwhile he says the couple are enjoying their very different new life – and the fishing - and he's forever grateful for a wife who is "happy in her own skin".