Bird Flu Is Here — What Your Flock Needs From You Now

🌱 This week at Red Ants Farm

A mild, dry week — lovely to be in, but the farmer brain won't switch off.

Funny old week here in Northland — mild, still, and not a drop of rain. After the mud we've had, getting out in the sun without three layers on has been a genuine treat, and the stock have clearly enjoyed it too.

But you know how it goes: you can't fully relax into a nice spell without a corner of your brain doing the sums. A dry patch in the middle of winter has me wondering what spring and summer are going to bring — whether we're in for a dry one, and whether I've got the feed and the grazing plan to handle it if we are. Probably reading too much into one quiet week. But it did send me back into the app to start keeping proper track of the rain, which — handily — ties into what's new below.

Meanwhile I've been keeping half an eye on the bird flu news, same as a lot of you will have been. I'd rather give you the calm, useful version than the panic version, so that leads the issue. Nothing to lose sleep over tonight — just a few simple habits worth getting into now.

🐔 This week's topic

Bird flu has arrived in New Zealand. Here's the plain-English version.

You'll have seen it: for the first time ever, the H5N1 strain of bird flu has been confirmed in New Zealand. It turned up in a couple of wild birds — a seabird found on a Wellington beach on 15 July, and a harrier hawk in the Wairarapa a day or so later. Both were wild birds.

Here's what matters for us, kept honest:

• There are no cases in poultry. Not in commercial flocks, not in backyard ones. So far it's wild birds only.
• Eggs and chicken are completely safe to eat. No change there at all.
• But MPI expects the strain to take hold, which is why it's worth building a few good habits now rather than waiting.

Why it's being taken seriously. This is the same strain that's been hammering flocks overseas for a few years now — not a small thing. The US has spent over a billion dollars compensating farmers for birds lost to it, Germany culled around half a million birds in one recent stretch, and South Korea has had dozens of poultry outbreaks affecting millions of birds. When it gets into a flock, the standard response almost everywhere is to put the whole flock down, because there's no practical treatment. New Zealand has been lucky to stay clear this long, and it's still only in wild birds here — the whole game now is keeping that gap between the wild birds and your hens as wide as we can.

If you keep even a handful of hens, this is the routine MPI is asking of backyard flock owners — and none of it is hard:

• Keep feed and water undercover, where wild birds and their droppings can't get at them. This is the single biggest thing you can do, because wild birds are how it spreads.
• Keep your birds away from wild birds as much as you practically can. Free-range flocks are the highest risk, so if you can limit where they mingle with ducks and gulls, do.
• Be strict on the basics — clean boots, clean gear, clean hands before and after you're with your birds.
• Quarantine any new or returning birds for 14 days before they join the flock. That includes birds coming back from a show or a swap.
• Keep a record of birds coming and going — who arrived, who left, when. (The app does this bit for you.)
• Watch for trouble. If you get three or more birds sick or dead in a group, ring MPI's exotic pest and disease hotline on 0800 80 99 66 with your location and the type of bird.

That's it. Undercover feed, a bit of separation, clean gear, quarantine new arrivals, and know the number. Do those and you've done the sensible thing.

The full, official advice — and the latest on where things are at — lives on the MPI website, which is the source I'd trust over any headline: mpi.govt.nz — bird flu and protecting your birds.

🐑 While you're out there — lambing is coming

A few sheep jobs worth staying on top of this fortnight.

Last issue we talked about condition scoring your ewes and sorting your feed budget before lambing — still the two biggest levers, so if you haven't, that's the job. A few more for the diary as we head into August:

• Look after your twin-bearers especially. Ewes carrying twins need good condition through late pregnancy — it drives lamb birth weight and survival, and twins are where most of the trouble shows up.
• Most lamb losses happen in the first day or two — mismothering, cold, or a lamb that didn't get its colostrum. Sheltered lambing paddocks close to the house make all the difference when you can only check so often.
• Scouring hoggets? Do a FEC before you drench. A thriving animal that's scouring usually isn't wormy, and blanket-drenching just breeds resistance. A quick faecal egg count tells you whether you actually need to.

