Farm of the week: Farmer finds perfect flock on other side of the world

The result is a flock influenced by a history including Suffolks, Lleyns, Romneys and Texels, but moving quickly towards a profile more familiar on the other side of the world – Highlanders siring breeding ewes and Primeras most of the butchers' lambs.

Both are New Zealand composite breeds, mixed together largely from old English exports, and brought to this country by NZ stock supplier Rissington Breedline.

It became a close collaborator in Mr Stark's drive for a reliably profitable flock and has a representative there when he takes a party of professional visitors around his operation on Fridlington Farms, based near Sutton in the Forest, between York and the Howardian Hills.

He runs nearly 1100 hectares of family holdings, plus 140 rented, growing potatoes, cereals, kale, linseed, peas and more. The cereals go into an indoor pig herd with 1100 breeding sows. The pig manure is washed out of their sheds as slurry and goes onto the land. Sugar beet was a part of the mix until the York factory closed, in 2006.

One way and another, it made sense to take some land back to grass, he says – especially as most of it is "Grade 3 blowaway sand" on a high water table.

He tells his guests: "Also, from the personal point of view, I like to see livestock around the farm and you want to get some pleasure out of the business, don't you?"

Having got his sheep, however, he measures their performance the same as any crop.

Bayden Wilson, the man from Rissington, tells us: "Stuart is a businessman. He wants the maximum weight of lamb for the minimum cost. That's why he deals with us."

He is choosing his words carefully. Kiwi sheep are apparently great according to measures such as lamb weight versus ewe weight – or money earned versus food consumed.

However, being derived from wool breeds, and selected for easy birthing, they tend to be narrow-shouldered and do not easily hit the top grade on the standard European conformation chart. In New Zealand, they have already moved on to X-ray machines for yield estimation and reckon the European charts are a poor reflection of the value of an animal in butchered meat – and, incidentally, the Yorkshire farmers on this tour all agree.

Rissington is test-butchering thousands of UK versions of Kiwi crosses to prove to buyers like Marks & Spencer that they are undervalued.

Meanwhile, farmers are wary of NZ genetics, especially if they sell liveweight, through the markets. But Mr Stark is happy he is moving in the right direction. If he gets a little less per lamb than he might from Texel crosses, he gets the lambs for less – or should do soon. Already, thanks to the Highlander influence, all his animals live and lamb outside and he is running 4,000 ewes with two shepherds – plus, he guesses, about half a man from his arable team, in terms of time spent on grass maintenance and fodder growing. The aim is for all ewes to be at least 75 per cent Highlander. Once that target has been reached, culling will start to follow the Kiwi rule – if the ewe needs help, its career is over.

He came to his breed choices through membership of the Scottish Agricultural College's 'Easicare' advice service, led by John Vipond, an expert on low-maintenance livestock. Confusingly, there is an Easycare breed of sheep, originally from Wales, which lambs outdoors on its own and feeds its offspring until they can take off on grass – and has the added advantage of needing no shearing. But the Kiwis reckon their alternatives have advantages which make up for the shearing costs.

It all depends where you are, everybody agrees. In this case, we are on land which is ideal for fodder beet.

The New Zealand way is to get as much as possible off grass and Mr Stark and his head shepherd, Ian Murdoch, are working hard on that. They are experimenting with pasture mixes and check what the sheep are getting out of them by using exclusion cages. By measuring growth inside the cages, they can work out what the sheep are cropping – and results are often at odds with data from seed houses.

"You get your own data from your own farm to make up your own mind," says Mr Stark. "If the performance of the grass goes down for some reason, you are aware of it."

By trial and error, the pasture is getting more productive. But North Yorkshire does not have the kind of space New Zealand has and the fields need time to recover. Winter feeding is the key to making a profit and for Fridlington Farms, beet seems to be the solution.

A thousand sheep will feed for two days on five rows of it, 400 metres long, rooting it out of the ground themselves – even during this last winter. They need a few supplements – including potale syrup, from the brewing industry, which is a staple of the pigs' diet – but 80 acres of beet, yielding 70-80 tonnes an acre, is more than enough. And any surplus can fetch a price almost as good as sugar beet.

Fridlington is a lowland flatland business. But there were a couple of hill farmers in the audience – and Mr Wilson of Rissington is keen to talk to them. He thinks the Highlander could be a good alternative to the Blueface Leicester for crossing with hill breeds to make a good general-purpose Mule. Email [email protected] or call 07903 484881.

The Fridlington Farms visit was organised by Len Cragg for the North Yorkshire Red Meat Groups. Call him on 07718 528501 or email [email protected]/