Hugh Taylor is not afraid of farming outside of conventional wisdom.
Who else would grow feedlot-fed Japanese beef for Europe, have automatic gate openers and sell all his wool to Nepal? Or divine his own irrigation water and volunteer his romneys to be part of one of the largest meat-yield trials?
The Oxford farmer is not into fads %26ndash; a 50-year-old family romney stud can vouch for that. But he and wife Jan have been prepared to move in new directions when opportunities arise or times get tough.
Taylor admits that he has never been one for standing still.
%26quot;We have gone outside the square a bit and looked for alternatives. The way the farming economy for sheep and beef is the last 20 years, we have had to take this direction.%26quot;
At about 300m above sea level, the couple%26#39;s 350ha Gleneyre farm is on billiard- table-flat property west of Oxford and receives more than 1000mm of rainfall a year. Half the farm is irrigated by a centre pivot and two guns.
For the first of seven wells drilled, they brought in commercial diviners, who were found wanting after 180m of digging. With metal rods in hand, Hugh Taylor took over, eventually honing in on four successful well sites.
As there was not enough water on the farm for dairying, the Taylors had a feedlot built in 1995 for finishing beef cattle.
At the time, Nippon Meatpackers, a Japanese company with a turnover three times New Zealand%26#39;s GDP, was looking for Kiwi farmers with experience in running up to 1000 cattle on flat land for a trial to see if feedlot farming was viable in New Zealand.
Cattle operations of that size were hard to come by at the time and Taylor fitted the specifications for running wagyu cattle. The breed is genetically inclined to intense marbling in its meat %26ndash; also known as Kobe- style beef %26ndash; which is favoured by fine diners for its flavour, tenderness and juiciness.
The feedlot was designed by the Taylors in partnership with their neighbours, Glen and Sharon Morris. The electronic fencing they introduced was an eye-opener for the Japanese, and a fall for the pad was added to allow for the high rainfall.
Nippon Meatpackers put up the full $1.6 million cost for the feedlot, and when they departed New Zealand shores 18 months later, it changed hands for $1, minus the plant.
A later trial with another operator of 40 lines of cattle has proved invaluable after a 0.8kg a head difference was found in daily weight gain between breeds, with angus and angus cross doing the best.
Today the feedlot operation continues to be run by the Taylor and Morris team. The wagyu beef they produce is no longer bound for Japan but rather processed in Wellington and despatched to European diners by Kiwi company Firstlight Foods.
The Taylors%26#39; consent allows the 8ha feedlot to carry 2000 cattle, with more than 1500 currently being finished. Cattle with wagyu bloodlines come from North Island operations and are contract fed, with only a few cattle owned and raised by the partnership%26#39;s trading company, Southernprime.
Taylor says wagyu cattle have provided a premium above returns for conventional breeds.
%26quot;With wagyu, the higher the marbling, the better you get paid, and there is big bucks involved. A Japanese A5 wagyu got $26,000. That is the elite of the breed. The best we can get in New Zealand is to B3, with a marbling score of nine.
%26quot;We bought a high-marbling angus bull, which is in the top per cent (of angus bulls) in New Zealand. We will put him over our angus cows and then put high-marbling wagyu semen over the heifers.%26quot;
The meat is sought after by top chefs in Europe and is so tender a butter-knife will cut through it, Taylor says.
%26quot;It makes farming more viable when people get paid for quality and marbling. At the moment we are fighting feed costs and the United States dollar, but we can bypass the US dollar because our meat is going into Europe.
%26quot;The wagyu are a Japanese- type cattle. They are like a dairy animal, but once you put them onto hard feed they turn into a good beef animal. They are very intelligent with a gentle temperament.%26quot;
Incoming wagyu cattle are about 350kg liveweight and are fed on the feedlot for just over a year to reach a weight of up to 750kg. Once up to the desirable weight, the cattle are trucked off the property.
Feedlots are a costly exercise %26ndash; in Japan, daily feed costs are more than $US10 a head %26ndash; and cattle feeding rates are precisely analysed. The Taylors and Morrises know to the nearest kilogram how much each mob eats. The cattle are weighed two months after arrival and when they leave the farm.
Fed twice a day in the morning and after lunch, each cattle eats between 10kg and 12kg of dry matter depending on their weight. Young cattle are first schooled on eating silage. They go on an initial diet of silage with some straw and within four or five days most take to it easily.
%26quot;We train them up on silage so they learn how to eat,%26quot; says Taylor. %26quot;It%26#39;s a bit like a yacht race. In a feedlot, they have to be up to speed when they come in and up to speed when they come out.%26quot;
Prime cuts from feedlot beef are mainly sent to Europe, and Firstlight has lately tested the South American market. Forever looking for the next opportunity, Taylor hopes, possibly in the next three years, to have romney lamb combined with the shipments of wagyu beef to European restaurants.
