At home in the heather
Once a rarity in our rural landscape, highland cattle are becoming a popular choice for lifestyle blocks because of their appealing look and docile nature. Anne Hardie visits a `fold’ that looks right at home on the Takaka Hills.
The rocky outcrops and heather-clad hillsides of Takaka Hill are about as close to home as highland cattle are going to get in New Zealand.
It’s there, on the way to Canaan Downs, that Swiss-born Hans Strub and Verena Rudolf have run a small herd - or fold as they are called in Scotland - for the past 15 years.
Snow covers the landscape two or three times a year, with a few extra falls this last winter, but it’s still a benign climate compared with the Scottish Highlands where the shaggy beasts originate.
Numerous small herds now dot Nelson’s rural landscape, though normally on the lusher pasture of small lifestyle blocks where their docile nature and shaggy good looks attract attention.
For Hans and Verena, they’re a tough beast happy to browse on the native pasture and heather and fit well with the couple’s holistic lifestyle.
Hans bought 100ha of rock-strewn terrain covered by regenerating bush in the late ’80s, built a creative house with his craftsman skills and farmed the cleared space that now amounts to about 24ha.
It’s a perfect hideaway and Hans had been seeking a block of land on the hill for some time, but initially the property was a huge task to tackle.
“It was quite daunting because, after all, the farmers who had run it in the past had basically given up on it,” he explains. “There was hardly any pasture when we came here and there was one paddock that had to be pointed out to us because it was so overgrown you just couldn’t see the fences.
“But it’s kind of grown on me really and I enjoy being here more now than when I first came here.”
Initially, they ran a herd of up to 75 milking goats that chomped away on the weedy pasture, and the couple sold the milk to the former Parkerfield Dairy in Motueka for cheese.
Doe kids were raised for live export, contributing to a plane-load to Korea where they were needed for milk production.
When the dairy closed and returns from the goats didn’t stack up, the couple looked for other options for their hilltop block and settled on highland cattle.
“I never considered any other breeds,” says Hans. “They seemed the perfect animal up here: hardy, light, worm resistant, and because we’ve always been organic, they suited well.”
Mostly though, they’re bred very much for their looks in New Zealand and Hans says they mature too slowly to be used as a commercial beef breed.
“You wouldn’t consider slaughtering a steer below 18 months and that’s still a small animal.”
Despite their slow maturity, a number of breeders in the North Island are trying to establish a highland beef market. Hans says the meat is well marbled and compares favourably with other beef.
It’s not a path Hans and Verena want to go down though, because while they’re happy to slaughter old cows and steers on their property for their own salami and beef, sending them off to be slaughtered in a meat works doesn’t fit with their philosophy for raising animals.
“We want to stay a little bit more connected to how nature intended and not pull things too much out of context,” Verena explains.
The popularity of the breed means that it’s more worthwhile selling the animals to lifestyle blocks than for meat anyway.
The breed’s slower maturity also means they are slower to mate. Hans says they don’t mate the heifers until they are about two years old.
“They don’t look like they can handle it any earlier because they’re still pretty small and have a bit of filling out to do. I know people who mate them earlier and they tend to look a bit stunted.”
Though slow to mature, they then have a long, productive life. They can live to about 18 years of age while producing calves.
But it’s that shaggy look with a great mane of hair hanging over their eyes and a horn span that can spread 1.2m that captivates breeders.
“I just liked the look of them,” Hans admits.
And that’s what sells them too. The difference in the shape of the horns can mean a big difference in dollars when buyers are looking for just two or three to grace their paddocks.
These days, a purebred cow in calf is worth about $2500, with numbers being lifted dramatically through embryo transplants and imports.
Most of Hans and Verena’s herd have been bred up from base cows and they now have a mixture of purebreds and crossbreds totalling 17. By chance they used jersey, hereford and shorthorn cows to initially cross with highland bulls and found the jersey the best of those. It proved too hard to breed out the white faces of the herefords, while the shorthorns retained their white belly and had the dominant polled gene.
Nowadays, you can’t cross highland bulls with base cows if you want to eventually register them with the New Zealand Highland Cattle Society’s herd book.
Though the horns are one of the highland cattle’s greatest assets, Hans says people have to learn how to deal with them. They need to be given time in the yards or loading into trucks to allow them to manoeuvre their horns through the given space. In their own yards, he’s altered the rails in the race to give their horns space and that’s worked well.
Nowadays, their fold, Northwest Highlands, works easily alongside Hans’ cabinet-making business, looking every bit at home on the heather-clad hills.
Tags: 18 years, fence, fences, landscape, lifestyle, maturity, plants
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