You Bought Five Lambs. What Else Did You Buy?

🌱 This week at Red Ants Farm

Wet, but you can feel the temperature coming up.

Everything's moving again — the growth is properly away now.

The bit I always forget to enjoy: the days are finally long enough to get a few odd jobs done after work, rather than just walking round with a torch checking nothing's gone wrong. That's the real turn of the season for anyone who farms either side of a job.

I'm still feeding a little, which is the thing I'd most like to stop. Not because the animals need it exactly, but because the slow paddocks haven't caught up yet and a bit of feed is the cheapest way to keep stock off them long enough to let them get going. Feeding to protect the pasture rather than to feed the animal — hopefully not for much longer.

Which is roughly where this week's topic comes from. This is the month the grass either gets ahead of you or doesn't, and either way it tends to end with animals going on or off the place.

🚚 This week's topic

Two opposite problems, and they both put livestock on the road in September.

Block A has lambs and calves on the ground. Numbers have jumped, the grass is good right now — but summer might not be, and nobody wants to carry surplus mouths into a dry January. So they sell.

Block B sold before winter, or came through lightly stocked. Now the spring flush is getting away on them and there's more grass than animals. Buying a few store lambs or weaner calves looks like a tidy way to use it.

Both are sensible. And between them, this is the month animals change hands.

So here's the turn, and it's the whole issue:

Worms — including worms carrying drench resistance you don't currently have. Lice or mites. Foot problems. An unknown vaccination history. Something respiratory that wasn't showing on the day. A treatment history nobody wrote down.

And this matters more on a small block, not less. Five sheep on ten acres have nowhere to be kept apart by accident. There is no far paddock. Whatever comes in is shared within days.

1. The cheapest time to investigate an animal's health history is before you own it.

Where have they been? What have they been vaccinated for, and was the course finished? When were they last drenched, and with which product — the active, not the brand? Any lameness, scouring or lice in the mob? Has the property ever tested for drench resistance?

Most sellers on our end of the market are straight-up people who'll answer happily. A vendor who has kept good records is usually pleased to be asked. One who can't answer anything has also told you something.

2. The paperwork catches lifestyle blocks out, and not in the way you'd think.

In New Zealand, most people know cattle and deer mean NAIT — register, tag, record movements within 48 hours, even for one pet cow. Fewer people know that sheep and goats need an Animal Status Declaration when they move between properties with a different person in charge. Sheep aren't NAIT animals, which a lot of people hear as "sheep have no paperwork". They do; it's just a different form.

And for the Australians: the bit that surprises new owners is that on a private sale, the buyer records the movement, not the seller — within 48 hours of the stock arriving, on the NLIS database. The obligation lands on the person who just bought. Same number as our NAIT window, oddly enough.

3. And the one almost everyone gets backwards.

Say you've done everything right: asked the questions, treated them on your vet's advice, held them off pasture for a day or two. Now, where do you put them?

Instinct says the clean paddock. The good grass. They're new, they've had a rough trip, give them the best you've got.

That is the one thing you should not do — and both countries' worm programmes say so independently. New Zealand's Wormwise and Australia's WormBoss are separate outfits with different climates and different products behind them, and they land on the same advice: after a quarantine treatment, put new stock on your dirtiest ground, not your cleanest.

The reason is worth ten seconds. A drench kills worms, but not the eggs already laid — so treated animals keep passing eggs for a day or more. Any worm that survived the treatment is, by definition, a resistant one. Put them on a clean paddock and the only worms seeding that ground are the resistant survivors: you've made a pure population of exactly what you were trying to keep out, on your best grass. Put them somewhere your own stock have been grazing and those survivors are swamped by the ordinary, drench-susceptible worms already living there.

Dilution, not hygiene. It feels wrong and it's right.

The full version, including the questions to ask, how long to keep them separate and both countries' paperwork, is in the new guide: Buying and quarantining new livestock — free to read, no account needed.

📲 And where the app fits

The date nobody records is the one you'll be asked for.

