Morrison Farming

15/06/2026

Breeding cows groom the pasture to enable high performing lamb breeding and finishing.
We hear this a lot, from farmers, consultants and other experts. It is a sound theory; the reality is correct. The majority of farms/stations with beef breeding cows, farm a much higher proportion of sheep.
So, with the fantastic bull sale results that NZ is currently experiencing, how many of these bull breeding programs have an equivalent, or higher proportion of lamb breeding and finishing? Do they farm sheep? Are they keeping it real?
At Morrison Farming, the Ardo stud calves are either bred on the hills among 6,000 ewes and hoggets, or on the Fern Flats among 5,000 finishing lambs. Cows, heifers and their calves spend spring and summer cleaning up pastures and hoovering up sheep worm burdens.
Perhaps this is wrong and we should just be pumping the feed into cows and calves. But the mortgage is big. The stocking rates are high. The requirement to make every stock class do its job and deliver a competitive return, is real. And this is no different to the majority of the commercial farms that buy our Ardo Ezicalve bulls.

15/06/2026

4 day old calves!! What an incredible time to be a livestock farmer in NZ!
Generations of hard work is really paying dividends now.

NZ Herefords

13/06/2026

On Friday we harvested the fodder beet. We grew 3 hectares of beet specifically to lift. We have another 5 hectares that we are grazing. This is one of my favourite farm jobs; to see the huge production that comes off such a small area of the farm. The harvested beet is 18% Dry Matter with a yield of 22 Ton of bulb (excluding leaf) Dry Matter per hectare. It keeps well, in a big windrow, in a holding paddock. Over the winter months (June, July, August and September) it will be spread over grass paddocks, in front of cattle on daily grass block shifts, a bit like a lolly-scramble. Each morning when these young cattle are shifted, they get green grass with sprinkles of fodders beet. They love it!

10/06/2026

The start of June is when we start feeding the Kale crops at the Fern Flats. This is electric fence fed to 240 R-2-Yr old females (mostly in-calf and some growing for the works). There are 14 hectares. The crops are very good this year and they will keep growing through winter. Currently they yield around 14 Ton of dry matter per hectare. This is fed daily with Lucerne baleage. The heifers love it!

08/06/2026

Yearling bulls like this…. become sire bulls like this!

Wow! There are some Red-Hot bull sales right now. But, if you missed out on your picks, or they don’t quite fit your budget, or you need a better all-around performance package, relax and remember that there are spring bull sales.

Morrison Farming will auction 140 bulls on September 22.

Performance. Carcass. Growth. 65 years recorded breeding. 165 years farming. One of New Zealand’s leading recorded stud cattle herds. GREAT FOR CROSS-BREEDING!
NZ Herefords PGG Wrightson Genetics

30/05/2026

From across the Tasman - it will be sad to see the dispersal of the Wirruna Poll Herefords . But with a hundred young cattle sired by Ardo Trust 2003 and Ardo Ajax 1015, it will be really interesting to watch!

19/05/2026

We carcass scanned 250 recorded Wiltshire and Ezicare ram hoggets last weekend. An ultrasound scanning machine measured Eye Muscle Area (EMA), Fat Depth and for the first time Intra-Muscular Fat (IMF). We also recorded a weight and a dag score. This information is submitted to Beef + Lamb NZ Genetics, to generate the SIL (Sheep Improvement Ltd) breeding values and indexes. This adds to the other traits that we record including:
Number of lambs conceived and weaned,
Weaning weight,
Shedding,
Bare points,
8 month weight,
Body Condition Score,
Ewe weight,
Parasite resilience (CARLA),
Facial Eczema tolerance (RamGaurd).
What have missed?
It’s a big job and a big investment. But it’s important!

10/05/2026