Condition of cows sparks row

KELLY HODEL/Waikato Times

GREENER PASTURES: Hamilton farmer Gavin Shewan has been fattening up boner cows for 40 years and says there was nothing wrong with the thin cows sold at Morrinsville saleyard last month.

Relevant offers

Hamilton farmer Gavin Shewan has defended the sale of seriously emaciated cows at Morrinsville saleyard last month.

The Agriculture and Forestry Ministry and the SPCA began investigations after Waikato Times Farmer columnist Clive Dalton, a retired agricultural scientist and former Wintec lecturer, photographed cows which he said were at best Body Condition Score 2.

"By law the vendor should not have offered them for sale, the saleyards should not have accepted them, and the auctioneer should not have sold them. They should have been sent home."

Both Sue Macky, director of Dairy Production Systems, and Greg McNeil, manager of the Te Awamutu branch of VetEnt, said over-estimating condition scores and using herd averages was to blame.

But Mr Shewan, who attended the sale, said while he did not know how to condition score, he nearly always knew if a cow was healthy enough to be transported. He thought the animals photographed were healthy enough.

Mr Shewan said Dr Dalton's suggestion that the cows should have been sent home would increase stress and disagreed with DairyNZ senior scientist Dr Gwyn Verkerk, who said cows with a condition score under 2.5 should not be transported and be destroyed on-farm.

"To suggest that is totally outrageous nonsense," he said. "For the last 40 years my sole farming business has been buying cows like the ones pictured and fattening them for the export market. Had these particular cows been of more percentage friesian based as opposed to jersey, I almost certainly would have bought them and turned them into good fat cows. I purchased some of Clive Dalton's so-called `poor sods' in adjacent pens and am confident of successfully fattening them."

Mr Shewan said such cows cost between $300 and $400 per head and, depending on the exchange rate, he could make up to $250 on them.

"Most of the cows, other than those bought by myself or other graziers, go to the abattoirs immediately after the sale and have value in the lean grinding beef markets in the US and Asia."

Mr Shewan said huge numbers of cows across the Waikato, and probably most of New Zealand, had come through a colder than normal spring and there had been a lack of grass growth until about six weeks ago.

"The cows pictured are thin, but not extremely so, and the obvious reason for selling them at the sale would have been to lighten the load on the farm concerned, so the rest of the stock could be provided with adequate feed." Hamilton farm consultant Vaughan Jones said the problem was not ignorance of condition scoring, but overstocking. Every farmer knew when a cow was thin, regardless of his or her knowledge of condition scoring.

"The problem is common with thousands of thin cows in the Waikato, caused by the bureaucrats at Ruakura, DairyNZ and LIC, chasing production per hectare rather than profit per farm," Mr Jones said.

"Too many Waikato dairy farmers are milking too many cows, causing many to be thin all year, which is a dead loss."

Mr Jones' website, grazinginfo.com, offers software to help.

"Following the wet cold October, then the dry cold November, I had a client cull the lowest producing 5 per cent after which milk production increased within days and the money from the culls paid debts. The remainder of the herd were then not starved, so produced more and stopped getting thin."

- © Fairfax NZ News