Scaling the heights as Aotuhia seeks to reach potential
Plenty of people seized a rare opportunity to see the development at an iconic hill country station. Sue O’Dowd reports. The farming potential of Taranaki’s iconic Aotuhia Station is being tapped as the owners continue their 10-year development programme on the remote hill country property.
Central Taranaki farmers Kevin and Jean Downs bought Aotuhia Station in 2003 and began a redevelopment programme that has almost doubled the stock capacity and increased the amount of pasture threefold.
‘‘There’s plenty of potential here,’’ Kevin Downs told about 200 farmers who visited the station when Beef + Lamb New Zealand – the farmer-owned industry organisation representing New Zealand’s sheep and beef farmers held what it called a Big Day Out last week. On their quad bikes or in side-by-side vehicles, the visitors undertook a 50km tour over the steep, dusty, rutted tracks of the isolated station.
It’s a 11⁄ hour drive from Stratford, and the last 25km over a dusty metal road takes about 40 minutes.
‘‘In five years time, you’ll notice even more of a difference. There’ll be a lot more grass here,’’ Downs said.
Aotuhia, 65km east of Stratford, was settled in 1896 when access was by riverboat on the Whanganui River and trek by packhorse on a narrow bridle track.
By 1914 a road wound its way 18km along the Whangamomona River from Whangamomona to the little settlement where there was a school for a while, a telephone exchange, a post office and a domain for sports events.
Low prices for farm produce, marginal land, debt and isolation took their toll forced most settlers to walk away during the Depression.
But in 1936, even though the Aotuhia district was essentially abandoned, the Government paid for the arched, concrete Bridge to Somewhere to be built over the Whangamomona River, a few kilometres upstream from where it enters the Whanganui.
In 1942 large chunks of the Whangamomona Rd fell into the river after a storm, the road was deemed beyond repair and the district remained abandoned until redevelopment began in 1980.
Landcorp began managing Aotuhia Station as a single unit in 1985 but after it was sold 10 years later, much of the grazing land reverted to scrub.
In 2003 Kevin and Jean Downs purchased Aotuhia Station and leased the adjoining Okara block which they bought the next year, creating a 3840ha unit which now has 2000 effective hectares, with just 60ha of flats at an altitude of 100m and countless steep hills rising to 335m. The property also has 800ha of native bush.
When Landcorp sold Aotuhia Station in 1995, the total effective area was only 640ha. With a redevelopment programme of spraying and burning scrub and establishing new pasture, the Downs family has boosted carrying capacity from just over 9500 stock units to 17,100, at a ratio of 53 per cent sheep and 47 per cent cattle. More redevelopment in the next two years will increase the effective size by 640ha, allowing stock units to rise to 20,000.
It’s all about improving farm performance and enhancing the strengths of the station as a breeding block for stock that are fattened on the family’s other Taranaki properties at Pukengahu, Strathmore and Urenui.
Figures presented to farmers last week put the station’s gross return at $526/effective hectares this season, with projected income of almost $1.52m and expenses of not quite $467,000. The family has a policy of using the extra income generated by better livestock prices for fertiliser.
Soil at Aotuhia is a mix of papa and loam, with a pH of 5.2 to 5.8. In the first two years of ownership, the family fertilised the flats. In 2006 and 2008, 500 tonnes of superphosphate were applied over the entire station and in the last two years there has been a maintenance application of 250 tonnes on the better 1250ha.
Twin sons Lance and Lloyd, 23, have played a big role in the development of Aotuhia. They completed secondary school by correspondence so they could help on the farm and Lloyd now manages Aotuhia Station, while Lance is the manager of the family’s 810ha block at Strathmore, 33km away.
Clearing the scrub, developing tracks and getting rid of goats and pigs must have been a back-breaking task at times.
While Kevin Downs said manuka posed no problem now, ‘‘at first it felt like it was was strangling us’’.
Employing a digger driver has allowed the family to be efficient in the development and maintenance of infrastructure, which includes about 100km of tracks, dams for stockwater and an annual fencing programme of 3-4km. As well as the main yards, the station has 10 small yards and the most distant paddock is 13.5km from the woolshed.
Lloyd Downs said there were not too many paddocks with fences.
‘‘I pull a few fences down because it’s easier than repairing them,’’ he said.
Cattle figure strongly in the redevelopment programme, controlling weeds and stopping regrowth of scrub to keep the pasture in good order for the sheep. ‘‘The cattle make it for the sheep.’’ Last year the station wintered 700 angus cows and that number will increase by 100 over the next two years as the redevelopment continues.
Angus bulls are mated with rising twoyear-old heifers and the best cows just before Christmas and charolais, shorthorn and hereford bulls go out with the rest of the herd. After scanning, late or empty cows are sold.
‘‘We keep the cows until we see them heading downhill,’’ he said.
Lloyd Downs is satisfied with the calving rate of 92 per cent, which is much higher than the 72 per cent average for similar class land in the western North Island. Calving begins behind wire on the flats on October 1 and 650 calves were born last year.
Between April and June 420 weaners leave the farm at an average liveweight of 260kg – for sale or fattening – and 230 replacement heifer calves are kept.
Aotuhia Station wintered 7000 ewes and 2300 hoggets last year, and those numbers will rise over the next two years to 8000 and 3000 respectively. Lambing starts on September 15.
In the last five years the mixed age and two-tooth ewes have scanned at 150 per cent to 170 per cent.
Nearly 6500 lambs are sold at 28kg to 30kg liveweight between December and March and older and triplet-bearing ewes are culled at weaning in December or at scanning in winter.
Hoggets are shorn in November, ewes and lambs are shorn in December and two-tooth ewes and ewe lambs are shorn in April, providing about 50 tonnes of greasy wool.
While Kevin Downs is frustrated that older generations of farmers aren’t creating opportunities for young people to get into sheep and beef farm ownership, he and his wife are doing their bit.
If the couple think young people have what it takes to farm in the hill country, they provide them with pathways to farm ownership.
So far they’ve helped seven young farmers who have worked for them to buy farms.