How Much Water Does Your Block Actually Drink?

🌱 This week at Red Ants Farm

The best part of the egg numbers wasn't mine — it was yours.

Last Monday I posted August's cost per egg — the second instalment of a thing I started in July mostly to embarrass myself into paying attention. July's number was ugly. August's had a direction to it, and the direction is the interesting part: one month is a number, two is a line, and a line tells you whether what you changed worked.

But the best part wasn't my number. It was yours. Seeing other people post screenshots of their own egg figures was the highlight of my week — some of you are running rings around me, and a couple were honest enough to post a bad month in public, which I know isn't nothing. I want to keep this going every month and see where the line takes all of us.

There were also more useful tips in those threads than I could keep up with, and I mean that literally — I didn't get back to everyone, and I'm sorry. It got away on me. If you asked me something and got silence, it wasn't deliberate; send it again and I'll answer properly.

A run of posts in block-owner groups on both sides of the Tasman also brought a lot of new people through the door — the busiest week this project has had, by a distance. Welcome, and hello in particular to the Australians, who arrived in numbers I wasn't expecting.

That's changed how I write this, and I'd rather say so than pretend otherwise. The Bulletin has been a New Zealand newsletter because I farm in Northland and that's what I know. So from this week there's a news block covering both countries, and I've picked a topic that doesn't care which side of the ditch you're on.

💧 This week's topic

Water is the only input on a block that you never think about until the day it fails — and it fails in January.

Feed you notice. Fences you notice. Water sits in a trough being boringly reliable for eleven months, and then one hot Saturday you find twenty sheep round a dry concrete bowl and a ballcock that's been half-seized since autumn.

It's a September job because everything that makes water easy to fix is available now and gone by December. The ground is soft, so a leak shows as a wet patch. Demand is low, so you can run a trough dry on purpose without anyone suffering for it. And you've got time, which you won't have when the grass browns off.

Start with the number, because it's bigger than you think

Agriculture Victoria publishes a stock water table — Australian figures, but the arithmetic travels, and if anything a Victorian summer is the harder test. Litres per animal per day:

Now do your own block. Twenty ewes with lambs, two dry cattle and one horse is 280 + 224 + 49 = 553 litres on a summer's day. More than half a tonne of water, every day, quietly, through a pipe you've never inspected.

Most people guess low by a factor of three, and it's the single most useful thing on this page.

Two things push it higher, and Agriculture Victoria names both: stock drink more on dry feed than on green pasture — so demand climbs exactly when supply gets harder — and they drink more if the water is salty, which matters if you're on a bore.

Now the bit almost everyone gets wrong: it isn't the size of the trough

A trough is a buffer, not a supply. What matters is how fast it refills, because stock don't drink evenly through the day — they come as a mob, usually late afternoon, and they drink hard.

Twenty ewes with lambs arriving at a forty-litre trough will flatten it in minutes. After that, everyone is drinking at whatever rate the pipe delivers — and the ones still waiting are the lowest in the pecking order: the smallest, the shyest, the ones you'd most want getting a decent drink.

That's the failure mode nobody sees, because it doesn't look like one. The trough is never empty when you walk past at nine in the morning. There's just a lamb not growing as well as its twin, for reasons you'll put down to something else.

Four checks, twenty minutes, this month

1. Time a refill. Empty the trough and time how long it takes to come back. That's your real supply rate, and "quite a while" is worth knowing before Christmas rather than after.
2. Work the ballcock by hand. They seize, they stick half-open, they drip — all three cheap in September and expensive in February.
3. Walk the line. Soft ground shows a leak as a green stripe or a soggy patch while everything else dries. In January the same leak is invisible and has been running for weeks.
4. Count your days of storage. If the supply failed today, how many days would the tank cover at the number above? Thirty seconds, and it changes what you do next.

While you're there: scrub the algae out before the water warms up, and note any trough in full sun. Warm water gets drunk less, and the fix is a tree or a shift — neither a January job.

And yes, the forecast is part of why I'm saying this now

Forecasters either side of the Tasman are watching the same thing: an El Niño in the tropical Pacific that the models expect to strengthen through spring and peak over the 2026–27 summer.

Be careful what you do with that, and I'd rather under-claim than scare you. A strong signal out in the Pacific does not automatically mean a strong impact at your gate — El Niño is one driver among several, and its influence on summer rainfall is not something anyone can pin down from here. The broad New Zealand pattern is drier in the east, wetter on the West Coast, and windier generally. For Australia, the honest answer in early September is that it's too early to call the summer.

So this isn't "a drought is coming". It's: the odds of a hard summer are higher than usual, being ready costs twenty minutes, and not being ready costs you carting water.

