Landline - Nothern Breed : AACo Integrates StockIT Technology

but first to our feature story about the emerging new breeds of top end cattle at brunette downs in the Northern Territory there's normally about 100,000 head grazing on the station's vast plains and for the past few decades they've mostly been Brahman cattle well adapted to the North's climatic extremes but the need for greater production is quite literally changing the complexion of Australia's northern herd a new style of hybrid beasts known as composites are pushing Brahmins off their long-held turf the vast outback were the land and sky stretched to a seemingly endless horizon is the heartland of Australia's cattle industry and across northern Australia the peaceful contentment of the massive grazing herds is about to be severely disrupted the dry season has arrived at brunette down station in the Northern Territory and as the diminishing waters the giant Lakes make their seasonal retreat the collective pulse of the station quickens in expectation the coming of the dry marks the start of a muster and thank our three favor Widow and they can go either buy it and throw it out of it in the next few months most of brunettes eighty-five thousand cattle will be shifted and sorted the other staffing in the fehb and then the Ryan sort of made good first this kind of mittens sort of held us up a couple of weeks but we're ready to go next week well look at the way things are on and we'll be ready to go staff will find up and ready they were ready to get out there get into it brunettes immense size 12,000 225 square kilometers a touch over 3 million acres in the old language means the master is a mammoth logistical exercise we have 50 staff on board where and that's this potli 25 stock staff okay okay three hidden stock water stuff there's pilots as road train drivers there's graders as those that put them all together and it makes up about 50 for the season and now I call a season anywhere from mid-march through til sort of bending that member half of them jackaroo x' and jill aru's drawn from farms and agriculture x' across the country a new recruits every afternoon in the stockyards they refine their stock skills what is like sister started jacqueline this year their first year they haven't had a lot of experience so you have to balance their learn to control their hands their reins make sure the horse again in what direction they go think about more than one thing at a time so it's a good good practice for them to start with around the Australian stock horse is the favorite breed long-striding types to cover the ground and even temperaments to help ensure horse and rider don't part company some are out in the white blue yonder a lot of money ever had a family pet a dog or something all that so it's a bit different they are yeah I think I look how I got a permit and pull his tail and shoo it and all that sort of does check it down after each ride make sure there's no rub marks or anything on and and yeah it's a good bit of responsibility for him and horses rather than motorbikes are much preferred just demo steadier the horse can got the pace of that the animals are therefore we can walk how to where you want to walk them I feel was in the lead and the peel on the tail kept keep the mob at the same person and not only that was a good attract them for the young ones they come up here every year to ride horses to Tibet they have to be part of their program thing a good horse person gives you a lot of life skills as well this is a training drill when the real stuff starts the work done by 13 writers here or more likely need just three with some aerial support from helicopters if this is the emerging human face of the northern Australian cattle industry these cattle are its bovine equivalent they're called a ACO composites the word composite derives from the mixed ancestry of the cattle there are at least four breeds in their makeup and the iho were Australian agricultural company which owns and operates the nation's largest cattle herd about six hundred thousand head the purpose behind developing our composite program is to really maximize our profitability and sustainability and give us a line of cattle that can suit all markets and and give us a fair bit of flexibility and productivity I think in northern Australia we've come from a short on base and then the the Brahman program over the top that gave us a lot of hybrid vigor through the north and people that really need to get more fertility into their herd the composite programs through the north I think will certainly be the way of the future saves has been ideal for it but traditionally the iock had composites are sort of a good 15 20 percent in front of where where we were with the Santa Sheryl ice in appalling it's a 25 percent Santa Paul 25 percent share alike 50 percent Santa advice is behind that was to get a an eye a composite could live in the north and amongst the hate and the ticks and the flies and that process and that have good good prime good Eden quality and make the requirements to the southern markets in terms of MSI and so forth at the end of the wet season the barclays tableland looks deceptively benign but for much of the year it's a harsh environment for cattle hot summers under a tropical Sun in mostly shadeless paddocks that rely on water from bores and water holes flies and cattle ticks are a constant irritant and the herbage often lacks nutrient the whole idea is to have an animal which is more robust and to be able to weather the conditions and the changes in weather conditions from you know one range we've got monsoon all through dry spells through to you know heavy rains cyclonic conditions so you know these cattle have to withstand a lot of different conditions Mako's foray into composite cattle began in 1994 our composite program is a combination of three to four breeds so we have a santa gertrudis base or a Brahman base and then we've got a mix of Santa Paul Sciarra light red angus and nelson bonds mara so it's a tropically adapted composite so it handles the ticks well it handles the tropical conditions well but also performs very well in the southern markets the bonds mara is a South African breed renowned for its hardiness as for the Southern beef markets such as the big supermarket chains they normally shun tropical breeds such as Brahman and Santa Gertrudis in favour of British breeds such as Angus and her effort that has meant that in recent years most northern Australian cattle have been shipped as live exports to Southeast Asia principally Indonesia we've been putting a composite cattle into Indonesia for about the last two years and the several feed Lots up they're now paying a supreme m4 composite cattle over the Strait Brahman cattle getting better