If we hadn't been using genetics to
improve our production results, it would
have put the business under extreme
pressure to even exist.
Our family's been at Werrington for 120 years, this branch of the family for 40, and we
had some pretty bitter lessons
early in the piece when
we first came here.
It was a heck of a
drought in the early 80s, lost half our
breeders and became evident that we had
to do things differently with regard to
breed selection and getting performance
from our breeders.
We became focused on selecting for
fertility, preg testing, removing
substandard breeders on fertility from
the herd and buying bulls to improve the
genetic ability of our cows to
reproduce regularly.
Yeah, so this one's pregnant.
She's
about ten and a half weeks pregnant.
Genetics absolutely plays an important
part in the profitability moving forward.
If the three big drivers of
profitability is greater weaning
percentages, less breeder mortalities and
higher selling weights, then this
selection process ticks every one of
those boxes.
When you actually get to
go and select the bulls, I certainly
try to lean towards if they've got
good maternal data.
So it's temperament,
scrotal circumference, and days to
calving is really all we go on.
And
for example the last 20-odd bulls that
arrived here had an average days to
calving of -13.5.
When we get the bulls home here, we
have them semen tested and morphology
tested.
A bull that has greater than 70
per cent morphology has a greater chance
of producing a heifer that is superior
in a fertility trait.
And we've got bulls
here - their mothers have had 10 and 11
calves in succession, so that's
really important to get that reliability.
There's a whole lot of breeder
management practices that go on here.
It was a process of eliminating the
sub-fertile animals.
Our two year old
heifers that are joined, every non-pregnant heifer leaves the place.
We've taken our breeder herd from a 50-odd per cent weaning rate to a consistent
75 - 76 per cent over the last 14 years and
that has included some extremely tough
environmental years and reduced our
breeder mortalities from 5% to 0.5%.
We've shortened our joining period just
by removing the bulls basically, taking
them out of the herd and preg test the
animals back to that four-month calving
period.
Our last calf is at the end of
December.
I think the real key to getting
it short is the absolute control over
the heifer group.
Each generation of
heifers through to pregnant with their
second calf - that is a really easy process.
It means we can run a whole lot less
breeders, putting a whole lot less
pressure on the country, to get the same
number of calves or more calves.
For sometimes seven, eight months of the year, our protein levels in the feed here are
at or below maintenance levels for a
breeder.
We time our breeding according
to the green date, if you like, which is
the first week in January, so they can
then take full advantage of the summer
flush.
Because we get such harsh winters
in this area, we have to have our
last calf weaned by about the third week
in April to allow those cows to get
back into score 3+ at calving, so
that requires a supplementation program
to compensate for that.
It all ties in with your pasture
production and your cattle production.
Whilst we haven't selected for growth in
in any way, because of the indirect
relationship between fertility and
adaptation, the slaughter weight of our
cull cows has been slowly sneaking up
for 15 years without selecting for
growth.
Record keeping is so very important
because if you don't know where you're
at and don't measure where you're at,
then you have got no idea where you want to
go.
You can't do it without measuring the
performance within a 12 month period.
I'd just encourage everybody to go
about things with a completely open mind
and start to look at things objectively,
instead of subjectively, and embrace the
change that's coming because genetic
selection and improvement is picking up
pace, and I would hate to see the
northern industry left in the dust.