A slight deviation from my Nuffield studies took me to Dunedin (this is the first church of Dunedin) to talk
to a company called AbacusBio about a type of Carbon assessment for sheep
flocks called Hoofprint. I met with Jude
Sise who is a partner at AbacusBio and who is running the Hoofprint program in
New Zealand. Abacus Bio is the science
partner to Alliance and who’s philosophy is all about using science to help
business. Hoofprint is web based, and is
currently used on about 50 New Zealand lamb producers supplying Alliance; one
of the main farmer owned cooperatives operating in New Zealand.
The program requires very limited farmer input with the bear minimum
requirement taking up about an hour or two a year.
This is involves putting the closing stock numbers into the system and
adding the fuel, fertiliser and electricity usage into the system. The real beauty of this system is that the
kill sheet data is automatically added to the program through a system in place
at Alliance.
Depending on the ability of the operator the system can be much more
accurate, with regular inputs of sheep deaths, sales outside of Alliance making
the carbon impact much more accurate.
But where this system scores highly, in my opinion is about the
results that are generated. There is a
lot of scientific algorithms running in the back ground to calculate many of
the figures used to generate the reports.
At the end of the year animal growth rates, carcase weights, and growth
rates are all available. In addition it
reports on scanning, docking and sales percentages which call also be compared
to previous seasons. We know from
previous experience that lower carbon foot prints equate to more efficient and
profitable sheep production. Take growth
rates for example, the shorter time lambs stay on the farm the lower its carbon
emissions, the lower the cost and the more efficient that animal is.
This is a great tool to monitor the flocks performance and it can
even be split up to manage and monitor different flock or mob numbers.
I spent Tuesday morning back at the office running Overbury’s data
through the program, from memory, which showed some interesting comparisons
with New Zealand emission and performance data.
It would be interesting to get hold of the program to run a full years
worth of data for our sheep enterprise to look at it’s performance against the
top producers in New Zealand.
After leaving Jude and the Abacus team, I headed to the Otago
Peninsular to try and find the resident Penguins and Albatrosess. I failed miserably on both counts which was
shame, so I about faced and headed towards Invercargill via the Southern Scenic
Route, which should have taken about 4 hours but in true 'Jake the travelling
tourist' mode, took me almost 7 hours!
However the stops were certainly worth making.
The first place to stop was Nugget Point (above) protruding out into the
South Pacific Ocean. The rocks,
beautiful white sand, turquoise sea; punctuated with seagull and seal calls was
simply stunning. Pressing on from Nugget point I made my way along the very scenic
route to another incredible view this time from Florence Hill, overlooking
Tautuku Bay, which I arrived at as the sun was starting to set.
A few miles along the coast I came across Curio
Bay, where the remains of a petrified forest can be seen on the rocky beach. The fossilized trees are clearly visible, and
are incredibly rare. This is because the
silification, brought by the flood, covered the forest in a matter of weeks or
months before the forest material could degrade, preserving them for millions
of years.
I made my way onwards to Fortrose where I met up with Hayden Peters
who farms with his father and also works full time for Alliance, who had very
kindly offered to host me for the night.
After a quick tour of the farm, as it was getting late we headed back to
his house.
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