A great mound of barley silage is based next to the feedlot, where it is fed with other ingredients into a kilometre of feed troughs. The feedlot recipe includes minerals and supplements, and about 2500 tonnes of barley silage dry matter is made for the wagyu operation.
The two-man operation is fully mechanised, with a barley- crushing machine on site to make the grain palatable. About 150ha of dryland and irrigated barley is grown by the Taylors and Morrises to keep the feedlot stocked. This grain and silage is mixed with brewers%26#39; leftover, the residue after brewers make beer from barley.
The feedlot is on a clay and shingle-based pad topped with sawdust and with fabric underneath diverting cattle waste to an effluent pond.
A mountain-load of sawdust is used to keep the feedlot within consented parameters for odour, and to keep the pad clean and dry underfoot.
The sawdust and manure mixture is collected by a home- designed machine and deposited on pasture to raise Gleneyre%26#39;s soil fertility. This blend is kept for six to eight months to settle and then spread in spring.
Taylor says the soil additive sends wormlife %26quot;through the roof%26quot; and improves paddock performance during a drought.
Gleneyre%26#39;s heavy and light soils are a combination of wakanui silt loams and ruapuna silt loams. To further improve pastures, Taylor is working with a dairy farmer to fine-tune planting rates and grazing of new pastures.
A mixed-beef cattle herd of 70 head are grazed on the farm. Another 2000 dairy cows are contract grazed between May and July.
Gleneyre was bought in 1947 by Hugh Taylor%26#39;s ex-serviceman father, who opted out of becoming a doctor for a farming career.
Rocks, gorse and rabbits had to be removed, fences built and shelter introduced. Taylor took over the farm when his father died in 1978.
With it came a romney stud, now 150 ewes, that has been in the family for half a century. Alongside this flock are 1000 commercial ewes and 500 ewe lambs of the same breed.
On the property, 638 ewes were involved in a saleable meat-yield trial during last year%26#39;s lambing, aimed at getting the most out of the romney by measuring traits that will raise the profits of commercial farmers.
During the romney trial, rams were identified that produced not only the highest meat yield, but carried tenderness and quality traits. The three-year trial is now in its final year.
Last year, half of Hugh Taylor%26#39;s trial flock of ewes were two tooths and the rest older ewes. They were single-sire mated, and lambed at Gleneyre between August 23 and September 20.
Every lamb was weighed at birth and tagged according to its sire, while the ewes were scored on their mothering ability, from one for a ewe that stood by its lamb when approached, to three for a scatter-brained %26quot;nutter%26quot; of which there were few.
Of the 1149 lambs that dropped for a lambing percentage of 180%, about 121 lambs died at or around birth. The eventual tally of 156% for lambs finished during a stop- start season with cool soils was considered a success.
The lambs were sent to the freezing works in three drafts over five weeks ending February 15, and averaged 17.2kg. The ewes produced more twins and few triplets, which reduces the risk of lamb deaths and slow lambs unable to gain weight quickly.
As chairman of Romney New Zealand, the marketing arm of the New Zealand Romney Sheep Breeders Association, Taylor is proud that romney farmers have driven the trial. The discovery of a double- muscling gene in the breed by scientists is a bonus, he says.
%26quot;That%26#39;s (meat yield) the way the market is heading. I can see down the track the benefits should be huge for the breed. The better the double muscling, the higher the yield we will get.%26quot;
At his own stud, ewes are culled exhaustively to raise their breeding performance. Each year between 25% and 30% of the ewe flock is replaced. With this tough approach, Taylor has pushed the lambing percentage at much the same rate as the trial flock, with all single-bearing ewes immediately culled.
Taylor is working on pulling back the size of his stud flock for a smaller and more compact animal with more meat on its frame.
The ewe wool produced is 37 microns, with each ewe averaging six kilograms a year. All the wool is bound for Nepal, where it is used by Tibetan artisans in handmade carpets, in an initiative driven out by Romney New Zealand.
Taylor says romney farmers have looked outside conventional farming markets for a destination for their wool.
%26quot;The reason we are getting stuck into the wool is because we see huge potential in it that hasn%26#39;t been realised. I cannot see why someone hasn%26#39;t been doing this before. We have been let down by people who have used our levies and we have virtually had to do it ourselves.%26quot;
Taylor has an easier time negotiating his way around his own farm.
Electric gates are spring loaded so farm vehicles don%26#39;t have to stop every time one is reached.
Taylor says the gates are worth their weight in gold, and he can motor around the entire farm in 15 minutes.
%26quot;I see opening gates as a sheer waste of time. We had some Lincoln University graduates a few years ago and they did a thesis which figured out that (by not stopping to open gates) they save 17 days a year.
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