Teaching ‘old dog’ new tricks

And a lot of this is thanks to the fresh, innovative mind of David Moyle’s son James, who has recently come home to farm, after a stint at university.

Mr Moyle runs the farm with wife Donna and said James, who as well as helping out full-time on the family farm, has purchased his own block of land just down the road.

He said since James came back to help, they have tried “some new tricks”.

One of those tricks has been joining ewes as lambs, rather than at one and a half years of age, like they previously did.

“You’ve got to get your lamb off early, but it means you get an extra lamb out of them,” Mr Moyle said.

Instead of only scanning crossbred ewes, they now also scan and re-scan all Merino ewes.

“We should have started doing that a long time ago,” he said.

One of the biggest changes has been delaying the joining process.

“We used to put rams out in the third week of December, but now we put them out in the third week of January, so they cycle better,” he said.

“It means we get another 10 per cent lambing each year.”

Mr Moyle said while he and James might not always agree, it’s important to take on the younger generation’s opinion, rather than just saying ‘we’ve been doing it this way for decades’. 

“Some ideas are going to work, and some might not, but James is really into the technical side of things, he’s on the computer every night doing research, so it’s important to take it into consideration,” he said.

The Hamilton property has been in the Moyle family since 1977, but it hasn’t always been a woolgrowing operation.

It was originally run as a cropping operation, but Mr Moyle wasn’t impressed by the farm’s yields, so he and his brother went their separate ways.

“He stayed in cropping and I went into livestock,” he said.

“It’s a business, not a lifestyle, so you have to work out the dollars per hectare, I was never going to go into cattle, so I had to decide to go into wool or meat sheep.”

He went into wool sheep, and ran Merinos for the first 10 years, but the market wasn’t in his favour.

So he decided to sell half of the flock, and start breeding first-cross ewes.

The flock now consists of 5000 crossbreds and Merinos, and is constantly being improved.

“We’re always working on our ram selection and classing, and it’s got a lot better in the last 10 years after we weeded out the ones we didn’t like,” he said.