After a week’s work experience spent getting to grips with greasing machinery, fencing, soil sampling and driving a (small!) tractor, I knew that I had to be involved in farming somehow and couldn’t wait to learn more. The following Easter, I went up to Yorkshire to spend some time with two hill farmers who had kindly offered to teach a complete novice all about lambing. I was captivated by the tradition and culture of hill farming and after lambing my first ewe that week, a Mule with a tangled set of twins, I was well and truly bitten by the sheep farming bug.

In 2014 I started studying BSc Agriculture at the University of Nottingngham, spending every holiday
where I could either lambing, milking cows or carting corn. I spent my third year at a university in
France learning about - amongst other things - growing wine and how it can go hand in hand with
sheep production! It was after talking to a group of French dairy technicians at a farm tour that I first
got the idea of going to New Zealand.

After graduating in 2018, I worked over the harvest to save up for a plane ticket, then set off that
October for what was supposed to be six months in New Zealand – nearly five years later I am still
there! The first six months I spent milking cows and working on a neighbouring drystock farm near
Matamata in the Waikato, before venturing south to pursue my goal of working with sheep on a
larger scale, to the farm I now work on, Minzion Station.

Minzion is a 6,500 ha sheep and beef property in Central Otago, New Zealand. Beginning in the
Teviot Valley, the land consists of intensively managed crop and grassland on the home blocks and
extends out to the extensive pastoral tussock country of Mount Teviot (1000m asl) and Lake Onslow
(700m asl). There is strong focus on legume production both on the hill country (white clover) and the lower home blocks (lucerne for grazing and making baleage), as well as brassicas for wintering ewes postshearing and youngstock.

Stockwise, we run approximately 850 Hereford and Hereford x Angus cows and 150 replacement
heifers, with Hereford, Angus X and Charolais X calves being bred to sell in the autumn as stores. The
sheep flock currently stands at about 13,000 ewes, 5000 of which are Perendales and 8000 of which
are Halfbreds (Romney x Merino). We have introduced the Halfbreds gradually over the past few
years, by sourcing ewe lambs from a few select farms and breeding our own replacements, with the
eventual aim of replacing the Perendales completely. The additional income from the Halfbreds’
higher quality wool and their ability to do well on drier country, along with their excellent maternal
instinct and handling ease, makes them a much better fit for the system. Last year we started eID
tagging the ewe lambs, with the aim of monitoring their performance on desired traits (such as
number of lambs weaned, fleece weight and micron) in order to select the most productive sheep to
breed from. There is also a small stud flock of 45 Suftex and Suf-Bel-Tex ewes, which is a bit of an
experiment in progress to see which cross produces the best terminal sires to use over the
commercial ewes.

There are three of us working full-time on the farm – myself, a junior shepherd and the farm owner manager – as well as a casual shepherd when needed and a part-time fencer general. We rely heavily
on seasonal labour in the spring and summer months, especially for tractor work. My role on the
farm comprises anything from cultivating paddocks and drenching lambs, to making feed budgets
and preparing records for audits - I enjoy the fact that there is such a variety of work and that no two
days are the same. In the long term, I hope to put the skills and knowledge I have gained into practice one day in my own farm business, and to be in a position to help other new entrants into the sheep industry.