The cold, wet spring has cost the country 2.8 million lambs according to Beef + Lamb New Zealand’s latest lamb crop survey.

Storms in Southland and the central North Island decimated stock numbers in the busy lambing period, leading to the biggest single season population drop in 21 years.

Total lambs tailed tallied 25.11 million, a ten per cent drop on last season, but Beef + Lamb Economic Service Director Rob Davison says the loss is by no means spread evenly.

“In Southland, they’ve dropped 20 percentage points to 113.5 and that’s taken out 730,000 lambs.

"But that’s probably the biggest percentage drop, in lamb numbers, since records began 40 years ago."

Mr Davison says the cool weather, low sunshine and grass growth has put most lambs two to three weeks behind where they should be.

He says export numbers should be steady, however, as higher lamb retention last season means farmers can afford to offload more this year.

"The tighter supplies of lamb look like they’ll force prices up depending on where the exchange rates go.

"Last year, we made about $2.6b from lamb."

"It looks like we will make the same again, or thereabouts, depending on the exchange rate but it looks like prices are good offshore.”

The national lambing percentage was down nearly 12 points to 109.6 per cent.

Rob Davison says while winter scanning signalled a slight drop, the weather has clearly been the dominant factor.

WOOL LEVY CLEANED OUT

Beef + Lamb is also in the process of divvying up the last of the old wool levy.

Woolgrowers voted to end the levy payment to the old Meat and Wool New Zealand last year, and the remaining $2.8m is being spread across wool-specific projects.

Beef + Lamb Chief Operating Officer Cros Spooner says some of the funds will be retained to continue long-running wool information research.

"We over-collected the remaining wool levy, and the sales were far higher than we predicted.

"We then had to talk to farmers about how we wanted to use it."

"It kind of made sense that we had a lot of information, we do a lot of work around free trade deals for wool, and in discussions with members of the wool sector...it made sense that Beef and Lamb could continue to do this and provide more information."

The rest of the money is being put towards shearing sports events and a contestable fund for wool specific projects.