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Farm Nutrient Advisory Ltd., Napier (2026)

02/10/2026

The end of the year is in sight with all remaining road trips already confirmed whether it be via wheels 🚙 or wings ✈️
Most weeks are fully booked but for anyone who was keen for a catch up feel free to send me a message in case there’s a gap free ☕

Week of 18th October: Auckland, North Waikato, Marlborough
Week of 25th October: Wairoa, Gisborne, Central Hawke’s Bay
Week of 1st November: North, Mid, South Canterbury
Week of 8th November: Waikato, Rangitikei
Week of 15th November: Otago, Southland
Week of 22nd November: Central & South Hawke’s Bay
Week of 6th December: Tararua, Wairarapa
Weeks thereafter 😴 👩‍💻

A variety of jobs to complete ranging from:
🪏 soil testing for those yet to gain a comprehensive baseline or be reviewed from previous years' data
🍀 clover-only testing once ‘real spring’ kicks off to monitor soil to plant nutrient movements & diagnose any primary or (typically) secondary deficiencies, most obvious when plants should be growing at their maximum rate
🐮 🐑 mixed pasture testing for animal dietary assessment
💉 animal performance & health plan reviews to maximise growth & reproduction
👩‍🏫 along with a workshop thrown in there for good measure

Christmas sure is approaching fast 🎄🎅 🎁

07/09/2026

Coming out of the tail end of winter, the harshest time of year for stock in terms of biological, immune & nutritional stress highlights those areas of stock health needing improving including mineral levels. If mineral levels were not high 📈 enough going into winter, there’s likely deficiency by the time spring comes about 📉. For zinc, iodine & selenium, there needs to be continued supply given there is no storage organ.

Historically, I normally rant on about lack of appreciation & understanding of iodine but over the last couple of years I seem to be ranting more about zinc. The fact that our understanding of its role in animal production & its importance is in essence, diddly-squat, nil, zilch, just pushes my buttons 👉 (I have a lot buttons!).

Zinc has many roles including:
Carbohydrate, protein, fat metabolism;
Innate (first line defence) & adaptive immunity;
Skin, epithelial & mucous membrane integrity;
Appetite & feed conversion;
Intestinal permeability/absorption;
Growth & musculoskeletal development;
Reproduction male & female;
A major driver in the number of wool follicles & fibre strength 🐑

Referring to zinc’s most widely known role in skin & epithelial health, plus immunity, it’s no surprise that deficiency is implicated in woody tongue development & highly negatively correlated with ringworm incidence & severity.

This year seems to be worse than most for ringworm, considered ‘just one of those things’ & ‘normal’ when to me, I see it as a red flag 🚩 An issue that is typical, but NOT normal & suggestive of zinc deficiency; potentially multi mineral deficiency but almost guaranteed zinc amongst that. What drives such a poor understanding of zinc in animal health are the so called ‘optimal’ ranges vets & labs refer to which are not optimal at all, the minimum value not even adequate to prevent clinical symptoms yet this is news to them.

For whatever reason, NZ hasn’t done their homework or research like the rest of the world (again) or even looked at the rest of the world in case we could learn a thing or two (or thousand).

As with woody tongue 👅 lack of zinc doesn’t cause the disease but any factor that ‘breaks down’ skin/epithelial integrity in effect opens the draw bridge to invaders that should not be let in. The internal immune system whose job it is to wipeout any invaders that do cross the ‘bridge’ is then also unable to do its job because the same deficiency that opened the draw bridge is also a key player in supporting the soldiers protecting from the inside.

Lack of zinc has been implicated in all sorts of disease but one well researched is the link between zinc levels & ringworm severity. The graph included summarises it very well. This study like many others also stipulates the optimum Zn value, 1.7 times the NZ ‘optimum’.

Our ranges devised 50 years ago are encouraging us to deliberately farm deficient stock & no one where it matters unfortunately seems to care 🤷‍♀️

Farming for deficiencies reduces profits, it's as simple as that.

03/09/2026

This week & last was a bit of a novelty for me actually working in Hawke’s Bay with no plane required to get to farm for a change 😆

Visiting what many would consider one of the most beautiful farms in the North Island (there’s just no comparing North versus South landscapes, a bit like chalk & cheese), it became blatantly obvious that the stock are not only well cared for & well fed, but treated with patience & kindness.

It speaks a thousand words that all stock couldn’t help be nosey, inspect me & my intentions, then proceed to follow me wherever I went, sheep included. It’s not uncommon for dairy cows to get in your face or cattle to be inquisitive to some degree but to be befriended on a sheep/beef farm 🐮 🐑 is welcome but somewhat unexpected.

