Nō te reme te tau - Final season milk collection for miraka hipi

From start to finish, the first season on the adjoining Koetuku and Waitokorau Miraka Hipi farms owned by Parininihi ki Waitōtara has been hailed as a success.

Shane Miles, PKW Te Rau Whakahaumako General Manager Ahuwhenua, says that from July 20, 2022, to May 1, 2023, the farms located in Ōkahu Inuāwai rohe collected a total of 75,000kg of milk solids, or nearly 400,000 litres of sheep milk.

“For a first season, operationally, it was really good, when you consider it was a completely new industry to us nigh on 12 months ago,” he says, praising the on-farm teams. “I cannot say enough about them.”

In 2022, PKW was still trying to get the infrastructure completed, putting extra pressure on the teams at Koetuku (70 hectares) and Waitokorau (50 hectares). Because of construction delays, lambs were being born while the infrastructure to support the operations was still being finished. “We were still going through strange times with Covid back then,” Shane says. “Which meant timelines kept getting disrupted.”

The two blocks of land are one farm, but it has been divided with a milking shed on each, although the one on Koetuku has a larger capacity. “We had to milk through one shed until November when we got the second shed established and enabled the two farms to be run independently."

Shane says the season began with about 1300 litres of miraka being collected each day, ramping up to about 4000 litres per day in the middle months and ending as it began, with around 1300 litres a day. At the peak, the teams were milking 1500 ewes in total.

“Our expectation this year is it will be nearer to 2000,” Shane says. “That’s a learning from the first year – we can milk more than was originally modelled, and we have bred additional ewe lambs this year, which will become part of the milking flock next year."

Milk from the two farms is sold to the Spring Sheep Co, which has a processing plant in Hamilton.

Other learnings by the teams have involved getting their heads around animal husbandry for the 1500 sheep as opposed to cows and other differences, including grazing practices, eating habits and pasture management. “There were more learnings than challenges,” Shane says.

The teams, with extra staff on hand, coped well with a lambing season which equated to each of the 1500 sheep having, on average, 1.5 lambs.

As ewes can have multiple lambs, the average of all those births meant that there were around 2250 lambs in total born on the property.

To cope with that number, there was a dedicated group of kaimahi working in the rearing shed through the lambing period – for around 12-weeks. At the beginning the lambs are hand-fed by bottle, but soon move on to automatic feeding machines.

Into the future, Shane says the goal for the coming season is to cement the learnings and have a year where the team can just concentrate on farming, and not have to work around infrastructure development.

The sheep are dry in May and June, and lambing and milking will start from the end of July.

“The whole team is looking forward to starting the season in a good position and having a full year.”

Shane says PKW wants to continue its diversification plans by having more sheep milking farms.

“That’s the exciting part of farming, you are always trying to do better and be better.”