Te Akau Midweek Update

David writes:

One thing that we have spent a lot of time looking at in the last few months is the weather forecast.  It is incredible how inaccurate this has been since November. You would think that with the modern day technology, the weather office would be able to give more accurate forecasts.  There is a lot of rain predicted for this weekend which is needed in the Waikato but I will surprised if we get much before the 20th April.  I hope I am wrong (but the Chairman of the Waikato Racing Club which meets on Saturday hopes you are right! - Ed).

Meanwhile the fine weather is giving us a terrific opportunity to catch up on maintenance.  We have spent a lot of time in the cattle yards fixing some broken posts while rails and gates in the sheep yards have been re-done.  A lot of horse fencing has been redone and our fencer Kevin has just finishing fencing the property that we bought in May last year.  It looks absolutely sensational.

The fertiliser and lime is on the whole farm so all we are waiting for now is the rain to come and the grass will really grow.  This morning we started feeding out haylage. We have 650 big bales of haylage on the farm and this haylage will provide the stock with plenty of protein and fibre in the next month.

We are full on at the moment breaking the horses in and it is wonderful to see what simply beautiful yearlings we have from the sale. Some of the yearlings we are breaking in include the Captain Rio/Lady Classique colt, the Paco Boy/L'Accord colt, the Fastnet Rock/Morgalicious colt and the Darci Brahma/Twelve Carat colt.  This is a really nice group of horses and it is great seeing them working around the farm.

We have three nice chances at Matamata today.  I will not be there as I have people having coming to the farm to inspect the yearlings and we are going to have a nice relaxing lunch after that.  Jamie Richards will be on hand to look after the owners and to give us a full report on the day's activities.  Jamie is going up to Singapore tomorrow to stay with Mark Walker for ten days.  He will have two weekends of racing to see first-hand how the Singapore operation works.

We had a great day at the Rotorua trials yesterday with some really nice horses coming out to trial and it is obvious that we are going to have a good autumn and a really good spring with some really top horses.