Not as unexpected however, as me walking up to a poor dead hogget to check for an obvious cause of death only for the ‘dead’ sheep to come back to life as I’m literally walking over her. Turns out she wasn’t dead at all & despite being eyes wide open 👀, she was so fast asleep in her happy place, I couldn’t even see her breathing from a foot away. I’m pretty sure we both stopped breathing for a few seconds after that rude awakening & can only hope no one watched the entertainment unfold.

The plus side of having fearless stock is that it’s pretty easy for me to get a good look of their overall condition!

With spring firmly setting in here, I was getting a comprehensive set of soil tests done for crop recommendations. When testing whether it be soil or herbage, the sampling accuracy is paramount, the value of the data obtained relies on it.

Statistically, we are only sampling a very small portion of the ‘population’, our bag of soil represents ALL of the soil within a group of similar paddocks. To maximise the accuracy, precision & robustness of data collection, sample collection has to be as thorough as possible, not just the lazy 50m line & half a bag of dirt that most reps consider sufficient.

The number of steps 🚶‍♀️ I accumulate in one paddock plus the maximum soil or herbage physically able to fit in the bag (to the point it starts breaking or doesn’t close well so needs heaps of sticky tape) is the very minimum anyone should be doing if those results are to be an accurate reflection & representation of the larger area.

Coming from an analytical laboratory & statistical background, doing the basics properly is not something I underestimate ✔️ 📊 I’m pretty confident I’m the lab’s least favourite person though 🤭

27/08/2026

It’s always nice to have positive feedback about your work & proof in the pudding that the changes we make on farm are achieving objectives & meeting or even exceeding expectations.

This particular paddock in North Canterbury had been a bit of a nuisance with its lack of clover & palatability. In my interpretation, soil tests revelled a significant calcium & S deficiency with a MAF 11, Ca base saturation of 49% & Total S 351mg/Kg. Total P was on the low side too but not the limiting factor & not the priority.

Now, if you’re a NZ trained soil scientist or Lincoln/Massey ag graduate, you’ll only look at the Ca MAF units (standardised units for cmol+/Kg) & say the calcium is ‘high’ because apparently, according to NZ science done 70 years ago which focused on averages with no assessment of plant or animal requirements, the ‘optimal’ Ca is 4-10 MAF units.

Now, if I tell you this soil, apparently ‘high’ in Ca according to NZ ‘science’ only has a pH of 5.5, do you still think Ca is high ❓
Take that one step further & imagine if this soil only has a Ca MAF level of 4, 7 units less but still considered ‘optimum’ Ca if applying the 4-10 MAF range. Can you imagine how low the pH would be then⁉️🤢

pH is misleading (refer to previous post) & NZ’s claimed optimal Ca levels are beyond iffy, they’re just outright wrong ❌🙅‍♀️ if you are targeting those levels, farm health, productivity, efficiency, carbon neutrality, will never be achieved.

Long story short to get back to this very welcome happy Friday message, we put lime & sulphur on this hill country less than a year ago & the positive effects are already being seen.

For those who are understandably nervous about the looming El Niño & looking towards putting nitrogen on to try boost spring covers, imagine how much free & sustainable N is provided if all hills had this much clover coming out of winter ☘️

As for the low phosphorus, I expect this to naturally increase under a regular liming regime☝️so the amount of additional input is less & more effective than when ignoring obvious warning signs of low Ca.

When you acknowledge & treat soil as a living entity 🪱🪲🦠 not just a inert medium, decomposition of litter material & dung increases beyond your imagination compared to its limits under an acidic & calcium deficient environment.

23/08/2026

Last week I was invited by Amuri Lime Co. to present at their event “Benefits of Ag Lime on Farm Production & Financial Performance”. North Canterbury is always a great community for open mindedness & discussion, so it was a pleasure to be asked to be a part of it. By throwing the cat amongst the pigeons, many do tend to leave my presentations with more questions unanswered than the ❓❔ they came in with.

I'm not shy when it comes to my love of lime & to say we underdo lime in NZ & AUS is an understatement. Unfortunately, our industry’s 80-year-old science hasn’t progressed & at the farmer’s expense 💰🚽. This stall in NZ science is driven by the fact our research funders are those who would suffer a profit loss if farmers knew more lime & less phosphorus is actually the key to higher profits. Fortunately, the rest of the world are a bit more advanced (& unbiased) with their science 👏 & is exactly why other countries correctly state the optimum pH is neutral i.e. pH 7 for maximum plant-availability NOT 5.8-6.2 as we claim here.

