Hatching Eggs For Sale

A pity they can't see the wood for the trees

There was an interesting front-page story in the Taranaki Daily News last Friday concerning the objections of Federated Farmers to the projected sale of several eastern Taranaki hill- country farms to a foreign buyer for forestry purposes; the application for change of land use is currently with the Overseas Investment Office (OIO).

Their meat and fibre chairman, John McMurray, complained about the conversion of pastoral land into the "monsters of forestry and carbon farming".

He made the valid point that coastal finishing units depend on a supply of store stock from the inland properties, and with meat processors already unable to fill export orders, every inland conversion has serious ripple- down consequences for the whole industry.

This is undoubtedly true, but the situation is not quite as black- and-white as Mr McMurray paints it.

The fact is that these properties have been offered for sale several times in recent years, and potential pastoral buyers have had ample opportunity to snap them up.

Presumably, the reason for the lack of interest is that backcountry farming is barely marginal. It offers backbreaking, ill- rewarded toil in exchange (if you are lucky) for a once-in-a-lifetime chance of a windfall capital gain when you sell on retirement. Not unreasonably, sellers like to realise sufficient funds to be able to buy a town or coastal retirement block with sufficient residual to live on. This usually has the effect of pushing the cost of the property above its true earning potential, and making it next to impossible for young couples to buy in. The whole chain of ownership transfer is totally unsustainable.

This is a serious threat to the supply system upon which, as Mr McMurray rightly points out, this country is so dependent. Whether a capital gains tax would help is highly questionable.

It isn't just forestry ventures that Mr McMurray should have in his sights. Without a decent wool cheque, many inland sheep stations are unprofitable, and one might well ask why Federated Farmers has allowed wool marketing to degenerate into its current shambles?

In addition, the main reasons for recent reduced stock-kill were horror weather during lambing and because many of Federated Farmers' own members have voted with their feet and switched, not to trees, but dairying.

A couple of years ago, Jeremy Thompson - who is involved in the current sale - invited me to visit his property on Croydon Rd. We spent the afternoon driving around on his six-wheeler "quad" in typical Taranaki mid-winter weather - a howling gale interspersed by frequent squalls. My recurring memory of that afternoon is looking down a hillside over a neighbouring property. It was a wind-swept "green desert" of grass with barely a tree in sight. The cattle had "weather-vaned" against the gale and were huddled up in a waterlogged corner looking about as cheerful as emperor penguins hatching eggs in 60 below. The contrast with Jeremy's property could hardly have been starker.

Incubation of leopard gecko eggs

This is how to incubate leopard gecko eggs. The only other thing you need not in here is the leopard geckos themselver, and maybe an incubator. The section on adding water, basically for every 10 grams of perlite, you add 8 grams of water. So if you have 20 grams of perlite, add 20 grams of water. This can be done on a calculator by multiplying the mass of the perlite by .8, the number you get is how much water you add.

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