The focus is on promoting their Polwarth stud rams.
They have their own site at the November show, to meet with ram-buying clients and prospective new clients; winning the supreme fine-wool award “12 or 13 times in the last 16 years” helps with the marketing efforts.
The success lifts their profile in the industry and has led Andrew into the wool judging circles, most recently at the Uruguayan national show in September. They funded that visit with prize-money from the Dakins Show Ambassador award in 2017, awarded each year to the farmers doing most to advance the show’s ideals.
The Patersons sell 200 stud rams each year and the Canterbury show (now the New Zealand agricultural show) is their main promotional event.
“It’s an important few days for us,” Andrew says.
Wool used to be the main money-earner for their Matakanui Station at Omakau in Central Otago. More recently, lamb meat income has taken over . . . the Polwarth is a genuine dual-purpose breed.
They have 1000 stud ewes and a 9000 commercial ewe flock.
“The lambs are a big part of what we do, and wool is big as well; they go hand-in-hand.”
They also run about 850 Hereford cattle.
“We’ve found that we can’t run as many sheep if we don’t have cattle, but they do provide good income as well.”
High quality and high yields are the objective at Matakanui.
The beef goes into ANZCO’s restaurant supply business in Japan. Lambs go into Alliance’s Silere alpine origin brand restaurant supply.
“The lamb is really good, and the beef is top quality,” Andrew Paterson says.
The Patersons put a lot of time into genetic testing, and he had to take a break from eye muscle scanning of ram hoggets to talk to Farmers Weekly.
They’re also involved in grading The New Zealand Merino Co research flock, and heavily involved in the group’s work on breeding footrot resistance into the wider breed.
Footrot is one of the great challenges of farming merino, and the work is specially crucial in a wet year like this one. He estimates that three-quarters of the 10,000 Matakanui flock is now resistant.
“It makes a huge difference to managing the flock, to the extent that it is not one of our problems now. This year the biggest challenge is having enough stock to eat the pasture down.”
As well as taking big silage volumes this season, the farm is topping pasture to retain grass quality.
The farm supplies 500 bales of wool a year to The NZ Merino Co. Of this, 200 bales are sold to Icebreaker and 100 bales to Smartwool contracts.
The Icebreaker wool is at the stronger end of its supply base, and the supply to Smartwool is at the finer end of its requirements.
Matakanui produces wool in the 20 to 21.5 micron range, having moved finer in recent years from a 23-24 micron range.
“We think 21 micron is right in the sweet spot,” Paterson says. “There’s so much demand and limited supply.”
They won’t be going any finer than what they do now, because they have a “really good balance” in the meat/wool equation.
“If we go finer, the hoggets will be too fine, and we don’t want our animals to be too small.
“We’ve got good size and meatiness and higher fat content into our lambs, and we’re getting good lambing percentages.
“This season’s rate was 118% and we’re pleased with that. We’ve been getting it up by about 1% each year.”
Matakanui is a big farm, 8700ha of steep high country – ranging from 280 metres to 1600 metres above sea level – and was bought by the Paterson family in 1958.
Andrew is the third-generation farmer, and says his parents deserve a lot of the credit for many of the achievements on his watch.
His wife Tracy is a full partner in the farm operations. She came from a non-farming background, but now does the farm administration and stud recording, including being involved in ram selection, and with marketing.
She’s also a qualified wool classer.
“I’m out of the wool shed now and she has three weeks in there doing the classing,” Andrew said.
“I’ve been teaching her all about the farm so that if something happens to me, she could carry it on, and that’s important for the next generation if they choose to be involved.”
Tracy set up the Canterbury show site in November and ran it on her own on for the first couple of days while Andrew was kept at home trying to keep up with the silage work needed because of the exceptional pasture growth after high rainfall.
“We do really well as a team,” he says. “I like to think that I’m a well-rounded farmer, and a good stockman.”
A big project now is mechanical, with a lot of recent restructuring of the irrigation system to spray from border-dyke. They irrigate 430ha of flat to rolling country, allowing them to grow a lot of good lucerne to cut for winter feed.
Without that, they would be running about 5000 stock units fewer than the average 24,000su they’re doing now. It would also mean going back to selling more store stock, rather than finishing as they do now.
The Canterbury Show is a good fit for the Patersons, as they sell rams into North Canterbury, as well into the Hakataramea and Middlemarch areas, then into the lower central Otago and Northern Southland areas. Their rams do well in usually drier regions similar to Omakau.
They also show their wool at the small Central Otago Show at Omakau, and Paterson says it’s harder to win there than in Christchurch because the top local fine-wool producers are also in the contest.