There are of course varying economic pH optimums that are rarely as high as pH 7 here & quite frankly a neutral pH is near impossible to achieve when the natural soil state is as acidic as pH 6. That being said, our soils are nowhere near the true optimum so will always benefit from lime regardless if you are a pH of 5.5, 6.0 or 6.5. There is a lot of scare mongering 😈 about us ‘overdoing’ lime yet your stock health will be far worse for wear by avoiding lime than regularly applying it. The only way you can ‘overdo’ lime when your soil is naturally acidic is by pouring it on at high rates as by doing this, you have literally dumped a highly insoluble alkaline product on in one layer that does not dissipate through the soil profile so simply stays in one thick band & can stunt the chemistry & biology in the months following – exactly the same as by dumping five times the amount of a typical urea application, that will also ‘stunt’ plant growth!
Anyone else worked out that dumping 4T of lime on only increases your pH average on paper & not the actual soil profile pH 🤔🤦‍♀️

pH is NOT solely driven by Ca & that is one of our biggest downfalls with advisors thinking all there is to a soil is pH & Olsen P. pH is elevated by Mg, K, Na so you can have a so-called ‘high’ pH at the same time as a soil Ca deficiency. It’s not 🚀 science, but it is basic science that appears to be dropped from the NZ ag science curriculum (I’m sure it’s just a coinkydink that the fertiliser coops fund varsity education). A pH that is driven by the other cations will not directly improve your plant or animal available nutrition.

Stock need at the very least double the amount of Ca to P but with our industry as we know it, most farms are farming this the wrong way round. Ca a major driver of skeletal & muscle growth, hormones, lactation, immunity & directly correlated to rumination.

A very common opinion is that lime is "too expensive to put on hill country' but I would disagree, lime is too valuable not to. Stock & pasture will grow quicker with sufficient Ca than without.

In farming, there is no silver bullet but lime comes pretty close.

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20/08/2026

Coming to the end of my two week stint (minus the weekend) across all areas of Canterbury. I’ve conveniently picked the only two weeks of drenching rain in Hawke’s Bay to be away while here basking in sunshine for the most part. Very grateful for both all the invites to farm & the good weather ☀️

Animal health & early season plans are now well underway. With a significant number of triplets 🐑🐑🐑 on the ground following a growthy autumn & the threat of a Godzilla-like El Niño arriving, 💨 more mouths to feed means pasture management & animal nutrition are even more prudent than usual.

August is nearly done & dusted so shortly I will be booking my next flights for at least three additional South Island ‘tours’ including Marlborough, Otago/Southland & Canterbury (again) before summer. For anyone interested in a visit who hasn’t reached out already give me a bell (or text, or email).

13/08/2026

My first of two weeks in a row working in Canterbury, luckily for me, better weather compared to last week! ☀️

Most of this morning was spent with these pretty girls 🐄 a couple of real cuddle bugs amongst them & very much loved ‘pets’ 🥰 (anyone who does not like cows cannot possibly be a good human!) taking the time to note down the tail enders that may need a bit of special attention including extra minerals so they can look more like the ‘fat’ girls in the group. I also paid attention to their behaviour & herd dynamics with the ‘poorer’-looking girls always near the gate both days I was there…is this just coincidence or are they possibly not eating as much as the others so getting less energy, less minerals just because of less intake?

When condition scoring , it’s vitally important NOT to pay attention to the average figure or only remember the ‘fatties’ (because they make us feel happy) & fail to pay attention to the actual spread of results i.e. the range of scores from the lowest to highest & number at each given point of the scale. This ensures when there are individuals not where they should be, they aren’t ‘lost in translation’.

By using averages, the value in any data collection is completely lost, negating the purpose of doing it in the first place. This same issue is often seen when blood or liver results are ‘interpreted’ by only looking at the average 🤦‍♀️

FYI, when we refer to ‘fat’ in NZ dairy terms this is typically not actually fat but what I would simply consider well fed. Generally, we tend to underfeed cows for what’s expected of them (& then wonder why metabolics, animal health bills or poor reproductive rates are an issue) with our condition scoring for target weights ‘calibrated’ on what would be considered a skinny cow if any qualified non-NZ nutritionist were to assess them. This difference in knowledge & opinion of a healthy cow was nicely demonstrated when the great, Dr Ian Lean visited a couple of years back for an NZARN conference. Walking the paddock with the group I asked him for his opinion on the herd there that day as I knew my BCS versus the typical NZ BCS is very different. He put this question to the group who ALL rated them 4.5-5.5 while Dr Lean had them at 3.5-4.5 maximum (10 point scoring)…one heck of a difference which should have been alarm bells for anyone in the paddock that day & an eye opener for me just how few professionals here actually know what is, or isn’t a well conditioned cow.