📲 And where the app fits

Water is a job, not a feature.

So the honest version is small: put the trough check in as a recurring job so it comes back around through summer instead of relying on you remembering, and log the rainfall while you're at it. The value of a rainfall record is entirely retrospective — next February, "is this drier than last year?" is either a number or an argument with yourself. My Block Hand holds both, and the reminder is the half that changes behaviour.

📰 This fortnight, both sides of the Tasman

Bird flu and traceability news for New Zealand and Australia.

🇳🇿 NZ — bird flu: still no detections in poultry. MPI confirmed the first H5 detection on 15 July, in a wild ocean-going seabird; detections since have been in wild seabirds and raptors, and MPI's advice page — last reviewed 25 August — still states no detections in poultry. July's new regulations will cover operators with more than 100 birds, so almost nobody here is caught. The backyard advice is worth five minutes: bird-proof the run, keep birds off water wild birds use, stop feeding wild birds and take down the bird bath, quarantine any new bird 14 days, and keep a register of birds coming and going. Three or more sick or dead wild birds: 0800 80 99 66.

🇳🇿 NZ — NAIT levies rose 1 September. Cattle and deer tags to $1.35, slaughter levy to $1.91 (ex GST). Movements still need recording within 48 hours — one pet cow the same as a hundred.

🇦🇺 Australia — a bigger story than ours, and I'd want to know. Per Animal Health Australia's threat update of 3 September: since the first H5 detections in WA wild seabirds in June, the virus has been found in wild birds in Victoria, WA, South Australia, NSW, Queensland and Tasmania. South Australia has had mass mortality events in wild birds and detections in a small number of wild mammals — genetic testing so far shows no sign it has adapted to spread more easily in mammals. Still no detections in Australian poultry, and human health risk is described as low. The line that matters for planning: H5 is now expected to be an ongoing wildlife disease needing long-term management, not a short event to be eradicated.

🇦🇺 Victorians, check whether you're covered: the state has extended temporary poultry housing requirements in higher-risk coastal and southern areas, for flocks of 50 or more birds, until at least 18 September — agriculture.vic.gov.au/birdflu. Multiple sick or dead birds anywhere in Australia: don't touch, photograph if safe, ring 1800 675 888.

🛠️ What's new

Version 1.4.6 is live on the App Store and Google Play.

Phones don't always update themselves, so it's worth a look. Three things in it:

• Today's Brief stopped chopping the ends off its own numbers. On narrower phones the tiles were clipping at the right edge, so an egg count or cost-per-egg figure could lose a digit — with no way to scroll across and see it. Fixed.
• Pounds, inches and acres, if you want them. Settings → Units switches weights, rainfall and pasture cover out of metric. Paddock sizes deliberately don't move — each one already carries the unit you chose for it.
• NAIT movements now offer you a reminder (New Zealand only), landing the day after the move rather than on the 48-hour deadline. My Block Hand doesn't submit anything to OSPRI; it keeps the record and reminds you.

And a new Farm Guide: docking, castrating and tagging lambs — free to read, no account needed. Eight guides now at myblockhand.com/guides.

🔜 Still coming: a block biosecurity checklist with a 14-day quarantine countdown · a vet-ready PDF of an animal's treatment history · a NAIT-friendly movement log you can export · a proper Help Centre with screenshots for every section.

🗓️ On the block this month — spring

Written from Northland, but we're all in the same hemisphere.

Most of it travels; the dates shift.

• Do the water jobs above. Top of the list for a reason.
• Broody season. If you're letting a hen hatch, decide now where chicks and any incoming birds live for their fortnight apart — deciding that at the gate never goes well. Walk the run with a staple gun while you're thinking about it.
• Growth is accelerating. A rotation left on its winter setting a fortnight too long is how spring gets away on you. Watch the paddock, not the calendar.
• Lambs: docking and tagging want doing young, and the flystrike clock starts in earnest from here. If the first clostridial shot is done, the booster is the one that gets forgotten.
• Windy spring: walk the fence lines before the first decent blow, not after.
• Buying or selling stock? This is the month it starts — some of us offloading before summer, some of us buying to eat the spring flush. Next week I'm looking at what else can come home on the trailer besides the animals, so if you've got lambs or calves arriving, hold off mixing them with your mob until you've read it.

💡 A practical tip

Write your daily water number on the tank.

Not in a notebook — on the tank, in permanent marker, with the date. "553 L/day, summer."

It does two things. It turns an abstract worry into a sum you can do at a glance: look at the level, divide, and you know how many days you've got rather than how many you feel like you've got. And when you add stock next season, the number is sitting there being wrong at you — the only reliable way I know of getting a figure updated.

The best farm records are the ones physically in the way. Everything else needs remembering.