For the Moore family from Upper Moutere, getting farmers to visit Nelson to buy rams can be like herding sheep.
That’s why Peter, and his son Reuben Moore are hoping a move to online auctions will help shepherd in more buyers for their Moutere Downs Romney and Poll Dorset Stud farm rams in November.
Stock agent Graeme Sidey floated the idea to the Moores one day, after seeing the high quality of their rams this year and the need to get more buyers than in-person sales can achieve.
“We thought, ‘why not?’,” Reuben explained.
“We need to sell more rams, so this could be an idea of how to get our name and brand out there.”
Selling rams via an online auction is something Peter and Reuben don’t think has happened in the Tasman region before.
“I don’t think anyone has tried it here before, not sure how it will go, but it’s difficult to get farmers to come to Nelson to buy rams,” Peter chimed in.
Usually, Moutere Downs Romney and Poll Dorset Stud sells privately on a first-in-first-served basis, but on Tuesday, 3 November the top 15 rams will go up for auction on the Bidr website, with the remainder for sale privately from Monday, 9 November.
According to Reuben, the rams will be sold in tiers based on their worm resistance breeding values (internal parasite resistance), which is something the Moores have been breeding for the past 30 years.
“I’m feeling positive, the rams look tremendous, as Graeme said, which gives me confidence that they will catch people’s eyes, but then, it is the first sale and a complete unknown,” Reuben says.
“But the rams should sell themselves, they look that good.”
The Moore family first bought 80 hectares of gorse-covered land in Moutere Hills in 1959.
The land had been overgrazed and was almost 100 per cent unusable.
“We are now up to the third generation farming the now almost gorse-free expanded property,” Reuben says.
The Moutere Downs farm is now 465 hectares and runs 3600 ewes and 100 beef cows.
Apart from the genetics in the Moutere Downs stud rams, the farm has very strong worm resistance throughout its Romneys and good natural worm resilience throughout the Poll Dorsets.
“We are testing our rams for facial eczema tolerance as well, and that natural tolerance is built up across the whole commercial flock of 3,500 ewes,” Reuben says.
Moutere Downs’ lamb finishing program is also considered revolutionary.
“We are mixing raphno and chicory as our summer crops, slightly adjusting the sowing rate, dropping 1kg/ha for the raphno (recommended 8kg/ha rate) and adding 2kg/ha of chicory.”
“It is an incredible finishing crop, and we are yet to have a failure with it.”
The farm has also recently transitioned from 100 per cent reliance on the Dovedale water scheme, with the installation of two solar pumps and water is gravity-fed over the property via a network of tanks and a maze of water pipes.
Moutere Downs is setting up for a dry summer, by planting 50 hectares of raphno in to feed the 6,000 lambs, which they tailed recently.
“There’s a very positive outlook, we have a good amount of feed around and the lambs are growing like mushrooms,” Reuben concludes.
