Page 49 - Hereford Magazine 2021

These young Hereford cows and calves are part of Kent Duncan’s commercial herd, from which he selects young Hereford service bulls
for the dairy industry.

He plans to repeat the process next season, putting forward Kent leases about 300ha of land, including some larger
35 Friesian/Hereford or Murray Grey cross nurse cows for blocks on the hills overlooking the Taieri Plain. Calves are
embryo transfer. All are quiet cows, good milkers, and calved reared on three different properties, including his parents’
for the first time as three-year-olds. home block at Outram and on their new
He has his fingers crossed for a good “There’s no point dairy farm.
number of heifer calves to build the nucleus Ultimately, his goal is to increase the size
of a Hereford breeding herd quickly. having stock of the family’s calf-rearing operation to 3000
“It might take five years of embryo work that has the calves a year to generate enough profit to
to get a good herd of heifers, I don’t know,” same genetics buy a hill block where he can run some stud
he says. as everyone else. Hereford and commercial cows of his own.
As Kent explains, the only reason he “You need to be a bit different from
is investing so much money in embryo You’ve got to be everyone else so you’ve got something
transfers is because he is at high risk of different.” different to offer,” he says. “There’s no point
introducing Mycoplasma bovis to his Kent Duncan having stock that has the same genetics as
cattle because he leases out service bulls Hereford breeder, Outram everyone else. You’ve got to be different.
to multiple dairy farms and brings them “I know what I like, I’m learning all the time,
backto winter them on leasehold blocks. and these guys [Gray Pannett, Neil Sanderson
“I didn’t want to risk having to cull embryo cows, so we run and Richard Martin] are pointing me in the right direction.”
them on a separate block from the commercial herd.”
He has already invested in a stud Hereford bull from Gray
Pannett’s Limehills Stud in the Teviot Valley for use over his
commercial Hereford cows.
Kent was looking for a bull with low birth weight and short
gestation breeding values to supply service bulls for the
dairy industry.
Despite the scale and complexity of his farming operation,
Kent has only recently bought his first farm through a new
company, Maungatua Farming, which splits his family’s
farming and contracting businesses into two separate entities.
The 100ha package of freehold and leasehold Taieri property
is currently run as a dairy farm and the takeover date was
early November 2020.
The idea of buying the farm was to winter 1000 cows there and
build the family’s calf-rearing business up to 3000 calves a year.
“But with the new Otago Regional Council rules we don’t
know if we’re going to be able to do that on the Taieri Plain,”
Kent says. “We don’t know if we’ll be able to manage 1000 cows
without pugging paddocks and getting into trouble with the A purebred Hereford heifer calf with its Murray Grey mother, the
council.” result of a successful embryo transfer.

Year 2021 HEREFORD MAGAZINE 47