Drought grips livestock pastures in New Zealand region

New Zealand's northernmost region, Northland, has had almost no rain for three months which is drying up pastures on cattle feedlots and it has little prospect of a break before April.

After a decade of wetter-than-normal summers, an old-fashioned El Nino dryness has delivered soil moisture and pasture conditions normally expected at the end of February, not halfway through January.

Silver Fern Farms agent Tim Brandon, of Kaeo, said districts in his patch were down to bare dirt, having lost their ryegrass cover after 14 weeks without rain.

Although August and September were wet, October was cold and November the driest ever recorded, and the kikuyu grass has not been able to get growing to fill in pasture covers and carry farmers and their livestock into the autumn.

Northland's two export plants, Moerewa and Dargaville, have waiting lists of thousands of head of cattle, both dairy cow culls and prematurely consigned beef animals.

Brandon said those farms without any feed will need priority and that SFF Dargaville has returned to peak production following the Christmas-New Year shutdown.

More than 30 government, local government, advisory and relief officials gathered in Whangarei earlier for an initial Northland Drought Committee meeting. It evaluated the scale of the current drought event, to assess when it will qualify as a "medium-scale adverse event", triggering government assistance for the Rural Support Trust, technological transfer, tax relief and welfare payments.

Fonterra has closed its Maungaturoto factory more than a month earlier than usual, re-routing a dwindling stream of milk to Kauri.

Although it will only say Northland's seasonal production will be lower than expected, report figures show that daily milk flows from monitor farms are now 20% behind last season.