π± This week at Red Ants Farm
378 eggs in September, and the itch to sow.
The September egg numbers are in. 378 eggs for the month, up from 236 in August, and each one cost me about 45 cents to produce, down from 60. Feed went up, but the girls more than made up for it. Spring does that.
The other thing that happened this week: I emailed twenty of you and asked what's hard about keeping records on your block. The answers were honest, and they changed what got built. More on that under What's New.
And the paddocks. After the winter we've had, I can see exactly where the pugging was and where the weeds have moved into the gaps. Every year the itch is the same: get some seed on it now. Every year in Northland the answer is the same too. Not yet.
πΎ This week's topic
Oversowing: why we wait for autumn.
Here's the short version. In Northland we tend not to oversow in spring. There's a real risk of a dry summer, and young grass plants may not survive it. Best practice is to sow in autumn, which gives the seedlings the whole wet season to get established before they face their first summer.
Why it matters. A new grass seedling is small, shallow-rooted and has no reserves. Sown in spring, it has a few months before summer, which is fine in a wet year. In a dry one it dies while the established grass and weeds around it, with deeper roots, carry on. Sown in autumn, it has most of a year. That's why DairyNZ's advice for pasture renewal north of TaupΕ is to aim to have sowing done by the end of March, and the kikuyu guide from DairyNZ and the Northland Dairy Development Trust puts April as the most reliable month to sow ryegrass into kikuyu.
There's a Northland pest in it too. Black beetle larvae do their worst damage from December to March, worst of all in dry summers, and a spring-sown pasture meets them when it's at its weakest.
If you farm somewhere with reliably wet summers, such as Southland, the West Coast or irrigated land, spring sowing is common. The drier and warmer your summers, the more autumn wins.
πΆ The four spring jobs that decide whether autumn works
1. Walk the paddocks and pick the candidates. Sort them roughly: mostly fine (look after it through summer, top it up in autumn), parts badly damaged, or the whole paddock gone (a full renewal, not a top-up). Note where the gaps are, what's growing in them, and why it thinned out. If you don't fix the cause, the new seed goes the same way.
2. Test the soil before you buy seed. If clover is part of the plan, Beef + Lamb NZ gives the levels it needs as pH above 5.5, Olsen P above 15 and sulphate-sulphur above 8. Lime is slow. Put it on this spring and it's had months to work by sowing time.
3. Deal with the weeds, and watch the kikuyu. Get thistles and ragwort before they set seed, and don't let long summer rotations hand the paddock to kikuyu and paspalum. In kikuyu country, pick the paddocks you'll sow into from January and keep them grazed or mown down hard.
4. Choose the seed and book the drill. In the upper North Island, ask about the endophyte (DairyNZ recommends AR37, NEA2 or NEA4 here because of black beetle and Argentine stem weevil) and whether the seed is insecticide-treated. Then get on a contractor's list for March or April.
The one exception. If a paddock is too far gone to leave bare until autumn, DairyNZ's approach isn't to sow pasture now and hope. It's to protect the ground with a summer crop and put the permanent pasture in when the timing's right. If you do sow grass this spring anyway, sow the smallest area that solves the problem and be ready to water it.
π The full guide
There was more than fits in an email.
The words (oversow vs undersow, which matters when you read advice), the autumn sowing itself and the first grazing are all in this week's Farm Guide: Oversowing pasture: why Northland waits for autumn. Free to read, no account needed.
π² And where the app fits
Pasture work runs on a long clock.
You walk the paddock in September, test in October, spray in summer, sow in April, and find out the following summer whether it worked. By then the details are gone unless you wrote them down. In My Block Hand each paddock has its own pasture notes and grazing history, so why you picked it and what went on sit with the paddock. Add a paddock job for the soil test and another for sowing in autumn, and the app brings each one back round when it's due.
π οΈ What's new
Built from your replies.
Last week I asked twenty of you what's hard. Here's what got built from the answers.
- Recording a birth is where you'd expect it. A couple of you, and I'll admit me too, ticked "Lambing" on a ewe's timeline thinking it recorded the lambs. It didn't. Now the Lambing (or Calving, or Kidding) milestone opens the birth form, and recording the young ticks it off by itself. From a week before a ewe's due date, the app asks "Has Princess lambed?" on her profile and on Today's Brief, so she doesn't get forgotten.
- An egg calendar. Flocks β Egg records now shows the month day by day, so a missed day stands out. Tap a day to see what was recorded and add to it.
- Broken or eaten eggs. Count them separately in the egg form, or tick "Also count broken or eaten eggs" in quick entry. They're kept out of your egg totals and your cost per egg.
- Sold & died, findable. The Animals screen now shows a "Sold & died" list. If one was recorded by mistake, open it and tap Return to herd. Its history is kept.
- An evening reminder, if you want one. Pick a time (6pm unless you change it) and you'll get one notification on days something's still open, like eggs not logged or a job due. Quiet days stay quiet. Turn it on in Settings β Evening reminder.
- Fixed: after the clocks went forward, "days ago" and paddock rest days were counting one day short. They're right again.
π Still coming: a feed planner (how many days of feed you've got left at your usual rate) Β· lamb care jobs that land on the lambs rather than the ewe Β· a block biosecurity checklist.
ποΈ On the block β October
Written from Northland; most of it travels, the dates shift with you.
- Lambs and kids: tailing and castration done? The clostridial booster is the one that gets forgotten. Put a date on it.
- Pasture: growth is running ahead of stock on most blocks. Decide which paddocks you're shutting up for hay or silage, and walk the rest for the autumn list above.
- Ticks: still about. Keep checking young stock at the tail, udder, inside the back legs and ears.
- Chooks: peak laying, and peak broodiness. Collect eggs often, and keep feed in something with a lid.
- Flies: the warm, humid days are coming. Crutching booked? Flystrike is next week's Bulletin.
- Water: check troughs and tanks before the first properly hot week, not during it.
π‘ A practical tip
Photograph the paddock from the gate.
While the winter damage is obvious, stand at each paddock gate and take one photo looking in. Same spot, same direction. It takes a minute a paddock.
In April, when you're deciding where the seed goes, the thin patches will have grown over with weeds and summer grass and you'll have forgotten which ones were bad. The photo hasn't. Take another from the same spot a year after sowing and you'll know whether it was worth it.
π¬ A community question
Have you ever sown seed in spring that didn't make it through summer?
Or the opposite: sown in spring and had it take beautifully? I'd like to hear where you are and how it went. If your summers are wetter than ours, I suspect the answer is different. If you get the Bulletin by email, just hit reply. I read every one, and I'll share what comes back in a future issue.