What a question for a sheep farmer-haha! Presently we don’t have a lot of available funds to squander. There is no better resource than the generations who have gone before who have experienced such cycles and have made mistakes on our behalf. Seek their counsel, everyone’s journey is different, I try to apply their knowledge to our situation.
If it was about return on capital, we wouldn’t be producing quality meat and wool for the discerning customers of the world. Now in our 5th year of negative returns for our crossbred wool, this winter we are looking at the pros and cons of transitioning to organic certification.
Organic wool is fetching 3 to 4 times the recent auction price, but unfortunately there is no current premium for meat. We can’t sit idle waiting for the next silver bullet; we owe it to our children to uphold the balance sheet.
Having a positive attitude is also important for me in regards to resilience. I have been lucky enough to travel and work throughout New Zealand and have experienced living abroad. This gave me perspective….I love John Clarke’s (aka Fred Dagg) Sports Café YouTube video “we don’t know how lucky we are”. Times are currently tough out in the food and fibre producer land, but it’s important to stop and soak up our outdoor office and appreciate what is really important like health, friends and family.
I believe such an accessible spectrometer will help differentiate at the point of purchase that our low input natural pastoral based system is better for our health and planet compared to that of highly processed food or food created using copious amounts of resources. Harnessing the free energy from the sun is key to achieving this.
The rumen is the only natural biological function that takes that free energy via photosynthesis undertaken by plants and converts it into essential amino acids for human consumption.
When oil does run out, ruminant livestock will be our saviour and people will wonder what were our ancestors thinking trying to tax them into extinction?!
