The Cattleman 2010 Edition

 

The latest issue of The Cattleman magazine is Autumn 2010

If you would like be on our mailing list please contact us.
Phone 06 323 4484,  Fax 06 323 3878 or e-mail

Sample Articles:

Top partnership at Totaranui

By Jackie Harrigan

John believes Angus cattle are quiet, easy to winter and good foragers – as well as having carcase characteristics that readily outshine other breeds.

A brush with cancer in 1988 set John Jackson of Pahiatua on the road to farm expansion. “Once I was over it I thought: ‘if life is going to be short, I better have a go’.” Not that John had exactly been on a go-slow up until then. At that stage, John and his wife Mary-Anne were farming the Makuri property they purchased in 1978. Waipori was 400ha of good strong limestone hill country – “1st class hill country” according to John.
Running 4000 stock units, John and Mary-Anne talk very fondly of the farm – of how they managed to lift stock performance from 105% lambing when they arrived to 135–145% lambs to sale, and how the property was a very low cost operation with high lamb weights and wool weights.

“When we went there we treated every animal as an individual instead of as a mob – we never mob-stocked, and we got high individual performance.” Winters were long and hard on cows, but they managed to finish all the offspring from their 80-cow breeding herd.

John and Mary-Anne won the Tararua Farmer of the Year at Waipori and were a little reluctant to leave, but when Mary-Anne’s parents decided to retire from their Pahiatua property – Totaranui – the couple decided to take it on.
Norman Hoggard was a renowned stud breeder, breeding since 1940. John and Mary-Anne had worked for her father for ten years at his Spring-lea, Masterton, farm and had spent many years helping with his sales and show cattle, so they were in a good position to take over the running of the Totaranui Angus and Romney studs. Moving to the property was a wonderful opportunity for them, John says.

The Hoggards’ Corriedale and Lincoln studs were also well thought of, but were sold off as their North Island market virtually disappeared. In 1991 the Jacksons developed a Dorset Down stud as a terminal sire breed to complement Romney ram sales, the two studs growing to selling about 500 rams each year.
They retained the Waipori property, employing a manager.

Revamping the cowherd, the Jacksons have built numbers up to 260 stud cows, from which they sell 100 bulls annually at on-farm sales – 40 rising 2yr olds in June and 60 yearlings each September.
John is very focused on functional cattle that grow well and produce tender and tasty meat, and he relies heavily on carcase and phenotypic information to help him breed those cattle.

“I take a lot of notice of the figures – if the carcase figures are not right, I don’t look at the cattle,” he says. “You don’t know what you’ve got until you weigh and measure and scan them.”
Scanning all bulls for eye muscle area and intramuscular fat (marbling) helps the Jacksons make breeding decisions and selling recommendations, and their top sheep are scanned the same way.
Bulls are sold as far afield as the Coromandel, Taranaki, Bay of Plenty and all around the Wairarapa.
Bloodlines are based on American and New Zealand genetics, and John travels regularly to the US to keep up with breeding trends. “We try to marry the NZ and US genetics, and have built our market share over the years, which has not been easy – I’m a producer not a marketer, but it works through word of mouth for us.”
Totaranui is 1000ha, 240ha of flats and the rest easy to steep hills. Stud Romney ewes number 1500, and 2500 commercial ewes run alongside the 250 Angus cows, young stock and breeding bulls.

John is fiercely commercial. Any cow not calving as a two-year-old and rearing a good calf is culled. He also mates his hoggets. All ewes lamb unshepherded and unassisted, and the recording and tagging of lambs is done at 8–10 days of age in small groups so that losses are minimal.
John and Mary-Anne made a foray into dairy farming in 1999, purchasing an adjoining dairy property, but sold it in 2007, frustrated by the industry’s high compliance costs. In 1999 they also expanded their land holding in the Wairarapa hill country, purchasing 470ha Puke Te Station, an east-facing property near Masterton that is summer-dry but has terrific early spring growth.

