Southland farmers want Fish & Game reprimanded
Southland farmers want the Government to strip Fish & Game of their advocacy function and refocus the organisation on the management of hunting and fishing.
Especially noted was his “environmental investment” in a large wintering-over feed barn now in its third season.
The barn improves animal welfare and pasture health by keeping the herd off the land in the wet winter months. It also allows better control of nitrate leaching. With 380 cows, Overseer nitrogen discharge has been recorded at 10 units per hectare, versus 14/ha from only 320 cows prior to the feed barn.
Fish & Game called that “a fantastic result” and a rate of discharge seen more on a dryland farm than dairy. With no direct animal discharge onto the land in winter, the collected effluent can be discharged onto the land in spring when it is best used in grass growth.
Musson keeps the herd in the barn 24/7 in winter, and uses it to feed supplements year-round. It is popular with the cows -- cool and airy in summer -- and they practically queue for the rotating brush back-scratchers.
A robot sweeps the feeding lanes to pile feed in reach of the cows, and DeLaval scrapers collect the waste for pumping into the 7 million litre effluent pond.
On the day Dairy News visited, Musson was feeding a supplement, largely because recent harvesting “to get on top of our seed heads” had left the grazing a little short.
Overall, however, Musson says the farm is producing more of its own feed because of the lack of winter pugging.
Meanwhile, he is having concrete pads installed in front of his silage bins to also trap the leachate and add it to the effluent pond.
He has also fenced a spring at one corner of his land as a wetland with native and exotic plantings.
Musson’s farm has the Days Road and Powells Road drains on the boundaries, both feeding the LII River which drains into Lake Ellesmere.
Musson is the fourth generation of his family to farm the area, and remembers as a schoolboy when a section of the LII would regularly have about 74 trout redds (spawning beds), but in the past two seasons it has gone down to 13 and then only six.
He is trying to get other farmers in the area “onside” in joint efforts to repair the streams.
