David Bramley and Susan Wylie are proud and passionate Finley cross breed ewe farmers, but they fear the future of farming in the Southern Riverina isn’t viable.
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The couple are moving to Dannevirke on the south east side of the New Zealand’s north island about three hours from Wellington.
The town has about 3500 people and is considered a ‘‘very good farming area’’, especially dairy.
Ms Wylie, 44, has a connection to Dannevirke with her father farming there for nearly 70 years.
The decision to move wasn’t easy for 48 year-old Mr Bramley who has lived on his Finley property his whole life.
‘‘I don’t want to go because I grew up here and I like it,’’ he said.
‘‘But if Susan and I want to run a prime lamb operation, the way I see it, it is becoming impossible to do with little to no water.
‘‘I had to make the tough the decision and I’m prepared to go and make the most out of it.
‘‘We have a good farm, though it does need a lot of work with new sheep shed and fencing.
‘‘Susan already has a lot of contacts over there because she showed cattle with her neighbours when she was younger.’’
Mr Bramley said there have been too many times in the past 20 years with zero water to run a successful farm.
‘‘Between 2002 and 2010 we had 2500 cross bred ewes and would fed them for 18 months.
‘‘Costs were getting right out of hand so we de-stocked and eventually in 2012 we re-stocked again but only went to 1500 ewes because of the risk having too many.
‘‘We carried them through until July last year and then de-stocked again because once again that risk of carrying too many when we get to March this year with no water or feed.
‘‘The way I see it, and other farmers have their views, but in my opinion it’s a combination of factors as to why we’re getting no water.
‘‘I’m no expert but it’s a combination of government water policy, water trade which has been a bad thing, carry over and the dry years. It’s not just one reason for leaving but multiple factors and getting to a stage where we don’t feel we can run a successful livestock operation here.
‘‘Susan and I want to run a successful operation. Susan lives and breathes it and it’s what she wants to do for her whole life.’’
Because of the ongoing water problems on the Finley farm, grain crops were being used to feed the sheep.
Although Mr Bramley has some issues with leaving, the farmland he and Ms Wylie have purchased is economical for his ewes compared to Australia.
‘‘We’ve purchased 750 acres with ‘easy to medium’ hill with a rainfall of 1200mm to 1300mm,’’ he said.
‘‘The price was the equivalent to selling 1100 acres of irrigation land here in Finley and 600 megalitres (ml) of water. It’s virtually green 10 months of the years in New Zealand.
‘‘From my experience I can feed two lambs off one megalitre of water.
‘‘I’m using 600ml of water for 1200 prime lambs at 50kg live weight but I need to grow grain on the rest of the farm. We’re using that grain from January to March so we can’t turn anything off.
‘‘The issue we’ve faced in Finley is I don’t get to use that 600 megalitres of water; over the next 10 to 20 years I might only be able to use 50 per cent of that, based on the previous 20 years.
‘‘That means I might only have 300ml of water so I will only have 600 lambs; that’s not viable. This year we had zero allocation so we’ve had nothing.’’
The plan is to have 3000 ewes on the farm, selling 2500 lambs, keeping the 500 replacements and run about 100 head of cattle. That is just on a minimal low cost grassing feed operation.
Mr Bramley added New Zealand has higher lambing percentages.
‘‘They can lamb at about 150 per cent because the climate seems to allow that, whereas over here the climate is quite harsh. If we can get 120 per cent in Australia we’re doing pretty good.’’
A few years ago Ms Wylie brought some Suffolk ewes to Australia from Dannevirke.
To keep the gene line continuing, the ewes’ offspring will be shipped back to their original homeland.
Ms Wylie said there are some differences between Australian and New Zealand irrigating.
‘‘They do irrigate but that’s usually in the dairy and horticulture; they are the ones that really use a lot of the water,’’ she said.
‘‘We just rely on rainfall with our grazing so we won’t need to irrigate. In Finley we get close to 350mm per year.
‘‘Some parts of New Zealand like the south west coast of the south island, you will see nearly 2400mm of rain but other parts a lot less. New Zealand doesn’t have dry years, they classify it as a dry month.’’