During the past 35 years Quartz Hill station in Canterbury's Rakaia Gorge has been developed into a well-managed pastoral farming operation, so much so that it won owners Colin and Hilary Guild the SFF's Livestock Farm Award in the 2009 Canterbury region Ballance Farm Environment Awards reports Country-Wide. The judges said the Guilds had managed to maximise the strengths and minimise the weaknesses of the station as well as those of their two downland properties by integrating livestock, machinery and labour. They remarked that the excellent integration of sheep, cattle and deer policies had helped preserve the unique environment, and the downland properties allowed finishing of all classes of stock year round. Stock health, quality and production were a feature of the property and animal welfare was catered for through shelter and adverse weather plans. The 2800ha Quartz Hill station was split off neighbouring High Peak station in 1988 when brothers Colin and James Guild split the station bought by their father in 1973 as a challenging, undeveloped block. James and Anna retained High Peak and Colin and Hilary took on Quartz Hill, named by them after a landmark hill on the farm consisting of pink marble and quartz. They spent many years developing the infrastructure - building a woolshed, shearers' quarters, deer shed and fencing, more subdivision and reticulated water, plus fencing and planting 27km of shelter belts and woodlots across the wind-prone farm. The brothers had finished much of the development in 1988, cultivating the flats and oversowing some of the easy hill country, and Colin says Quartz Hill is now 30% cultivated rolling paddocks, 20% easy hill country and 50% hard steep hill country. Rising from 460m above sea level to 975m, the station is constrained by the clay pan under the rolling flats, causing summer dry and winter wet conditions, which depress grass growth and make it hard to feed out on in the winter. Winters are long and cold, and snow falls right across the property several times. "The snow can be four inches-and-above five or six times a year, which doesn't usually worry us unless it is really substantial," Colin says. Generally the sunny hill country thaws fast; the flats tend to freeze solid. If a heavy fall is forecast, the stock are mustered in and fed in a confined area with feed stockpiled for this eventuality.
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