Quartz Hill integration a winner

13-07-2009 | Jackie Harrigan

During the past 35 years Quartz Hill station in Canterbury's Rakaia Gorge has been developed into a well-managed pastoral farming operation, so much so that it won owners Colin and Hilary Guild the Silver Fern Farms Livestock Farm Award in the 2009 Canterbury region Ballance Farm Environment Awards.

The judges said the Guilds had managed to maximise the strengths and minimise the weaknesses of the station as well as those of their two downland properties by integrating livestock, machinery and labour.

They remarked that the excellent integration of sheep, cattle and deer policies had helped preserve the unique environment, and the downland properties allowed finishing of all classes of stock year round.

Stock health, quality and production were a feature of the property and animal welfare was catered for through shelter and adverse weather plans.

The 2800ha Quartz Hill station was split off neighbouring High Peak station in 1988 when brothers Colin and James Guild split the station bought by their father in 1973 as a challenging, undeveloped block.

James and Anna retained High Peak and Colin and Hilary took on Quartz Hill, named by them after a landmark hill on the farm consisting of pink marble and quartz.

They spent many years developing the infrastructure - building a woolshed, shearers' quarters, deer shed and fencing, more subdivision and reticulated water, plus fencing and planting 27km of shelter belts and woodlots across the wind-prone farm.

The brothers had finished much of the development in 1988, cultivating the flats and oversowing some of the easy hill country, and Colin says Quartz Hill is now 30% cultivated rolling paddocks, 20% easy hill country and 50% hard steep hill country.

Rising from 460m above sea level to 975m, the station is constrained by the clay pan under the rolling flats, causing summer dry and winter wet conditions, which depress grass growth and make it hard to feed out on in the winter.

Winters are long and cold, and snow falls right across the property several times.

"The snow can be four inches-and-above five or six times a year, which doesn't usually worry us unless it is really substantial," Colin says.

Generally the sunny hill country thaws fast; the flats tend to freeze solid. If a heavy fall is forecast, the stock are mustered in and fed in a confined area with feed stockpiled for this eventuality.

After a bad snowstorm at Quartz Hill in 1992, Colin and Hilary bought a downland property at Te Pirita where they grew turnips and ran their young stock. This worked very well for nine years and provided an insight as to what could be achieved on this light land. But a farm labour shortage and 35 minutes drive created difficulties and with dairying taking off in the area, the Guilds sold it for dairy farming and bought two properties on the edge of the plains at Windwhistle, just 15 minutes' drive from Quartz Hill.

The Terrace and Valehead properties are 237ha and 120ha, and at 350m above sea level with a shingle base, and better summer rainfall, growth is more reliable - allowing more cropping of cereals and winter feed crops.

Young stock are walked down to the two properties after weaning, and winter lambs and cattle are finished there under the management of Paul Cowie.

Reece Cleland is the stock manager on Quartz Hill and Tim Perry and Sean Baty are shepherds on the station.

Colin and Hilary say they are lucky to have good staff who work well together. They are able to share machinery and labour across all the properties.

Quartz Hill station forms the headwaters of the Selwyn River, and Colin is conscious of leaving areas of tussock intact to slow run-off on his property and further down the catchment. He has installed over 100 dams to act as brakes.

Quartz Hill has some cold, unproductive country that Colin is allowing to revert to native bush. He says it is going through the noxious weeds stage, but he has been assured the bush will regenerate next.

Outside of those areas, woody weeds gorse and broom are attacked vigorously every few years.

Colin says it is a huge expense but necessary to retain grazing area.

Cheviot contractor Matthew Ford has just had nine men working on Quartz Hill with mistblowers for a week attacking the weeds in the hill country.

Areas of red tussock are also a feature of the property and one Colin and Hilary are keen to preserve. They have covenanted an area on the roadside into a Queen Elizabeth II trust and within some paddocks the tussock is left intact.

"It is unproductive, but is good shelter for the stock."

Colin and Hilary are always looking for new, more efficient ways of increasing their product outputs for less input and cost.

"We really need to get back to good sustainable prices for our core products - sheep, cattle and deer - so that we can continue to topdress the hill country as it has missed out for some years," Colin says.

"The hill country will survive but we can't afford to turn our back on the cultivated paddocks, as sulphur levels can change quickly."

Colin changed the sheep policy from Halfbred to Perendale ewes after taking over the station and moved from Herefords to Angus cattle in 1992.

Colin says the Halfbred sheep had poor fertility and a major issue with foot rot, whereas he thinks the Perendales are the ideal dual-purpose animals to cope with the hard hills and the long cold winters, still managing to cut 4kg of wool and lamb unshepherded at around 120-130%.

Colin says that while this level of lambing is "not too bad", he would like to get it up to 140-150%.

Scanning results have been up to 175%, and Colin mates half the hoggets on eye appraisal at 44kg plus, and says around 60% get in lamb and 90% of those lambs survive.

Although the ewes are run on the hills, once the vegetable matter is removed from fleece wool the wool is beautiful, says Colin, a good line of bright clean 35-36 micron wool yielding 84% which has good bulk.

He has been disheartened by the wool market of late, but says he is optimistic for both the WPI and Elders Wool initiatives.

"But I do think they should be together."

Old ewes are sold off in an annual draft at five years of age - a shift in policy from farming them for another year on the downland properties - in favour of finishing more winter lambs.