⭐ From a fellow block owner

Our first named review — and it's a cracker.

Kayleigh, a lifestyle-block owner, sent this through out of the blue, "for you to use," which honestly made my week:

"My Block Hand is the perfect tool for anyone keeping track of their lifestyle block. It's so easy to set up and use. Being able to remove things you don't want to track keeps it from feeling too cluttered, and I just love how visual the map feature is for managing my paddocks. Everyone should definitely give this NZ-made app a go."

— Kayleigh, lifestyle-block owner

That "remove what you don't want to track" bit is exactly what we were going for — your block, set up your way, without a pile of features you'll never use getting in the road. Thank you, Kayleigh.

If My Block Hand has made something on your block easier — big or small — I'd genuinely love to hear it. Just hit reply. Those notes are the best part of my week, and they shape what goes into the app next.

📈 The block is growing

Past 150 of us now.

We've ticked past 150 block owners signed up, with a good chunk back using it every week. For something that started as one bloke fed up with soggy notebooks, that's a proper little community. Thanks for being part of it.

🛠️ What's new in My Block Hand this week

Rain tracking, and two smarter ways to handle your grazing.

A few new bits rolled out this week — and, timing being what it is, they're exactly the ones you'd want heading into a possibly-dry stretch.

🌧 A rain gauge. You can now log your rainfall in the app — just tap in the millimetres for the day. Your Today's Brief shows a running tally for today, the last 7 days, and the month, so instead of guessing whether it's been a dry one you'll actually know. Over a season it quietly builds you a proper rainfall record for your block — the kind of thing you always wish you'd started keeping a year ago.

🌱 Strip grazing (break feeding). For those of you who break-feed a paddock across successive shifts, there's now a one-tap way to handle it. On a paddock your mob is grazing, tap "Moved to next break" each time you shift the fence — it counts your breaks and, on the first shift, starts the rest clock on the grazed ground behind them. Because the paddock rests as you go, the app shows the rest as a range — the leading edge comes ready first, the whole paddock a bit later — so you know exactly when each part's had enough of a spell.

🐄 Graze several paddocks at once. Some seasons you throw the gates open and let one mob roam a few paddocks together. The app now handles that properly: in the Move herd screen you can tick more than one paddock, and they'll all show as occupied by that mob. When you move them on, every paddock in the group starts its rest clock together. No more pretending a mob is in one paddock when they're really across three.

Both grazing tools are about the same thing that matters most in a dry spell — knowing how long your ground's actually been rested, so you can stretch your feed without flogging a paddock too soon.

And on the app stores: My Block Hand is still working its way onto the iOS App Store and Google Play — both in review, and I'll shout the moment you can download it.

🏷️ A quick compliance heads-up

Your next NAIT cattle tags might cost a bit more.

If you run cattle or deer — even one animal — a small heads-up: OSPRI is proposing to lift the NAIT levy on cattle tags (from about 97c to $1.35) to help fund the rebuild of the whole NAIT tracking system. Feedback's open until 23 July. Nothing you have to do today, but if your next bag of tags rings up a touch dearer, that's why. And the usual reminder still stands: if you're in charge of cattle or deer, you need to be registered with NAIT, tag your animals, and record their movements — lifestyle blocks included.

💡 A practical tip

Set up a simple bird-movement note now, before you need it.

With bird flu about, keeping a record of birds coming and going onto your place is suddenly worth doing — and it's the kind of thing that's a pain to reconstruct after the fact. Jot down new arrivals, birds sold or gone, and anything home from a show (with its 14-day quarantine). You can keep it in the app so it's on your phone, not on a scrap of paper in the shed.

💬 A community question

How do you manage your chooks and the wild birds?

Bird flu's got a lot of us thinking about it — so I'm curious how you actually do it on your block. Are your hens fully free-range, in a covered run, somewhere in between? Any clever tricks for keeping the ducks and sparrows out of the feed? Hit reply and tell me. There's a fair chance your setup is exactly what another block owner needs to hear right now.