Early drought fears ease in Hawke’s Bay, but caution remains
Fears of a serious early drought in Hawke’s Bay have been allayed – for the moment at least.
A leading farm advisor in the region, MacGillivray told Rural News that the area had some good rain a couple of weeks ago and this varied between 10 and 100mm – with more in the north and less in the south around Waipukurau. He says that gave farmers a nice reprieve because up until then things were starting to look serious.
MacGillivray says at that point, the Rural Advisory Group (RAG), of which he is member, had met and they were going to start communicating to farmers to be aware of potential problems and to start planning mitigation measures.
“So, the rain we had was a relief to everybody but we do need follow-up rain within the next fortnight or things will start to deteriorate.”
MacGillivray says, since last year’s drought, there was some rain in November, which resulted in a good spike for pastures and they have come back. But he says some of the renovated pastures are taking a bit of a hit with native pastures creeping in quite quickly.
“But through January there was little rain and we received 15% of normal rainfall – that’s when we started to worry again,” he told Rural News.
MacGillivray says the good news is that the November rains resulted in quite a feed surplus and the contractors were flat out making hay, baleage and silage. He says feed reserves are right up where they’d want them to be.
“So we are not in the same situation as we were last year.”
MacGillivray believes the supplements made in November will be quite good quality, which is also good. But he says the pastures in the region, at the moment, are average at best and some has got a bit rank without much base to it.
MacGillivray says if there is more rain within the next few weeks, there is a chance that some of the grass underneath this rank pasture will come away.
But adds one final warning, that if this happens, facial eczema may appear and farmers should be aware of this.
