Omakere Storm Recovery

John and Sue Nation’s farm in Central Hawkes Bay was hammered by a highly localised and devastating storm in late April 2011. In less than 24 hours the property suffered a 4.5 earthquake and 530 millimetres of rain. The couple were forced to evacuate the farm. Six months on, we pay them a visit to find out how they are managing.

The property is 450ha. For the past 16 years John and Sue Nation have been running dry cattle and breeding ewes.  Over the last few years ewe numbers have been reduced, due to droughts.

2010 700 Rising 2 steers & heifers

200 breeding ewes

2011 300 R 2 steers & heifers

180 breeding ewes

Normally the property is summer dry coastal country but Sue Nation says the seasons are now very unpredictable.

The soil is “clay” base mix of Te Mata Sandy loam, Otane Silt loam and Mangatarata Silt Loam.

The average annual rainfall is around 1000mls – 1250mls. By September 1 thie year (2011) they had already had 1000mls with-another four months to go!

John is the 3rd generation of his family to be farming at Punawaitai. He’s been farming 40 years – thru thick and thin (and reckons he’s getting thinner!).

Sue is from further inland – on flat to rolling hills of a Romney sheep stud and cattle fattening, horses and cropping property.

The couple have 4 adult children and 7.5 grand children.

In such a challenging environment, diversification has been a necessity. In 1972 they established on farm holiday accommodation that is still going well today, with summer bookings full till 2016.

In 1979 they put in a 10acre citrus /feijoa orchard. The orchard was certified Biogro organic in 2001. But the couple pulled out in 2010. Sue made the comment that “it wasn’t economic to feed people for nothing”.

The couple have also subdivided sections for Holiday homes. They currently have 3 sections available “above the tsunami line”.

2009 August laid the concrete pad for the Green Feed Fodder factory. In Feb 2010 their first crop was ready to be harvested. Fortunately this side of the business was largely unaffected by the storm.

The product is sprouted barley and is said to be “the most nutritious food on earth”. The concept originated in Australia as a drought spin-off and has taken off there.

Sue says that in New Zealand (although relatively new) it’s being used on horse breeding farms, on milking goat farms and even on a sheep and cattle farm near Timaru.

The barley is sprouted in a greenhouse using a hydroponic growing system. It is estimated one tonne of barley can be converted to eight tonnes of grass in seven or eight days.

Sue says the Roman army marched across Europe on this kind of feed, and both horses and men were fed on it during the WW1 .

The decision to get into yet another diversification came after four successive droughts. Sue said they needed to think outside the square and come up with a way to feed livestock. The Nation’s green feed factory was purchased from a business in Dannevirke (which had gone into receivership). Sue says the major challenge running this operation is having to learn as they progressed – since there was little information available from the supplier.

The Nations use this system not as a replacement for grass, but as a supplement. Although it was originally designed to help out during times of drought, the system came into its own after the flood, when fresh pasture was hard to come by.

The Green Feed Shed is 22m x 9m produces approximately 2.5 tonnes of feed each day. They sow approximately 750g of seed to produce an average of 5.8 – 6.5kg (sprouted). They can get a slab of fresh green feed from seed in 8 days.  The harvested green feed needs to be fed out with grass or hay or straw to ensure the stock has sufficient fibre in their diet. The feed is not intended for an indoor feed-lot type system.

Sue says there is no bacterial gut “down time” between eating a sprouted barley diet and going back onto straight grass diet. She says the reason for this is that the digestive enzymes in the animal’s gut do not need to adjust as they do when switching on and off a chow, beet or fodder crop.

The Nations grow the green feed fodder to sell to others wishing to finish, fatten animals for show, sale, production increase/fertility, or slaughter. Sue says it is suitable for all animals and can be fed to cattle, sheep, dairy, horses, pigs, chooks, rabbits and alpaca. It can also be used in calf rearing.

The Nations seel to a local Aberdeen Angus stud that uses the fodder for bull finishing for sale and priming for the mating season.

They are also running a wagyu fattening trial using the sprouted barley.

They are still exploring human consumption in the catering/ restuarant and drying/powdered areas.

The Storm 26/27 April 2011 :  after a 4.5 earthquake and 530 millimetres of rain in 15 hours, the Nations reckoned they felt like they’d been in a front load washing machine. They ended up having to evacuate their home at 6.30am as they were rapidly being surrounded by fast rising water.

The Nation’s family home, between two streams, was saved by mere centimetres as flood waters lapped at the doorstep, but the garage, swimming pool and tennis court ended up beneath metres of mud.

Since the flood Sue Nation says, “You dig deep, put your boots back on and look for the opportunities presented.”  The couple say life is certainly different now. The first 3 months were gruelling, with many major decisions having to be made.

Sue says for the first month they felt like stunned mullets as each day presented another lot of issues and decisions that needed to be made (planning was done on bits of paper scribbled on in the middle of the night as there was no time, or peace and quiet during the day).

The couple say one of the hardest things was seeing a new mess each day – somewhere out on the farm – that they hadn’t seen before.

Nowdays they make sure they celebrate the positive things in each and every day as “one cannot undo what has been done”.

They say their priorities have changed, and they have huge empathy for others worse off than themselves (such as those in the Christchurch Earthquake Zone).

Some paddocks just don’t exist anymore, pipe lines, troughs, tanks and springs have moved, or disappeared completely.

Some gullies well planted in trees prior to the storm have just buried everything. They have a lot more flat land in gullies as it is filled up with 6 to 10 m of silt.

Papa started crumbling about three weeks after the storm, mixing with the silt, mineralising it and setting the process of revitalization of the soil into motion.

Sue says they now have to wait for the cycles of regrowth – thistles to bring nutrients up and then die down, weeds to do the same then die down, before the soil is ready to put up a good lasting grass/native clover crop.

She says 2 weeks after the storm all the grass, trees and animals went off – or died back -especially in the native trees. Cattle lost as much as 20 – 30kgs as though they were in delayed shock.  They say their worst day after the storm was loading out 260 weaners for sale as they could not feed them. These animals were straight off their mothers and had only been on the property for 5 days when storm struck. That was the 2012/13 income gone down the road.

In keeping with their philosophy of “looking for the positive”, Sue says there were also some advantages. She says the day after the storm when she and John were cut off from the rest of the world “was so quiet and peaceful”.

Sue says she’s been “blown away” by the help offered from family, friends and strangers. From offers of food, to phone calls and emails to showing up with shovels, wheelbarrows and fencing gear. They’ve had help getting springs back up and running, replacing boundary fences, returning stock back to their rightful owners, laying fence lines and rolling up others.

She says there are still about five paddocks they are unable to get in to because the damage is so severe.

In the aftermath of the storm the Nations say the East Coast Rural Support Trust offered amazing support and assistance. They’ve also had Task Force Green clearing and rebuilding fences.

They were grateful to be given the use of an apartment in Ahuriri when they “ran out of steam and needed to clear their heads and get their sleep patterns back in sync”, so sensible decisions would be made.

The couple also say that they received help from the local church ladies, donations from a boys’ boarding school and help from a girls’ boarding school for the garden. A Hastings orchardist brought 30 Ni-Vanuatu and Fijians to de-silt the swimming pool, tennis court and garden shed, as well as help clear the drive.

Looking ahead – the couple say a lot of the farm will go into forestry. They’ll aim to sell more fodder from the factory. They say the biggest challenge will be to generate sufficient income whilst the land is healing, which could take anything from 25 to 75 years.

Sue Nation observes that it is interesting to see the cattle that have had free range over the winter. She says they have done better than those they have had in smaller paddocks … “perhaps we need to let them roam again … especially out here on the coast.”