Waikaka Performance Driven Herefords
Manageable Birthweights + More Manageable Milk + More Growth = Better Steers Sooner.
All our Bulls are service tested, Eye muscle and Intramuscular Fat Scanned, Udder scored, TB.C10, 30 Big rugged Bulls, horned & Polled Grassfed for Sale!!
Numbers
150 Breedplan recorded cows calve each year including 35-40 first calving 2-year-old heifers. The resulting 150 progeny, both bulls and heifers, are kept through to 18 months and then either retained for breeding or sold at the annual bull sale, anything left is for slaughter. Surplus bulls are sold as they reach 300+ kg carcass weight from March, surplus heifers are consigned to Hereford Prime.
Either way, all surplus stock are off the property by the end of May each year.
Herd Management Policy
At Waikaka we aim to manage the herd as closely as we can to the reality our bulls will face when sold on into the industry, given the constraints of different property's. We try to calve our cows and wean etc., when other commercial breeders in our area are doing so. All cows go behind hotwires cleaning up for winter there are no favourites! All cows have to calve as two year olds and must rear a live calf every year, once again there are no favourites! While using bigger framed bulls than in the past, we are conscious that frame alone without thickness and soundness will only lead to lack of constitution and survivability in the sometimes harsh South Island backcountry that the Hereford has made its own in the last 100 years. At the same time we have to capture the Asian table meat market requiring 300 kg carcases of quality fine-grained table meat and enhance our profitability by accomplishing this before the onset of the second winter, and do it off grass! These are conflicting goals and only by constant effort will we achieve them.
Our cattle operation at Waikaka is driven by profit not sentiment and we place great emphasis on lifting the performance of our lower performing cows which of course is the nuts and bolts of any commercial operation. We don't want a herd of a few stars and "the rest". There is no way you can produce even lines of steers using bulls from herds like that!
Our priorities are:
- FERTILITY - get as many calves on the ground and alive as possible.
- GROWTH - increase carcase weights to sensible goals.
- CARCASE - increase muscling in tandem with skeletal size.
- ACHIEVE - these goals with a low maintenance cow herd.
PROFIT = KG OF BEEF PER HECTARE x PRICE PER KG LESS COST OF PRODUCTION (Feeding the cow herd etc).
THAT'S WHY WE'RE IN HEREFORDS | 
