Te Akau Weekend Update

Again it has been a full on week at Te Akau Stud. The week started with our owner's day at the Racing Stables at Matamata and our daughter Julia-Rose has made a YouTube video of our owner's day that I thought you would enjoy viewing above. We intended to do a lot more of this in the future as it was such a success and we have had so many emails from owners telling us how much they enjoyed it and we are looking forward to the next one!

What a disaster it was at Otaki today. It is wrong on so many levels when a really big meeting is abandoned because of unsafe track conditions. This is the third cancelation in a month and its just not good enough. I think NZTR need to go public and tell us exactly what the overall track supervisor of New Zealand racing is doing. As far as I am concerned before these premier meetings take place the overall track supervisor should be attending each course and go through the preparations that are taking place with the local course manager to discuss issues like irrigation so that they can insure that these cancelations don't happen again. I believe that the overall track supervisor is paid big money and we want to know what his job description actually is, we never see him interviewed on television to tell all the owners and the punters what is happening with each course. This is just not good enough and action has to be taken.

In our stables case, we have two horses that tripped south which involved sending two staff down with them, which is a huge expense for the owners as we need overnight accommodation etc as well the jockeys as they have to travel down for just a half a day of riding.  It is very unsatisfactory and is high time that someone is accountable for this. The worst part is that these Group 3 races lead into Group 2 races in the next month and those Group 2 races lead into the Group 1 races. If you have planned to start a horse today it is very difficult to get back on the right leg.

Normally at this time of the year getting an inch of rain is fantastic news but you wouldn't believe the rain that is falling at Te Akau Stud. Last night we cut 10 paddocks for haylage so I am looking very curiously at the weather forecast as by Sunday we need to start bailing this and I will be getting pretty nervous if it is still raining then!

This week we send our first lot of fat lambs to the works. Due to the generally coldish spring and lack of sunshine our lambs killed out about 1kg lighter than they normally would and made just under $100 per lamb. We sent 365 in our first pick and we now drench the balance and wean and the next pick will be ready to go in January.