the Kia ora Stud story
Noel Jones is a natural entrepreneur. Born in Nelson, New Zealand, the fourth of eight kids, Noel left school at 14 to work as an apprentice in his father’s butcher shop. He owned his first butchery by the age of 22 and when he ‘retired’ from butchery in his late 20s he had four shops. During this time Noel was also procuring animals at sales for his own businesses as well as buying for other clients. He bought his first farm in New Zealand in his mid-20s where he fattened stock to supply his own shops. He butchered his own beasts and as a young man earnt extra cash by becoming a deer stalker and tramper.
Because ‘everyone had three jobs when I was a young bloke’ Noel also worked in pubs at night, earning himself a hotel licence and performing hospitality management roles across bars and bistros.
In hospitality, Noel met a lot of powerline workers and they convinced him to work with them during the day. He loved it. He was offered a permanent job as a linesman (erecting and fixing power lines) and worked at it for four years before embarking with his wife and children on a world tour. He didn’t get far. After the first stop in Brisbane, Australia, where he worked as a relieving butcher, Noel saw an ad for linesmen wanted for a large powerline company in Australia’s Snowy Mountains. He went to Cooma, and worked for the company for 14 years as a transient powerline worker across Australia. A workplace back injury couldn’t keep him down and he pivoted to start his own company NJ Contructions Pty Ltd. Starting with three part-time workers Noel built up the business to become the largest privately-owned powerline company in the southern hemisphere and one of the ‘big four’ powerline contractors in Australia building large infrastructure like the Katherine to Darwin and Canberra to Wagga Wagga powerlines, to name a few. NJ also did powerline infrastructure for wind farms and solar farms, tower maintenance and reconstruction of towers and wires internationally e.g. in Fiji and Papua New Guinea. After 24 years growing NJ to a multi-million-dollar company with up to 400 staff at various times, Noel sold the business and ‘retired’, again. This time he literally went back to grass roots and returned to farming and KIA ORA STUD was born.
Farm practices
We use innovative farming techniques appropriate to our environment. Our animal welfare is second to none. We care about our land as well as our animals.
We use cell grazing (moving animals from paddock to paddock which allows us to better manage weeds and feed growth) and, somewhat controversially, stress grazing where our animals work for us in paddock management. Good fence maintenance is a priority and we have built in a series of chutes between paddocks to enable stock movement without use of dogs, motorbikes or traditional ’rounding up’.
We do not use toxic chemicals or poisonous pesticides.
Steers in our free range feedlot are fed daily with around 8kg of specially-formulated stud mix (‘nuts’) via our automatic feeder. In addition to the nuts (which contain everything they need) they have an outside 10 hectare paddock to graze in and they get hay, syrup (molasses) and lick blocks containing other supplements and nutrients.
Cell Grazing
Stress-FREE ANIMAL MANAGEMENT
No pesticides
fREE-RANGE Feedlot
Automated feeding
Our Breeding Programme
Originally focussed on acquiring breeding stock and genetics which had limited bad traits, we set about breeding towards eliminating negative traits and have succeeded in achieving a genetically clean herd after generations of very, very selective breeding. We are now in fourth generation stocking. With all progeny tested and free of bad traits we focussed on breeding for weight gain and marble score. It took five years to achieve the desired marbling score and we are proud of our proven success.
We run a breeding cycle annually, with full blood cows inseminated then flushed for fertile eggs which are implanted in surrogate cows. We then use a top quality bull to “clean up” the herd in the paddock. Any embryos not implanted go to the accredited storage facility to build up our repository.
Genetics
At Kia Ora Stud we are continuing the Japanese tradition of genetic excellence, building a large repository of superior genetic material available to the market.