Hazel family win with lambs

Hawkers Creek Farms is the family operation of Clyde and Janet Hazel, with their son Robert and his wife Lorin.

The Hazel family has a long history of farming in the Kapunda district, dating back to 1842 when Clyde’s great-grandfather William Hazel settled in the town.

“It was originally a sheep property back in the 1800s, and my dad George Hazel started cropping in 1924,” Clyde said.

For a while the family farm moved away from sheep, before reintroducing them in the early 1950s.

Clyde started breeding prime lambs back in the 1970s.

“I went to a business management course and decided going into prime lambs was a wise decision,” he said.

“We breed self-replacing Merino ewes and mate the youngest ewes to Merinos and mate the older ewes to Poll Dorsets.”

The Hazel family are fortunate to have great genetics on their back doorstep.

They have used Poll Dorsets from their neighbours, the Weichert family’s Bethelrei stud, and have done so for many years. It is not too much further to travel to source Merinos from Ian Rowett’s Mernowie stud at Marrabel, which they have also used for a number of years.

The Hazels run between 600 and 700 ewes.

The family recently won the crossbred category of the inaugural Thomas Foods International Booborowie Lamb Competition.

As part of the competition, three lambs in each team were taken to the Saltbush Ag feedlot at Booborowie.

They were then fed for six weeks before being sold on-the-hooks to TFI.

Each lamb was electronically tagged to monitor its individual performance.

The Hazel family’s team of Poll Dorset-Merino lambs achieved a 70.4 per cent gain and an average daily weight gain of 276 grams.

The carcases dressed out at 51.7pc.

Robert said the major reason they decided to enter the competition was to gain more information on how their lambs were performing.

“Information on growth rates and yields were the two things we were mostly after,” he said.