If you see an unscheduled Singapore Airlines freighter lumbering down the runway at Auckland Airport, it may be linking thoroughbred logistics between two very different countries.
For the last five years, Inner Mongolian Rider Horse has been taking the very individual activity of horse breeding and racing to a logistical scale, feeding a Chinese market hungry for the highly prized abilities of New Zealand horses.
In that time, 1,100 high value horses have been transported in 13 plane loads and each shipment is a major logistics exercise in itself.
It is a rapidly expanding business. The Rider Horse Group was started in 2006 by Chinese entrepreneur Lin Lang. Two years ago, a purpose built race track at Korchin in Inner Mongolia, complete with modern stabling and infrastructure that Kiwi race courses could only dream of, held its inaugural meeting with trainers and jockeys from Australia, New Zealand and various regions of China.
Kiwi know-how
A quarantine facility spreading across 10 hectares was finished just three years earlier and Kiwi horse breeding and logistical know how has been at the forefront of the industry’s meteoric rise. There’s horse breeding facilities next door and a nearby sales centre. A new horse feed mill, a partnership with Kiwi company Dunstan Nutrition, will be online by the end of this year. The Group has three other equestrian clubs throughout China including one in Beijing.
Although many of Inner Mongolian Rider Horse’s acquisitions are made at horse sales, they are involved in horse breeding and racing here in New Zealand as well. They currently have 150 horses here including 20 currently racing. Some have already achieved notable success, their most well known to date being Mongolian Khan, a Derby winner in New Zealand and Australia.
Top flight thoroughbreds can be worth $100-200,000 each even in our market. Yet a relatively large operation does deliver economies of scale while achieving greater value overseas.
$11 million air freighting not the whole story
The $11 million spent on air freighting is not the whole story, as Victoria Wang, Bloodstock Manager at Inner Mongolian Rider Horse (NZ) Ltd explains; “We ship not only export yearlings and two year olds, but also stallions and brood mares. The shipment fee works out at $20,000 per horse including quarantine and tests.”
“The horses have to stay for 30 days in quarantine before they are shipped to China, then one month in our quarantine centre there.” Quarantine at New Zealand paddocks includes blood and nose swab tests to make sure hoses are healthy before shipment. Most of them are. “Just two horses didn’t pass the blood test last time.”
“Size makes logistics to China a lot harder,” says New Zealand Bloodstock’s Air Freight Manager Greg Northcott. “There’s also the language barrier dealing with the Chinese vets they send down and it’s the only country we deal with that requires clear blood and nasal swabs before quarantine.”
Even finding quarantine space for the shipment is an issue. “There’s not many places that can suddently take 80-odd horses, and they have to be separated; stallions, mares and colts,” adds Greg Northcott.
Gathering horses for quarantine takes place over two to three days and thirty days later the horse floats arrive early morning to take them to Auckland Airport and the start of their 11,000 kilometre journey to a new life. Under the NZ-China free trade agreement, the process also includes application to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce for the correct documentation.
Horses are loaded into rented container boxes at the airport and these are scissor lifted onto the plane. Loading is a carefully organised process, taking into account size of box and horse and weight distribution.
Planning eight weeks ahead
Each shipment is a meticulously planned process that starts around eight weeks before the valuable live cargo lifts off. That includes buying named covers for each horse to cater for flights from our summer to their winter or vice versa. In fact it is the logistics planning process that drives part of Rider Horse’s activities; buying horses for export from the ‘ready to run’ sales at the start of the year that will fit in the next shipment.
With the experience of over a dozen shipments the operation is well practiced. “But the earlier shipments were more ‘interesting’ than the later ones,” confessed Northcott. “People at the other end got to know what to expect and it’s now a finely tuned operation.”
“There are five to six staff on the plane for the ten to twelve hour flight to Shenyang, handing out water and hay,” Victoria Wang explained. “There are around three horses to each container box, separated by boards. We have our own staff meet the plane at Shenyang to help unload the horses and take them the ten hour journey to our quarantine centre.”
A scissor lift platform drops box containers from the plane’s cargo hold door. From there, a forklift moves boxes to a set down area where horses can be lead out of their temporary stall, checked and loaded onto horse floats.
Horse floats take 9-12 each, and are designed along similar lines to the Majestic Horse Floats used this side of the water, often repurposed from general trucks. Time from unload to despatch is around three hours, including customs checks. Vehicles are despatch as soon as they are full rather than wait for the rest of the consignment.
Two or more NZ Bloodstock staff travel on the plane, ready to supervise the unloading and clean, break down and stacking the container boxes for return. 30 container boxes pack down to the space of five and are trucked to Shanghai for the next scheduled shipment back to NZ.
New Zealand horses are famous for staying power, and Rider Horse says it is here to stay as well. There are long term plans to expand the New Zealand breeding operation with their own stud farm and continue making an impact on the New Zealand racing scene, while shipping more highly valued bloodstock to China.
Article originally published in FTD July 2017
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