It was a beautiful Summer's day in Matamata as we welcomed the O'Shea tour to Mapperley Stud to inspect our 2020 Karaka Yearling Draft. The annual tour arranged by Andrew Birch and the team at NZTM brings well known Australian racing personalities to the leading stud farms in the Waikato.

We presented our quality draft of yearlings on our lovely parade ring enclosure and with sun beaming off their backs they looked in magnificent order. Hours and hours of yearling handling and preparation goes in behind the scenes and its a real testament to our staff on how magnificent they were looking on the first parade of the season.

The next 6 weeks is an extremely busy time on the stud with parades happening on a regular basis leading up to the sales at the end of January. The yearling preparation and education continues in between as we gear up to having these young horses looking their absolute best for sale time at Karaka.