North Range Partnership - Farm

06/10/2026

27/09/2026

🔷️♠️PJ Budler at North Range — Thursday 8 October♠️🔷️

Waimara Angus and North Range invite you to spend an afternoon talking cattle with PJ Budler. We’ll look at what it takes to breed functional, efficient cattle that handle tough conditions and still produce.

📍 🔷️♠️Main woolshed, 483 Sutherland Road🔷️♠️

🕐 🔷️♠️Meet and greet from 1:00 pm | PJ starts at 1:30 pm🔷️♠️

With the weather so unpredictable, we’ll base the afternoon in the woolshed. We’ll have cattle in the nearby yards and head out to look at them when the weather allows. We’re planning to have cows or heifers with calves, yearling bulls and heifers, and a couple of older bulls for discussion.

We’ll finish with a barbecue and beers, and plenty of time to catch up. After such a tough lambing season, it’ll be good to get off farm for an afternoon.

♠️🔷️We can now fit a few more people in.️ If you’re interested in coming, please call, text or message
Andrew Law on 027 452 1167

So we have numbers for catering. Hope to see you there!

23/09/2026

♠️🔷️For the past 70 days we've been quietly putting 180 heifers to the test.♠️🔷️

The idea came from some interesting US research looking at feed efficiency in cattle. One of the findings that caught our attention was that cattle that perform efficiently on high-quality, energy-dense diets aren't necessarily the same cattle that perform best on forage.

That's pretty relevant to us — we're trying to breed cows that perform in a grass-based hill-country system.

So in mid-June we weighed 180 commercial and stud heifers and put them on one of the poorer forage areas of North Range.

There's been plenty to eat — it just hasn't been particularly good quality.

After 70 days they'll be weighed and body condition scored again, so we can see which heifers have continued to grow and hold condition, and which have struggled when the feed isn't doing all the work for them.

♠️🔷️The really important part for us is having our ️stud heifers run with our commercial heifers in big mobs all year except calving and mating.♠️🔷️

These females could become the mothers of our future genetics — both for us and ultimately for the commercial farmers using our bulls. We think they should have to prove themselves under exactly the same conditions as our commercial cattle.

The idea for the trial came from work by ♠️🔷️Dr Dave Lalman at Oklahoma State University♠️🔷️, who has suggested this sort of 70-day forage test as a practical way for commercial farmers to start identifying differences between replacement females.

We're nearly at the end now, so it'll be interesting to see what the scales tell us.

♠️🔷️We're not looking for the heifer that performs best when everything is put in front of her. We're trying to find the ones that can still perform when it isn't.♠️🔷️

And ultimately, they still have to pass the most important test — getting in calf.

17/09/2026

🔷️♠️Who would have thought…🔷️♠️

Back in 2015 we were using a pony to carry standards around the hills, putting up electric fence so we could graze blocks for pasture development and oversowing.

Fast forward 10 years and we're putting collars on cows to do essentially the same job.

I don't think we could have imagined that back then — and it does make you wonder where we'll be in another 10 years.

It's also a good reminder when we're making breeding decisions today.

Technology, farming systems and the tools available to us are changing incredibly quickly. We don't really know what our farming system will look like in another generation of cattle.

But some things don't change.

A functional, efficient cow that can walk the hills, maintain herself, get in calf, rear a good calf and do it again next year will always have a place.

🔷️♠️Optimum rather than maximum. Functional efficiency never really goes out of fashion.🔷️♠️

03/09/2026

♠️🔷️We made it through our first winter without crop.♠️🔷️

A few lambs are starting to arrive, the stud cows are well into calving, grass is starting to move and we're getting close to having everything set stocked.

Overall, we're pretty happy with where we've landed.

The cows are probably a little lighter than we'd ideally like them to be. Nothing we're worried about, but we certainly wouldn't want to push them any further. On the positive side, we're happy with the covers we've got in front of them and, for our first attempt at wintering everything on grass, there are plenty of positives.

Probably the biggest lesson is that some of the decisions we made well before winter made the job harder than it needed to be.

We kept a mob of 130 store heifer a month longer than we should have. We also took a bit of weight of the ewes in march cleaning up blocks and we should have just left them.

Neither seemed like a huge decision at the time, but you certainly notice them when you're trying to make every blade of grass count through winter!

That's probably what gives us the most confidence going forward. There isn't one big thing we need to fix — there's plenty of room to simply manage the system better and go into next winter in a stronger position.

Halter is already starting to help with that. We're able to put cows into some of our lambing hill blocks and contain them to areas that wouldn't normally be used for lambing, picking up feed that would otherwise be difficult to utilise. Having the collars in full swing from the start next winter should give us another big step forward.

So, year one: not perfect, plenty learnt, but we've made it through without winter crop and we're pretty happy with the result.

Now the challenge is to do it better next year.

30/08/2026

We are looking for a couple of casual staff to help us with tailing. 19th October to 31st October. We have shared accommodation if needed.
Pm North Range Partnership - Farm