The statement he made that day which really stuck with me & highly applicable to the NZ ag industry was ‘it might be typical but it is not normal’.

I challenge you all, especially those in the animal health industry to assess your ‘normal’ & decipher if it’s really “normal” or simply typical 🤔

09/08/2026

For any North Cantabrian's at a loose end Thursday afternoon 20th August, Amuri Lime are hosting an event exploring the benefits of lime to soil health, animal health & farm profitability.

I will be presenting the direct animal health benefits when there is a strong focus on soil calcium outside the so called 'optimal pH' & breaking down our 'silo thinking' between soil & animal sciences.

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05/08/2026

I had a great question following on from my potassium post asking ‘what’s not right with the Albrecht-Kinsey method’ for balancing a soil. A valid question & one that those who follow the A-K philosophy aren’t usually open enough to even contemplate let alone ask. Here’s a bit about why I'm not an advocate:

Ask yourself, “are you wanting to grow grass or grow stock?”
Many think it's the same thing but it’s most definitely not. When there's any form of significant mineral imbalance (macro or micro), the added energy expended to cope with the imbalance actually pushes up ⬆️ total energy & dry matter required to be consumed compared to a balanced diet (the exact same thing occurs with high protein diets, you know, the typical NZ dairy diet 🐄💩).

The A-K system promotes this sort of metabolic imbalance (ironically given their objective) with their claimed base saturation requirements having NO relevance to ruminant nutrition.

❓Why increase grass growth with excess K when any 'good' the extra DM achieves (minimal) is undone by increasing MJ demand & reduces animal health for less output?
Potassium when in excess (>0.8% of pasture for most stock classes) not only reduces feed efficiency but damages the intestinal lining, reducing integrity of the epithelial cells, compromises the function of tight junctions (what should keep bad stuff out but let good stuff through to circulation) with negative impacts on immunity, weight gain, reproductive performance, profits.

The claimed soil base saturation values under an A-K regime will always have high dietary K & worse, the dictated Ca values will hamper any attempt to rectify it. It is very easy to confirm this by assessing a soil test with the corresponding pasture test but unfortunately, few using A-K philosophy puts 2️⃣&2️⃣to get 4️⃣.

Albrecht’s & Kinsey’s work is noble but neither were/are ruminant nutritionists so it's another prime example of inside-the-square soil science siloing.

Another oversight by advisors who use this approach is the depth tested.
A-K target ranges & reports are calibrated to either 10cm or 17cm yet NZ consultants have taken it upon themselves to test at 15cm.
❌ No standardisation 🟰 no calibration 🟰no understanding.

The data literally has no applied meaning but followed like a bible. Kinsey himself specifically says permanent pasture & no till crops should be tested at 10cm yet you have a following of ‘consultants’, largely unqualified in the realm of soil science who all use 15cm with no understanding that the numbers they get from the lab & the numbers they apply to it are completely different. This encourages 👆 fertiliser & 👇 sustainability, a somewhat different outcome to the A-K objective.

Flaw #3 is believing there is a fixed set of ‘rules’ that applies to ALL farms, EVERY soil, EVERY system in the entire world 🌍 Quite the stretch.

At the risk of bursting some bubbles, science is not that simple 🫧

While I am no fan of what Ballance & Ravensdown claim to be soil optimums (they just want to sell product & ignore soil health altogether), as far as the Albrecht-Kinsey philosophies go, there is NO supporting (independent) evidence despite a huge amount of global research for their claimed cation principles. Soil balance is very important but the ratios A-K apply are not justified.

I liken the whole A-K belief to a cult 'science', on a par with Scientology or a belief in God - a philosophy that gives comfort & sense of belonging along with fear of the unknown & uncertainty if you leave the group. Naturally those believers are very augmentative with an obscure sense of 'proof'.

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Farm Nutrient Advisory Ltd.

02/10/2026

07/09/2026

03/09/2026

27/08/2026

23/08/2026

20/08/2026

13/08/2026

09/08/2026

05/08/2026

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