Everything above produces a fact you'll want in six months and won't remember: where they came from, what you gave them, which product, whether a booster is still owing, and — the one nobody records — the date they joined the rest of the mob. If something turns up later, that date is the first question asked and the hardest to reconstruct. My Block Hand keeps it on the animal's own record, and the end of the separation period can be a reminder that comes and finds you rather than a fortnight you're supposed to be counting in your head.

📰 Both sides of the Tasman

Poultry thresholds, bird flu, and a Victorian housing order still running.

🇳🇿 NZ — the poultry biosecurity grant closes 30 September. Up to 50% of eligible biosecurity costs, capped at $25,000 + GST, for operators under 100,000 birds, covering work done since 28 July. Almost nobody reading this will qualify — it's aimed at commercial operations. It's here because two poultry thresholds are in the news at once and it's worth knowing which side of each you're on: the grant is for operators under 100,000 birds, and the written biosecurity programme becomes mandatory above 100 birds once the regulations are finalised, expected by the end of 2026. A dozen hens, and neither applies to you.

🇳🇿 NZ — bird flu: a handful of detections, all in wild seabirds, none in poultry. That position hasn't changed. The backyard advice still holds: bird-proof the run, keep birds off water wild birds use, stop feeding wild birds, quarantine any new bird 14 days, and keep a note of birds coming and going. Three or more sick or dead wild birds together: 0800 80 99 66.

🇦🇺 Victoria — the housing requirement is still on. Flocks of 50 or more birds in the listed coastal and southern shires must house or confine them, in place until at least 18 September and reviewed on disease activity. Outside those LGAs it's recommended, not required. Check agriculture.vic.gov.au/birdflu for your shire. Multiple sick or dead birds anywhere in Australia: 1800 675 888.

🛠️ What's new

Saving now tells you it saved — and four other things.

• Saving now tells you it saved. The Save button says Saving… → Saved ✓, and if a save can't reach your account the form stays open instead of closing as though it worked. That second one was the important fix — a save that silently didn't happen is the worst kind of bug in a records app.
• Confirmations stopped hiding behind the Save bar. The little confirmation messages were painting underneath the pinned Save bar in most dialogs, including every delete. If you've ever deleted something and wondered whether it took, that's why.
• Quick capture moved to the top of Today's Brief, and gained + Break — moving stock to the next break was four taps, now it's two: tap + Break, tap the paddock. The list shows only paddocks with stock in them.
• A cut now resets the paddock's rest clock. Take baleage or hay off a paddock and the rest days start again from the cut, which is what actually happened to the grass.
• Three new Farm Guides, free to read: chicken feed and nutrition, stock water requirements and buying and quarantining new livestock. That's eleven now at myblockhand.com/guides.html.

🔜 Still coming: a block biosecurity checklist with a quarantine countdown · a vet-ready PDF of an animal's treatment history · a NAIT-friendly movement log you can export · more poultry guides.

🗓️ On the block this month — spring

Written from Northland; most of it travels, the dates shift.

• Buying or selling? See above. Have the spare paddock sorted before the trailer arrives, not while it's backing up.
• The feed-to-protect-pasture call. If you're still feeding a little to keep stock off slow paddocks, that's a real strategy, not a failure — just know which paddocks you're protecting and check them weekly, because the moment they're away you want to stop.
• Watch the round, not the calendar. Growth is accelerating and a rotation left on its winter setting a fortnight too long is how spring gets away on you.
• Lambs: docking and tagging want doing young, and the flystrike clock is starting. If the first clostridial shot is done, the booster is the one that gets forgotten.
• Chooks: broody season. Anything new joining the flock gets its fortnight apart — same principle as the sheep, smaller scale.
• Water: if you didn't do the trough checks after last week's issue, they're still a twenty-minute job and still much easier now than in January. The full version is in our guide to stock water requirements.

💡 A practical tip

Write the arrival date on the animal's record before you put the kettle on.

Not the evening. Not "I'll do it when I've unloaded". The gap between the trailer arriving and the job being written down is where almost every missing record on a small block comes from — you're busy, they're moving, and by the time you sit down it's tomorrow.

Three things take ten seconds each: the date, where they came from, and the date the separation period ends. Everything else can be filled in later, and will be. Those three can't, because in three months they're a guess dressed up as a memory.