The early spring grass growth pattern complements the winter-wet but summer-safe nature of Totaranui.
The past seven years have been a period of rapid expansion for the Jacksons. The purchase of Puketotara, Wearati Flats, Cavelands and Te Whiti Station, brought the land area of Puke Te to 1800ha, with 320ha of flats and the rest hill country. The Dorset Down stud (700 ewes) has been relocated to the property, along with all the Romney ram hoggets and 9,000 commercial Romney ewes, run alongside 400 commercial Angus cows mated to Totaranui sires.

All the commercial ewes are mated to Dorset Down terminal sires. The property finishes all progeny from its 125% lambing, and also trades between 3,000–4,000 lambs.
Finishing a high proportion of lambs off their mothers is essential in the summer-dry country, as the property might not get rain from December to June. Making stacks of silage and supplementary feed is good insurance, and a small feed pad is used to feed silage to the young stock over the winter.
Steers are finished from 20–26 months at 280–320kg carcase weight.
John says the summer-dry conditions are difficult to manage – and he hasn’t got it quite right yet. “The stock do exceptionally well in the spring, but when the grass growth slows in the dry, it’s hard to keep the cattle growing – they really need the right management.” Sometimes he has had to sell stock store, like last spring when there was no grass and he decided to sell – and then it started raining!

With 34,000 stock units run across the whole group, having good staff is important. The Jacksons employ 8–10 staff, some of whom have long service. Mark Hanley has worked for them for 20 years, first at Waipori and now at Totaranui. They refer to father and son team Maurice Prince (Major) and Maurice Prince (Minor) as the engine room, saying Maurice Major, who has worked for them for 16 years, tells them which cows can and can’t be parted with. Paul Gough has managed Puke Te for the past six years.
Last year they lost a valuable team member, Dave Lewis, who had been the sheep stud man at Totaranui since 1974. Dave was an outstanding stockman, and worked every day right up to his death at 83 last November, says John.

John and Mary-Anne’s daughter Tally is accountant for the group and, with her husband Damien, worked on Totaranui for two years before going away to further their experience in the industry. Son Bruce is an accountant in Wellington, while daughter Helen trained as an engineer and works in banking in Ireland – and is visited as often as possible by her parents.
John enjoys being hands-on, particularly ‘in the engine room of the stud cattle operation’, but says that these days he spends more time on the road visiting the Wairarapa properties, and has Maurice Major on deck at home.

As well as appreciating their quiet temperament, John says Angus cattle are easy to winter, good foragers and don’t hang around the gateways. They have as much growth as the European breeds, he says, whilst possessing excellent tenderness and succulence.
Despite professing to not being a marketer, John helped set up the NZ Grassfed Beef Group that supplied trial shipments of New Zealand beef into the Wholefoods chain in the US. He was impressed by the stores, saying the presentation was “so beautiful you’d want to eat everything you saw.”
John supplies his cattle into a breeder-finisher programme that has 100% traceability and pays him a premium of 50c/kg. He is pleased with the progress of AngusPure and the traction it is having for the breed.
As a lamb producer, he is thrilled that yield grading is a reality at the Alliance plants he supplies, and is looking forward to similar happening in the beef industry.

“It will change the way cattle are bred – you won’t be paid for bone, it’ll be meat only. We have to have scanning for meat quality – pH, marbling, shear force testing. It will come.” John has been on the Romney NZ council for several years and says big production changes have been made to the breed, returning it to a very competitive position within the industry. The council has been working hard in conjunction with the Elders ‘Just Shorn’ programme in the USA to try to improve wool prices.

Time out for the couple is mainly spent on their boat, Fortuna Lights, a 48-foot launch moored in the Marlborough Sounds. Mary-Anne says her father was difficult to extract from the farm for a holiday, but John has always made the effort to get away, take the family and have a break. The boat has been particularly good for their seven grandchildren and lately for Mary-Anne, who has been battling rheumatoid arthritis for many years.
Theirs has been a very successful partnership, in which Mary-Anne has played an equal role. She gave up a career as a kindergarten teacher and always threw herself into work on the farm alongside John, doing the wool handling at shearing, tagging young stock and keeping all the farm accounts and stud records.
“She’s the only one who can use the computer – I’m computer-illiterate,” John says.
The couple plan to spend their next five years lowering the debt levels of the company, as well as spending more time on the boat – although when questioned John did admit that there is one more property he would dearly love to buy if the opportunity came up.

Top