The McDonald farming operation is a family business that has become synonymous with the Snowline™ and Ranger™ sheep breeds.
Spanning some 50 years, the family business involves running a commercial sheep and cattle operation along with a large ram breeding operation. The elder McDonalds – John and Joy – manage the ram sales through Otago and Southland at the 121-hectare Cromwell Racecourse.
John also oversees the pathway to the continuing micron reduction in the McDonald’s entire sheep flock.
Son Jason, along with his partner in life and business Tracey, run Cheddar Valley Station along with the main Snowline™ DNA flock, doing all the mating and recording with the farms partners Zoetis NZ.
Another son, Glen and his wife Lisa McDonald look after the Kiniston Run in Central Otago and manage the entire Ranger™ flock while also running a separate fine wool snowline ram-breeding block.
This spread maintains a larger genetic base of ewes and a larger pool of sires to keep as many bloodlines as possible in the breeding programme.
This year after an initial culling there will be up to 1700 Snowline™ ram lambs transported to Lake Onslow, up behind Roxburgh at 750 metres, where different weights EMA (Eye Muscle Scanning) will take place, reducing ram numbers for final sale.
To understand the Snowline™ story we need to travel back to 1968 when John and Joy established a fully recorded heavy boned Coopworth flock, ‘Acton Meadows’, building up to 1400 ewes and 500 ewe hoggets – then fast forward 30 years to 1998 when the McDonalds introduced Kelso™ genetics to further lift production, through the use of DNA and gene markers.
Almost a decade later, Jason came up with the idea of selecting for bare breech to significantly minimize labour intensiveness – effectively developing a new breed of sheep.
“We wanted to find a name that anybody from the farmer to the agent to the consumer could associate with,” explains John.
“We felt that ‘Snowline’ brought up a feeling of pureness, so secured the trade mark ‘Snowline’™ and selected the highest production bare breech sheep out of the Kelso flock.”
Today the McDonalds have a Snowline™ ram breeding flock of 2400 ewes and 900 ewe hoggets. John, who has always been interested in wool as well as high production, and was an owner/wool classer, put forward the idea of lifting the percentage of income coming from wool.
“We all know that reducing micron is the easiest and most cost effective way to lift the value of the wool income so we started microning in the snowline flock seven years ago. Today we micron all our ram hoggets and all our ewe hoggets in the Snowline™ breeding flock.”
John says the family knew progress would be slow because they didn’t want to introduce any genetics outside of the Snowline™ breeding flock.
By putting a nil $ value on micron in their recording system they kept making progress in the other breeding traits.
“It took two years to find a top ram hogget under 30 micron,” recalls John. “Then things started to speed up once we got rams that were 27mc, then moved down to 25Mc. This year all the ram hoggets and sires we’re using across our entire flock are between 23.3m – 27.6m. It doesn’t matter which ram our clients choose, as they will all reduce micron in their flocks.”
John says the finer rams have exactly the same conformation as before and may even be a bit thicker through the loin and back end. The McDonald’s own the Snowline trademark and intellectual property to all clothing, hats, scarves and also meat.
Their medium term goal is to use the finest edge of their clients Snowline™ wool for apparel here and overseas and have established the contacts overseas to make it happen, when there is enough volume of the lower micron wool.
“Our clients realize that it will take time to make it happen as their ewes will take 4 to 5 years to get through the system. However the wool from the lambs and hoggets is where the most gains will be achieved genetically and financially.”
To find our more about Snowline™ contact John McDonald – 03 445.3664, Jason McDonald – 03 315 6285 or Glen McDonald – 03 446 9090.
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Snowline success years in the making