The Valehead and Terrace properties are stocked with 2600 lambs, to be finished at 18-20kg through the winter months.

"We chisel away at them from July to September."

Quartz Hills runs 4200 Perendale ewes, down from a height of 7000 ewes a few years ago.

Colin says the sheep numbers were dropped when the lamb price dived and the drought hit in 2007.

Replacing the ewes with more deer and increased cattle numbers lightened the workload and Colin says this is a priority for the future.

"We are always looking at new ideas for increasing stock performance from smaller ewe numbers - more income from less work," he says.

"There is too much cost in sheep farming with tailing, crutching and shearing - we need to increase the kilograms of meat produced off the property as efficiently as possible."

Increasing deer numbers is also a priority for the Guilds, who say the cattle and deer run on different land classes and the pasture growth curve at Quartz Hill fits in very well with the hinds' feed demand which builds up to November fawning.

"I see a steady increase in hinds, running more and more on our hill country

"The deer are really good in the snow, have a low labour requirement, and are very intelligent.

"They are totally natural, and we don't have to go near them for most of the year."

The Guild brothers were relatively early entrants into deer farming, capturing deer from helicopters late in the 70s and early in the 80s and entering sharefarming and investor arrangements in the early years.

The locally captured Red deer are a Rakaia strain which Colin says are very good deer with an excellent temperament which the Guilds work hard to preserve.

"There are far too many bad-tempered stags in the industry, but we can walk among ours - if anything has a go at us it's down the road."

The Rakaia strain deer are also heavy velvet growers, and the Guilds cut over a tonne of velvet each year from the 311 stags, including the spikers.

Wapiti are used as a terminal sire over half the 650 hinds, with the remainder bred to a Red stag for generating replacements.

Weaners are sold at an on-farm sale in April held in conjunction with High Peak Station. Colin sells between 300 and 400 weaners, usually to repeat buyers who finish the deer to slaughter.

The Reds usually range from 44-56kgs and the hybrids upwards from 60kgs.

"We usually achieve a top pen of hybrid stags between 75-80kgs," Colin says.

Running on the hills from October through to March the hinds require very little input; "we don't even go near the ones in the cultivated paddocks", Colin says.

Winter feeding consists of saved grass, grain and baleage for the replacement weaners, low-cost hay for the hinds, and a build-up on grain and baleage for the stags who can look shabby after the roar.

"It is well-documented that you have to build up the stags after the rut, and weaning the fawns at the start of March has a flushing effect for the hinds."

The only crunch point in the deer system can be in the event of a summer drought - Colin says he is careful to save feed to wean the fawns on to, keeping them growing for the weaner sale.

The 450 Angus and Angus-cross cows are wintered on the hills with the ewes and calved on the lower hill paddocks after sorting late in August.

Cows and calves are drifted in off the hills in November and used around the cultivated paddocks for grass control during mating through to January. Some of the cows are mated to Charolais terminal sires, which Colin says is an excellent cross.

Following weaning and pregnancy testing in April, when the paddock feed runs out, the weaner steers and heifers are walked to the downland farms at Windwhistle in May where they are wintered on kale, straw and grass.

The weaner steers are carried through one winter and sold the following autumn at 18 months to Silver Fern Farms at around 500kg liveweight.

Colin says they used to keep the steers on Quartz Hill and try to finish them, but they had to feed them through two winters.

"We can get much better growth rates on the lower properties with more consistent summer rain, and have been able to increase cow numbers on the station.

"I do get a huge amount of pleasure out of growing a line of cattle and we can get them off the property at good weights before the next lot are driven down from the station."

Cereals have been grown on all three properties, but success is very dependent on the weather.

"Last winter was very wet, but we are trying it again this year."

Sidebar story:

Shoring up the shelter

Not named for its lack of a breeze, farming at Windwhistle on the Canterbury plains can be a challenge for man and beast without shelter from the nor'wester.

Colin and Hilary Guild found the shelter "pretty lean", particularly on their Windwhistle property Valehead, so they have been planting shelterbelts as new paddocks are developed.

Valehead now has 10km of double fencing and planting and 9km has been completed on their neighbouring property, The Terrrace.

Colin says they have had a fantastic growth rates from a hybrid radiata with a different way of handling wind.

The aged cuttings planted in the shelterbelts are Radiata X Attenuata and Colin says they percolate the wind rather than having a brick-wall effect.

The "brick wall" makes trees prone to tipping over in high winds, but the internodal spacing of the hybrid means some of the wind seeps through.

Colin says the new hybrid, promoted by local forestry man Andy McCord, grows at twice the rate of any other radiata they have planted.

"We have been planting the cuttings for over five years now and they just get better and better."

Twenty hectares on Valehead had been planted in closely spaced radiata pine by the Selwyn Plantation Board to act as a shelter belt.

The trees were felled and stumps left when the Guilds bought the property and they have turned the ex-plantation into cropping land which will be sown down to pasture after two crops of kale.

Colin says digging out the stumps and preparing it for cropping was a big and expensive job, but he is pleased with the kale crop grown and says the soils have responded well to fertiliser.

The 600 weaner cattle being break fed on the kale are adding to the fertiliser as well.

He has replaced the old shelter block with a double-fenced belt of radiata pines.

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