Seymour Sheep

Charlie and Kerry Seymour are right at the top of sheep performance on the East Coast, with high performance in an environment traditionally considered difficult for sheep. They won the 2008 NZ Ewe Hogget Competition.

Kerry and Charlie have a very strong partnership: Its a real strength of their business. Theyve been together since marrying in 1987, and they leased the land and share farmed from 1995, and then bought the farm in 2003.

Both work on the farm, and Kerry works two half days teaching at the Whangara pre-school. They have their own dogs, and do a great deal of the stock work together.

They try and do as much of the work on the farm themselves, and theyve always carried out a high level of maintenance.

Most of this land has been in the Seymour family since it was first leased in 1875.

Kohata Station is 700ha, and made up of three valleys, mostly facing east, and with some southerly facing.

Only about 20ha isnt grazed, with bush and woodlots. There are roads around two-thirds of their boundary which is handy.

Of the 700ha, there are only 40ha of flats, with almost a third of the farm easy and the rest steep.

Its quite close to the sea, and the farm runs up to only about 300m above sea level.

The soils are winter wet and summer dry. Every August they plant about 100 poles, mostly poplars.

The farm runs 6500 stock units, with 60% cattle, 31% sheep and 9% deer. (There is a 160ha deer unit).

Despite the low numbers of sheep, it is a high performance flock. And as per head production ahs increased, ewe numbers have reduced. The cattle emphasis is because only the two of them work on the farm.

They have 290 cows, which is quite sizeable considering the farm size. Its an Angus operation, with only the bulls finished before the second winter. Steers are sold as weaners.

The cows are used to keep the pasture in good shape for the sheep.

On the deer side, they have 100 hinds fawning, and they finish all their stags, killing half of them at the end of the first winter, and the other half carried on to 45kg carcass weights.

Charlie and Kerrys sheep return more than $100/sheep stock unit. Their three year average income for sheep and wool has been $105/sheep stock unit.

They cut an impressive 7kg of wool per sheep stock unit, a result of good feeding.

Their animal health costs are pretty low at $3.68/sheep stock unit, and over the last three years their average lamb price has been $72.67. In the 2009/10 year they received an average $87 for lambs.

Their farm expenses have been below 50% of gross farm income, which is remarkable for this type of farm.

Eleven years ago the Seymours had a bad outbreak of facial eczema, so decided to find some rams that were tolerant.

Charlie says whatever fungal toxin problems they have, Northland breeders have it worse, so now they buy their Coopworth rams from David Hartles near Whangarei.

They have taken their flock from a 124% lambing with Border Leicester Romneys in 1995, to reaching scanning of 222% this year in the mixed age ewes, and 204% for the two-tooths. Their lambing percentage is close to 180%.

This is an incredible increase in performance which is attributable to three things:

1. new genetics

2. scanning

3. eczema tolerance

However using facial eczema tolerant sheep is the main reason why their sheep performance has lifted so much. Previously they have lost many ewes and rams: 10 years ago they lost 300 ewes and had only eight surviving rams out of 35.

That has meant they dropped ewe numbers from 2300 ewes back to 1300 ewe and 500 in-lamb hoggets: and they get the same number of lambs now!

Scanning is a great tool Charlie says. You dont have to change the equation much to get that money back, he says.

Theyve been lambing hoggets for 10 years, and these animals had a 144% scanning this year.

Any ewes which scan with a single lamb are sold, so now every ewe they keep is scanned with multiple lambs.

This means they can manipulate their lambing percentages and keep per head performance high.

For example they mate more ewes and hoggets than they need. About 650 hoggets are farmed through to scanning at the end of June, and then of these 500 in-lamb hoggets are retained and the rest sold.

At scanning the 150 mixed age ewes with single lambs are sold, and also a few late multiples.

As a result of this, their docking percentages are high: from the hoggets they have docked an average of 114% in the past three years.

Lambing triplets is a high-risk business Charlie says. When we first scanned for twinning ewes the losses would always be in them, now all the problems are in the triplet-scanned ewe mob, and the twin-scanned ewes are trouble-free.

The triplets are identified at scanning and lambed separately in small, sheltered paddocks.

This is a topic which farmers debate because some people advocate keeping twin and triplet bearing ewes together. One year we listened to them and it was disastrous for the triplet ewes they couldnt compete.

Instead, now they stock the triplet ewes at a low rate and give them every chance they can.

They try and stay out of lambing paddocks, and say there is virtually no mothering on. However they do check for cast sheep. Hoggets are also left to their own devices.

We are breeding and selecting for the ewes to have as many lambs as they can. If you do that you have to face the responsibility of dealing with them. The triplet ewes are still our best sheep, no doubt about it. 95% of them are magnificent sheep the biggest and the best unless you are shearing them!

Charlie and Kerry want to draft as many lambs off their mothers as they can.

They aim to get 60-70% of lambs gone by mid January.

The first lambs to get drafted are from the B flock which are mated to Suffolks and Dorsets. The ewes in this B flock lamb from late June.

The main ewes start lambing in mid August.

The early lambs all go on contracts to the Bernard Matthews plant at Gisborne, which is close, the later ones on schedule to the same place.

Early lambs are killed at 16-18kg weights. All the lambs about 2000 each year - are weighed off the farm.

The Seymours want the lambs to get to marketable weights as fast as they can.

This helps minimize the risk of exposure to facial eczema problems, and to any dry summers.

It also lets them channel the feed back into the ewe lambs and ewes.

Charlie is really worried about the impact of the ETS on their farm, and how little scope they have to change to cope with it, since they already have really high production and an intensive system.

He sees the ETS as a production tax which is going to be disastrous, and says his biggest concern is for the profitability of farms because the ETS will drag a massive amount of money away from the rural areas.