Te Akau Friday Update

David writes:

What a beautiful spell of weather we have had at Te Akau Stud. We have had a particularly busy week.

On Tuesday we finished the shearing and the wool has been sold. The lamb's wool was sold for $4.90 per kilo, which is nearly $2 more than last year.  It's a good price but you will find it hard to believe that in my first year in the Waimai Valley when farming we sold our lamb's wool for $6.30 per kilo.

This week we have sold a unit of cattle each day. A unit is a truck and trailer with 35 cattle. The bulls so far have averaged over 388kgs making them worth well over $1700 each and the steers have averaged just over 350kgs making them worth about $1650.

Last night we finished baling about 400 bales of haylage - big square bales that are a ten bale equivalent of the old small bales.

Dayna Davey has been busy all week with 10 yearlings that we are keeping to race. They have all been brought into boxes for the week, where they have had their feet trimmed and have been drenched. This morning we put them back out into a big 30 acre paddock to develop further. We will look to bring them back in January and start breaking them in.

It's exciting to have a quarter of the field in the $300,000 Group 1 NZ Bloodstock 1000 Guineas. There are four good fillies in the race that will fight it out and our girls Cosat Viva and Spellbinder should be right in the thick of things.

It will be a great day's racing at Riccarton tomorrow and I am so sorry that I won't be there but I am under doctor's orders not to overdo it and my attention is firmly focused on the Ready to Run Sale next week where I will be buying horses to race in New Zealand, Australia and Singapore.

The horses that we buy for Singapore will have their first start in a maiden race for $75,000. Can you believe that - yes stakes in Singapore are going up in April next year.  Good luck to Mark and the team racing tonight too!

I will be at Karaka on Sunday afternoon again looking at the horses that are sold on Monday and Tuesday.  Believe me, I have seen some really good types that will go through this year's sale, so if you would like to join me, please feel free to ring me on 021 925 151 and come out to the sale.

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