Page 3 - Wairere Angus

Herd History
The present owner’s grandfather came to the farm where the Wairere stud was to eventuate in the 1890s.
In 1936 the Wairere Angus stud started, when Owen Lander registered the first progeny of the animals he had purchased from the Ngawaka stud at Masterton
In 1966 a shipment of 34 cows was bought from the South Island’s Heathfield stud and were airlifted in to Wanganui, then trucked to Wairere.
Originally stock were sold through paddock sales, but when Taranaki breeders combined to have a sale held centrally in Stratford, Owen decided to join the group and sell through this
venue. Most sales in those days were yearling sales and when he thought he had a bull worthy to go, he would take them to sell at the Dannevirke sale – the equivalent to today’s National Sale.
When illness prevented Owen from continuing, Cedric took over the Angus stud. In 1988 we held our first on farm sale. We sell 20 to 25 2 year old bulls through the home bullring in June. One of our sale highlights was winning the Unled Champion Angus bull at the Beef Expo/National Bull sale with a homebred bull.
Wairere has used AB since the mid 1960’s and we used Beefplan until Breedplan began with weight gain recording. When ultrasound scanning became available in 1991 we were one of the first New Zealand herds scanned as we saw it as an avenue to assess the meat producing attributes of the animals we were breeding. We scan both our bulls and our heifers (not all breeders do both), for eye muscle, fat and intramuscular fat (marbling).
The challenge of genetic defects hit Wairere hard as most of the original carriers were high carcase producing sires that Wairere had used. After a lot of expensive DNA testing the herd is now free of the defects that are currently able to be tested for.
In 2009 Cedric’s son Paul joined him on the farm and continues Wairere Angus.
Cedric is also currently representing breeders on the NZ Angus board of Directors.