Trainee sheep farmer Jack Boon, 19, plays the bagpipes before the autumn sheep muster at Omarama Station in the South Island. Photo / Dean Mackenzie
Glider pilots cruising over the vast North Otago high country late this month could be forgiven for thinking they had strayed into Scotland while looking down at Omarama Station.
Chances are they’ll spot trainee farmer Jack Boon, clad in a tartan kilt, standing high on a crag playing Scotland The Brave and The Rowan Tree on the bagpipes. It’s a tradition for high country farmers to mark the muster with a ceremony, a get-together of shepherds and their working dogs as the sun comes up on a crisp morning. The “bark up ” is a way of exciting the dogs, and what better way to do it than with the pipes?
Boon, 19, picked up the pipes for his first muster in April, helping to get the dogs excited before spending a week rounding up thousands of merino ewes on the 12,000ha Omarama Station before the winter snow arrived. It was an event captured on video by the New Zealand Merino Company.
Now he’s set to play again before the mustering for shearing in late August.
Owned by Annabelle and Richard Subtil, Omarama Station is halfway between Queenstown and Mt Cook in the stunningly scenic region known as New Zealand’s gliding capital, where the likes of former All Black Richie McCaw, chef Simon Gault and late adventurer Steve Fossett have repeatedly flown over the years.
The station, which runs 7500 ewes, 10,000 lambs, 135 merino rams and 800-odd Angus beef cattle, is on the northern side of the Lindis Pass overlooking Lake Benmore – “terrestrially south Canterbury, emotionally North Otago”, locals say.
The Herald caught up with Boon to share the story of how he ended up piping at the gates of dawn. He learned to play the bagpipes at Christchurch’s St Andrew’s College, where 180 students perform in numerous pipe bands. His father and grandfather also played the bagpipes.
“You could sort of say it was a ceremony. It’s a bit of fun ‘n’ that, to get the dogs excited for the day ahead because they’re the hardest workers,” Boon says.
The young farmer has played at Anzac day services, funerals and farm shows, and this year won the New Zealand pipe band championships grade 2 with St Andrew’s A Band. He placed third with the same band in the World Pipe Band Championships juvenile grade in Glasgow in 2023.
Aside from the bagpipes, farming is his first love. Boon is a Growing Future Farmers cadet, a two-year training scheme of which Annabelle Subtil is a founder and director. Subtil is part of the Wardell family, who have owned Omarama Station since 1920.
Growing Future Farmers manages 130-odd farming apprentices in New Zealand who defy the stereotype of device-addicted Generation Z. For Boon, farming was a natural choice.
“I was lucky enough to be born into sheep farming,” he says. “My parents had a sheep and beef farm at Leeston, then we moved to Lincoln for the last eight years.”
In the best southern Kiwi parlance, Boon says he’s been doing “a wee bit of mustering” this year, which means hard days shifting break fences, feeding silage and baleage out, driving utes up mountain roads and rounding up thousands of ewes, partly to set them up with new feeding grounds, but also for “crutching” to remove wool from the sheep’s rear end to improve hygiene and to assess the sheep before lambing.
Boon started his cadetship at Omarama in January, where temperatures hit 30C during summer and winter brings -9C temperatures on many a night.
“I enjoy the opportunity of learning new skills and being able to work outside every day with a good team of people, and work with livestock and having the responsibility of looking after a young dog and training it as I’m progressing in my farming career,” he says.
To other young people considering a future in farming, he advises being prepared to work hard, listen and learn.
“Everything is done for a reason, and it will help you to become better at solving problems and make your own decisions.”
Boon’s boss Richard Subtil says while the sheep dogs start doing their job with just a whistle at any muster, the bagpipes “stir up a lot of emotion”. It was Subtil’s suggestion that his young trainee farmer play at the bark up.
“Jack’s quite a shy guy, but he’s got a special role that he plays when he steps up with those bagpipes,” Subtil says.
It’s fitting that Boon’s Clan Macalister heritage has brought him full circle to an area where, 180 years ago, very Caledonian names were given to the Mackenzie Basin, Benmore and Ben Ohau (Beinn or “Ben” means “mountain” in Scottish Gaelic).
Most of New Zealand’s 23.6 million sheep descend from a groundbreaking breed created by a Scotsman – the Corriedale, bred by James Little just down the road near Ōamaru in the 1870s.
However, merino sheep, which have always commanded a high price for their break-, stain-, smell- and water-resistant high-micron fibre, are originally Spanish, and were once so fiercely contested by European kingdoms that the penalty for sneaking them out of Spain was death.
“Merinos originated in the mountains of Andalusia, which is like it is here. This area reminds them of home,” Subtil explains.
Today, merino prices remain valuable, if volatile, with some 17-18 micron merino prices dipping to as low as $13 to $15 per kilogram for clean wool in 2020 but commanding as much as $155 per kg for ultra-fine merino sold at a record-breaking auction by two Ranfurly farmers in 2024. That compares with $4 per kg for cheaper, clean wool.
Sustainability of the farm is a major focus of the outdoor clothing companies that buy Omarama Station’s wool each year, including Mons Royale, Allbirds and Rodd & Gunn. A major client for the past 26 years has been Icebreaker, which buys nearly 80% of the 67 tonnes of wool the station produces each year.
The merino wool is produced and marketed around New Zealand Merino’s ZQ and ZQRQ-branded guarantee of sustainability. The CEOs of Icebreaker and Smartwool visited recently to see for themselves the station’s riparian planting, animal welfare work, and limited use of chemicals.
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