The Best Mothers Money Can Buy
In 2025 Kaiapoi had 2500 breeding ewes in North Hertfordshire. Including a sheep dairy, milking 300 ewes per season.
The ewes and ewe lambs lambed on permanent parkland, at weaning the ewes were left in situ to dry off while the lambs move onto our best pasture and forage crops for the ram lambs to finish and the ewe lambs to reach tupping weight.
In the Autumn the ewes moved off the grass and took up their winter residence on arable stubbles and forage crops behind electric fence allowing the pastures to rest and gives the girls a change of scenery!
Having the sheep flock allowed us to make profitable use of permanent pasture which we rotationally paddock grazed (sheep version of mob grazing) this encourages the pasture to grow more quality and quantity and helps control weeds without the need for herbicides.
Kaiapoi was born in the UK in 2013 with 200 Romney ewes. In 2019 we imported four Rams from New Zealand carrying double copies of the MyoMax gene which gives a 10% higher lean meat yield. These Rams were from the Nithdale flock whose previous owner spent many years selecting specifically for pelvic aperture, giving our girls the widest hips in the business!!
We then DNA shepherded the recorded flock which gave a 20% greater accuracy than paper recording. The samples were sent to the US for analysis and the results are combined on the SIL database to give the animals an EBV (Estimated Breeding Value). This score, ground truthed against the animal in the field allowing us to select the best performers for our breeding programme.
In 2025 we took our top 5 recorded rams to the semen collection centre and have straws available.
Over the 13 years we ran sheep in Hertfordshire the population continued to increase and the pressures that created heightened. Combined with a change in government in 2024 we felt we were no longer able to run our sheep in the area any longer. Following an extensive search we purchased two farms in France and have relocated the sheep enterprise to the Limousin region of France.
Sadly we were not able to take our UK flock directly due to Bluetongue restrictions, however we were able to buy 550 Romney ewe lambs related to our flock from a french farming family and are now working hard to re-establish our flock. In 2027 we hope to inseminate these ewes with the UK semen collected in 2025 to introduce the MyoMax gene into the flock and will begin DNA shepherding again.