NEWBOLD Studs has been in Gawler River for 104 years, and while it is known for its high-quality poll dorset and white suffolk rams and ewes, the backbone of the business is family.
Since being founded in October 1917, Newbold Studs has been at the forefront of the industry in South Australia, including being credited with creating the poll dorset breed in 1937.
This happened when W.J. Dawkins decided to mate a corriedale ram with a pure-bred dorset horn ewe, which was then mated with a Newbold dorset horn in 1940.
Through an extensive process, Mr Dawkins eventually eliminated all characteristics of the introduced breed except for the poll character.
While Newbold Studs was highly regarded through the 1940s and ’50s, the family business was at risk of dying out when Mr Dawkins retired as stud master and split the business and property among his four daughters.
Three of those daughters ended up selling their share after trying their hands at operating smaller farms, but Louise Close – mother of current stud master Bill Close – decided to retire from teaching and re-establish Newbold North.
Most of that sold real estate – including Mr Dawkins’s original home, which was built by his father in 1873 and was the place he raised his daughters – has been bought back, with Mr Close’s daughter Kate and her husband Craig McLachlan now living and raising their children in it.
Mr Close said he clearly remembered working with his grandfather back in the day, and recalled how much things had changed since his introduction to the business.
“I have very vivid memories of walking around with my grandfather in the yards and being told what to do and what not to do,” he said.
That being said, a lot has changed in the process since those days – technology has been the biggest evolution, but the market is constantly changing as well.
“As a seed stock producer, our role is figuring out what sort of ram the market will want in two and a half years, so we’ve got to be following the trends of the market, and the market has changed since when my grandfather started.
“Most of the market was to England, where they’d sell these 14 kilogram lamb carcasses after killing them, putting them in a chiller, onto a ship until they would eventually be sold three months after they’d been killed.
“Nowadays our lambs are between 22-30 kilograms – so double the size – and that comes from changing the style of the ram from a short, dumpy ram to a big, long, stretchy ram with great growth.
“As you could imagine, that is not a short process.”
Mr Close has continued to figure out the best way to consistently churn out highquality lamb, including taking out the 2016 Interbreed Lamb Production prize at the 2016 Royal Adelaide Show with its Newbold white suffolk – a breed introduced to Newbold Studs in 2000 in response to market demand.
Some of the changes to his farming methods have been technological, such as signing up for LAMBPLAN to have more scientific data behind is lamb.
But some has also been figuring things out the old fashion way, such as the way Mr Close now deals with foxes who prey on the newborns.
“It turns out alpacas are very protective of the young, even if it’s another breed,” Mr Close said.
“We tried a bunch of different things to deal with the foxes before without having much luck, but we bought a couple of alpacas 20 years ago and they have made life so much easier.
They cost $300 each, they eat exactly what the sheep eat, and they last 20 years – it was a hell of a good investment.”
Evidence of the quality can be found at the business’s annual on-property auction, which regularly attracts more than 100 keen buyers from Penong all the way to Hamilton and is set for its 76th edition on September 23, when guests can try Newbold’s famous lamb burgers.
While reflecting on the history of the business, Mr Close discussed how easy it is for a family farming business to die out because eventually there will be a generation that was not interested.
He spoke about what an outlier it was for a woman – his mum – to take the reins as stud manager in the 1960s.
“My grandfather had four daughters, and he never forced them to be farmers,” he said.
“But my mum was desperate to be a farmer – she took it on at a time when females didn’t really work on farms.
“I found out the other day that a female couldn’t call herself a farmer until 1969 or something, but it was just normal for me because my father died very young and she was just out there doing it.
“She was a very rare commodity… if it wasn’t for her, this place probably would have been gone by now.”
