Autumn chill hits Waikato farmers

The autumn chill arrived in the Waikato overnight as Hamilton city temperatures dropped close to zero and farmers awoke to frost blanketing their paddocks.

The cold snap, which delivered the first frosts of the year, could also lead to farmers drying off their herds up to a month early.

Residents in parts of Hamilton found frost on their car windscreens as the mercury fell to 0.8 degrees Celsius, according to the MetService.

Pirongia dairy farmer Wayne Vernall said he took a sharp breath on heading to milking at 4.45am. "We got a white frost this morning. It was bloody freezing."

His wife, Jackie, had to scrape ice from their ute windscreen before heading out this morning.

In Cambridge, at 6.30am, a car thermometer recorded the temperature as 2C, requiring the motorist to use windscreen wipers to clear a light frost.

It wasn't as cold in Paeroa, where the temperature dropped to 3C overnight; Tokoroa, where the mercury fell to 4C; or Matamata where it fell to 5C.

Kathi Harris, who farms a 90-cow organic herd at Pokuru, said the temperature dropped to 5.3 degrees overnight and she feared continued low temperatures coupled with low rainfall could impact on production. The effect on the farm would be "quite big"."Yesterday we got a brief shower, enough to wet the concrete, but that's the first one for weeks. What these conditions do is slow down the biology in the soil."

Ms Harris said 30 of her cows had dried off of their own accord, but she had begun feeding silage and hay out a few weeks early.

There was a frost at Keith Brawn's Arapuni Rd farm, near Te Awamutu, and he hoped it would kill the facial eczema spores. Fonterra spokesman Tim Deane, Fonterra's general manager of milk supply, said the dairy co-operative had noted a rapid drop in milk production north of Taupo in the past week.

- Wairarapa News