Same land, different game for breeder

BY JON MORGAN

It's now a rugged golf course, but once it was the birthplace of modern New Zealand sheep breeding.

The white ball bounces twice and rolls to a halt beside a round black sheep poo. Tony Parker expertly flicks the poo aside and, with a smooth swing, sends the ball soaring toward a small green ringed by a two-wire electric fence.

Watching are a few romneys and his fellow golf course architect and builder, son John. "Nice shot; not too bad for an old fella," remarks his son with a grin. The sheep say nothing.

The nine-hole course at Wairunga, 450 metres above Hawke's Bay's Waimarama beach resort, is on a farm that could lay claim to being the birthplace of modern New Zealand sheep breeding.

These days, its pioneering sheep breeder has put away his weighing machine and notebooks and is more often seen with a pitching wedge in his hands.

The course will never rival jeweller Michael Hill's hand-crafted Queenstown fairways as a New Zealand Open venue. But it is just as challenging – holes hemmed in by ancient titoki and tawa trees, elevated tees above 100m-deep bluffs and rough that is, well, rough.

And then there's the sheep poo littering the fairways – a hazard not found in similar tourist hotspots. It's a good idea not to play barefoot.

Despite, or maybe because of, these features, the Wairunga golf course is thriving.

Its 28 members pay $75 for a season's membership and a Wednesday night twilight competition is particularly popular.

In summer, holidaymakers come up from the beach, or stroll over from the farm's tourist cottages, for a game at $10 a round. They are given a half-set of clubs in a sewn-up old trouser leg to carry.

In these times of fluctuating meat prices and sinking wool returns, it would be easy to say the course was built to tap into the tourism market and bring in extra income, but Mr Parker is having none of that.

"It was just a bit of fun," he smiles. "Someone suggested, probably not too seriously, that we could put in a golf course and straight away, before I had a change of mind, I got cracking with the bulldozer."

That was 12 years ago and now Mr Parker, 79, has retired to town. He is a regular visitor to make sure the course is still playing well but greenkeeping duties have been taken over by John, who with wife Paulette and their young children, now runs the farm.

Wairunga has been in the Parker family since it was cleared from the bush after World War I.

Mr Parker's father, known as PH, bought it in 1919 when he returned from the war. He left the patches of bush and a few scattered trees as shade and shelter for the romneys and cattle he bought.

In the late 1940s, PH made his son a gift of 100 stud ewes as a way to keep his mind focused on farming.

Mr Parker admits his thoughts were straying to city life, but when the money the ewes earned him in the 50s wool boom began to mount up he knew where his priorities lay.

In 1955, that commitment was cemented when he heard Massey University Professor Al Rae speak at a meeting at Waimarama.

"He told us the best way to improve the romney breed was to measure our sheep's performance – weigh our lambs at weaning, weigh the wool from their first shear and to take note of which ewes bred twins."

This "wonderful, simple logic" was irresistible, Mr Parker says.

"If you want meat, if you want wool, you measure for it. It took all the mystique out of breeding and opened it up to reality."

* * *

But removing that "mystique" was fiercely opposed by the breed societies who dominated the sheep industry. Mr Parker says they felt threatened by Professor Rae and the farmers who acted on his advice.

"They ran the ram fairs and the shows and appointed the judges. They conned us into thinking only they had a sixth sense that gave them the ability to judge the animals."

Breeding had become a "beauty contest" without any consideration for meat and wool production.

"They did the industry a lot of harm, breeding animals for what they thought were good looks, but we ended up with sheep that were squat, wool-blind and wide-headed, prone to foot rot and with 30 per cent of them needing to be helped to have their single lamb."

Mr Parker became the first farmer to apply Professor Rae's methods. It was the start of modern breeding techniques that have transformed the sheep industry.

Today, performance recording is standard, with many farmers basing their ram choices on indexes of key measurements in a central database.

Sheep are valued for their fertility, free-lambing, fast growth and meat production. They have narrow heads and shoulders and meaty backsides and their heads and legs are free of long wool.

He remembers Professor Rae and his staff coming to the farm in 1961 with a state-of-the-art Munroe calculator to input the measurements he and his wife Robby had recorded. "It was several feet wide with cogs and wheels that clanked and clattered. The team worked on it all night and in the morning we had an index."

According to the calculations, the top ram was an ugly brute by the standards of the time.

It had a long head and legs and narrow shoulders. It was so different from most of the stud sheep that it was decided to disband the stud and mate the ram to the farm's commercial ewes.

Mr Parker became an enthusiastic supporter of performance recording and, as a member of the Hawke's Bay A & P Society committee, was able to get a special class introduced based on the new system.

It measured key indicators of a ewe bearing twin lambs in succeeding ewes, with the figures from all five animals included.

It was accepted as a Royal Show class and lasted 10 years before disappearing as shows became less important to breeders.

* * *

With the first indexes calculated, Mr Parker and a few other early converts of Professor Rae decided to advertise their rams. "That's when all hell broke loose," he remembers. "The breed societies immediately went on the offensive."

They tried to socially ostracise him and Robby. "We were lucky to live out here away from areas like Manawatu's Ram Alley and that none of our friends were stud breeders."

More importantly, his ram clients stuck by him. During the next 15 years, lambing percentage on Wairunga escalated from 100 per cent to 150 per cent and stayed there.

With results like this, the move to recording quickly spread and breeding groups were formed to make the most of the new technology.

By the 1980s they were putting their top animals into a central flock and making big gains by pooling their resources.

The New Zealand Romney Development Group was the biggest, screening 150,000 sheep a year with rams servicing 2.2 million ewes on 700 farms.

The group, and others like it, have all but disappeared today with the introduction of sire referencing, which ranks rams on the growth of their progeny, and the formation of the multi-breed Stock Improvement ram database.

Mr Parker regards Professor Rae, who died recently, as one of the country's greatest scientists.

"The reason our livestock industry is thriving today is to a great deal due to him. I was very lucky to have been influenced by him."

John took over 15 years ago at a time when the flock was going through a bad patch.

After successfully breeding out foot rot and a susceptibility to facial eczema, they had tried using the same techniques to breed parasite-resistant or resilient sheep.

But it proved a much harder task, with such a trait not being readily passed on to succeeding generations.

Mr Parker says that if he was still breeding sheep he would be trying a different tack.

"The future is in meat. I'd be looking for something easy to shear."

At Wairunga today, on 226ha, John runs 1300 romney ewes, reduced from 1800 in recent years because of drought, and 130-150 beef cattle.

Whether it was created to earn extra income or not, the golf course attracts many visitors.

A thousand people visit the farm each year to play golf, stay in the two cottages, which sleep 12, or to walk over a 10-kilometre track, shared with a neighbour's farm, that makes its way through bush remnants to a 520m summit with spectacular views.

The bush has been added to with plantings of rimu, maire, beech, pittosporums, kauri, totara and cabbage trees.

On the golf course, father and son look over their creation with pride.

They are pleased they went to the extra trouble of installing water sprinklers when it was built and say the sheep are a valuable grazing tool that means upkeep is reduced to just a few hours of green mowing a week.

Surprisingly, they weren't golfers before they built the course, but certainly are now.

"I've joined the Hastings Golf Club at Bridge Pa and play there twice a week," Mr Parker says.

"But I know which one I prefer. We may not be as well groomed but we're just as challenging and, besides, there's nothing like playing on a course you've built yourself."

More: www.wairungahawkesbay.co.nz

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