Started the day off with another farm tour. Remember from Day 10 where I talked about Landcorp, New Zealand's largest agribusiness? Well, we visited another one of their farms, Stuart Farms, located in the Southland.
Stuart Farms has sheep, cattle, and deer, but our main focus today was learning about their deer farming operation. The agenda for our visit was to learn about their pasture to plate value chain, covering data capture on farm and the technologies employed to do this. Demonstrating the forage and genetics component that complement the date capture; look at Meat EQ and how through extra measurement they are creating measures to determine meat quality. This is all capable through Farm IQ, a management program in which Stuart Farms was the latest addition to the program.
While at the farm we got to experience an up close encounter with the deer. We watched them move through their working pen where they discussed their use of EID tags to collect data as explained above.
None of us have really seen deer domesticated and farmed. It was interesting hearing its history and their marketing strategies to keep it growing in a competitive red meat industry. For lunch, Silver Fern farms came with their mobile cooking lab and prepared us some delicious beef, venison, and lamb. The meat has been questionable throughout the trip until this meal. It was prepared correctly allowing the flavors to truly come out.
As we finished lunch they gave us Silver Fern caps and we boarded the bus. Are we done with bus rides yet?!? another 3 hours to Lake Tekapo for another exceptional experience.
We stopped in town for dinner before heading to our backpackers. I still had some of my cheese, meat, and crackers from Gibbston Valley that I needed to finish which also allowed me to cheapen up the trip by a meal. It was a gorgeous evening, so I sat on a bench overlooking Lake Tekapo and enjoyed the peacefulness.
Later, we checked into our backpackers around 9:30 and began to prepare to head to Mt. John Observatory at 12:10 a.m. I showered, wrote in my journal, and took a little nap. Now, it was going to be pretty awesome seeing the sky in the southern hemisphere, let alone a nearly full moon lit up the sky which this did cause some light pollution, but we still saw some amazing things. The Southern Cross: can't be seen in northern hemisphere. It is on the NZ and AUS flag and was used by early explorers for direction purposes. Another unique characteristic about looking at the sky in the southern hemisphere is that constellations we can see in the northern hemisphere are upside down! Like Orion and the man on the moon, pretty cool!
There was an astro photographer on site that offered to take pictures for anyone with a DSLR. Obviously I allowed her to and asked her some questions as well. In order to shoot at night I need to use long exposure taking about 15 seconds to capture the shot, therefore, the camera needs to be mounted to avoid any shake. Who knew I was going to pick-up some photography tips on this adventure. Together, we captured the Southern Cross, moon, and overlooking the town of Lake Tekapo. This adventure was another highlight! Even though we didn't get to bed till about 3:00 a.m., it was worth it.
DAY 18
Guess what? Back on the bus , but this time it was finally back to LU. We were all ready to be back "home" for awhile. I was burnout but still smiling and reminiscing about everything we had seen and experienced over the last nine days.
We arrived back around 1:30 and had lunch. The afternoon was ours to do as we pleased. The Busker Festival, which is kind of like a live version of America's Got Talent with multiple performers from dancing to singing to comedians and so on, had started in Christchurch and we had the option to attend. I was just ready to stay put and catch up on life. I already had reading and quizzes to take for Genetics clas and was several days behind on my blog (still am, sorry but there is so much happening with little free time and limited WiFi). So I spent the evening catching up with the world and enjoyed a good nights rest.
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