Photo: Rudolph van Zuydam
Sparkle stands out in a crowd, you see she's the black sheep of the flock.
She was helped into the world two winters ago by the Onuku Māori Lands Trust chair Barnett Vercoe and she's one of 1800 mainly East Friesian sheep which the trust is milking on its property near Rerewhakaaitu, half an hour south of Rotorua.
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In 2020, at the cost of $3.5 million, the trust converted one of its four dairy cow farms to dairy sheep and the owners couldn't be more pleased with how things have gone.
"Being Māori we were very conservative with our plan, with our numbers, we've just completed our second season and both seasons exceeded our numbers ... I'll just leave it at that," Barnett says.
Trustee Tina Ngatai chips in "we're very happy."
And for Onuku Māori Lands Trust general manager Angela Wharekura the whole project is "just amazing."
She loves the fact running milking sheep employs more people.
As a dairy cow unit they employed two people full time, with sheep they have four full timers and up to 12 casuals over the lamb rearing season.
Photo: Susan Murray
Tina says the diversification into sheep was a sound financial move to make, but they did it for environmental reasons too, getting increasingly concerned about the footprint their cow farms were making with issues like nitrate leaching and water use.
"The dairy sheep indications were that it was going to be much better (environmentally) and now into our second season we’re seeing the benefits of that. Water use has been 35 percent reduced, nitrates considerably less, there's not so much shift in phosphate however we're still trying to do the formula to gauge that, and it's the same with greenhouse gases, we're monitoring to see if we've got any gains.
"So environmentally this is a better use for our land and for the environment generally," Tina says.
Onuku Trust is also part of a twenty strong Māori Agribusiness Sheep Milk Collective which received $700,000 from the Ministry for Primary Industries earlier this year, to investigate the potential to sustainably produce sheep milk at scale.
Tina says early indications are positive and within the next few years there could 15,000-plus milking sheep on Central North Island trust farms.
Photo: Susan Murray