Criticism of BERL report not accepted

Date: 2010-05-06 | Category: News

Murray Willocks, chairman of the Pasture Renewal Charitable Trust (PRCT) and Kel Sanderson, managing director of Business and Economic Research (BERL) comment on Brian Hockings’ criticism.

It is valid to ask what value the Stratford Demonstration Farm trials on renewing already productive pasture are actually adding to Taranaki dairy farmers and New Zealand agriculture as a whole.

Murray Willocks, left, and Kel Sanderson – move to the figures.

Brian Hockings makes one or two unsubstantiated criticisms of the estimation of the economic value of pasture renewal report, completed by BERL.

These criticisms would be substantially overcome if he were to read the complete report, which is freely available, rather than presumably responding to the summary reports carried in many farming publications.

He could find no reference as to how actual productivity gains from renewal were estimated, and assumed they came from results of plot trials and doing a theoretical estimation of the production that can be obtained on that basis.

In the BERL report he will find that estimates of existing production of pasture dry matter (DM), and stock unit carrying capacity were obtained from several sources. These included AgResearch models, data from a range of trials and recording in different regions between1975-2003 reported by Dexcel, and from regional test dairy farms at Ruakura, Lincoln and the one he’s associated with at Stratford.

Sources

Information on pasture response was obtained from a similarly wide range of sources and, far from adopting an “unrealistic and inappropriate massive overestimate”, BERL modelled the effects on output for a high response of 27 percent and a low response of seven percent on the dairy farms.

Interestingly, the low of seven percent came from the Stratford Demonstration Farm. Here the unrenewed pasture production level was given as 13,500kg DM/ha which BERL commented was high compared with the information from other sources for the Taranaki region. The information from the Stratford Farm trials indicated that successfully renewed pasture had a yield of 14,400kg DM/ha, an increase of just seven percent from the pasture renewal.

Hockings confirms this when he states: “We regrassed from already productive pasture.
Much better gains could have been made if it was run-out pasture being renewed ...”.

Regrass

The PRCT and BERL fully agree and believe that most farmers would, most sensibly, regrass run-out pasture.
In this case, their production response could well be closer to the 17 percent mid-point on the range found for dairy farms.
It is valid to ask what value the Stratford Demonstration Farm trials on renewing already productive pasture are actually adding to Taranaki dairy farmers and New Zealand agriculture as a whole.

The findings of the BERL report offer New Zealand’s agricultural and research sector a clear challenge: to generate better scientific information on the levels of production response from pasture renewal on run-out pastures in the different regions and farm types in the country.

The model BERL developed can then determine with more certainty where the value increase falls in the range.
This is the key focus for the PRCT over the coming two years and our efforts will focus on working cooperatively with major industry players to get clarity on this important aspect. The significant benefits will be of value to the entire New Zealand economy and its citizens.

Published courtesy of Dairy Exporter February 2010

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