feedlot performance better meat yield and a better carcass overall so we're certainly extracting the value out of their compass of cattle in Indonesia and they handle the heat and the tropical conditions of Indonesia really well as well as the cooler conditions of southern Australia as a global commodity beef like most exports is filling the impact of the high Australian dollar it's a factor in the eye a cow's continual quest for greater production it's a commodity basically and costs are going up everywhere around us everything that we do is going up and so we've had to get more efficient of what we do for the cattle industry weight gain or turning pasture into beef is the key determinant of profitability for the ia company developing this composite breed has been a massive undertaking and a multi-million dollar investment distance from market is the other great costs for northern Australian beef brunette down sits in the middle of the Berkeley table and 350 kilometres northeast of Tennant Creek the mining center of Mount Isa is more than six hundred kilometers to the southeast that's the typical example of the muscle and now an amateur or sort of near mature those bulls are about three three year old so as you say the twenty of honey made on them and they look good the early maturing composites produce a calf a year earlier than the straight Brahman or Sadek a truest carving at age 2 the coat colors can vary according to which genes dominate but as the breeding program progresses most composites tend to have a caramel already cooked on neighboring Alexandria Downs 90 kilometers away a mere stone's throw in territory terms the North Australian pastoral company or nav code is even further down the road to developing its version of a composite animal initially Alexander was a complete short on hood and in 1982 they put Brahman Bulls him all of a sudden carve started to live Grove and and the company started making a bit of money an elaborate crossbreeding efforts began in 1987 when the first calves arrived two years later these cattle are a five-way Commerce across from their 3:8 Brahman 1/8 sherilee one-eighth african de 5:16 short-horned and 1/16 he referred arafat comes in through the Belmont Red Bulls were used in the initial cross if that seems like a complex equation it does get more complicated stud master Pam gobbets job surely rivals that of the most devoted Midwife the main carving season for these is between September and December because we control mate them every day those three mountains let me out in their paddocks checking him catching the cobs and William getting a birth weight birthdate rolling down her mummy is getting tail hair so we can do a back to see your dad is and yeah just generally having a lot of fun because I get cranky and don't like to see he's taking the cup and what's more there are 52,000 often cranky cows to contend with but the diligence and the science are paying off I guess really you try to cherry-pick the best genetics or best traits that most suit this country yeah yeah yeah no it's Cheryl lays there of course for just muscling and beef attributes and and the short ones there with again with its milking ability and beef attributes as well but that was the place hood the African derp is there for survivability as well as the Brahman and with the African dat being a properly adapted boss Taurus well he got represented a person in the breed which is good nap Co has bred another strain called the kind nuna composite developed to suit its cattle stations in the channel country of western Queensland now purrs cows are smaller than the AAA composites the company believes that makes them more efficient at converting pasture into beef when we select we select for things like temperament and all their figures obscure to circumference and all that sort of stuff every animal is assessed and given an estimated breeding value or EBV and hornless cattle known as poles tend to get preference horned cattle are an increasingly rare sight everywhere these days here they're mixed ancestry means a range of coat colors enough to make the purest cattle breeder blush but it's what's beneath the skin this really matters and they look the same when they don't of their jackets on sorry it doesn't matter we've gotta have something the customer watch to eat that they say on TV now it's got to be a nice experience so and eating these is a pretty good experience so so it's yeah I think I think fertility is the main thing for us up here but further down the chain carcass traits are very very big part of it - yeah because these old girls are gonna have a they've got to be in cuff and and there'll be you stay in hood if they don't rear a winner and be back in carefully cold so it's you know we're having all the fertility launch every weekend as hard as we can so it's all a matter for production if you've got a care you miss you might as well keep producing otherwise to the looks back at brunette Yoko's efforts are also underpinned by the latest science in it stockyards the merits of every animal can be instantly assessed with a wave of an electronic one it's basically a computer program based on tracking individual cattle through their a ID number and therefore we can give a full life history of that anyway become comes through the odds so you're reading the ear tag I take it yeah Vanilla's personalized tag guitar read there's some computers attached to a pen reader or one renesis we have here it goes Bickley to the computer and be added to the computer program its history comes up through so it's going to be a big database how many stock will you eventually get on this system I think eyes are going to put in every piece we own on this system will run do six hundred thousand two major undetected some I'd run taking it's probably it's a cutting-edge technology we just type in number c c11 to 173 its weight was 317 kilos and we save it and then in all they're finished it's been entered on some system so we can there let her go and the next one it comes through it's weight gain its productivity cows that don't perform can't law it anymore they've got to be having that calf every year computers and composite cattle or a far cry from the traditional image of northern Australian cattle stations it's going to allow us to make a lot better decisions on each individual animals comes through the crushing as we as we look for its performance you know we've knows had a car for the last five years and it's a great breeder it's a it's a curve bender and in our minds that you know we can get a cow that's coming from every year with the we can start identifying those cows and really really increasing our genetic profile on those cattle a cluster company where we're starting to hit that you know we're starting to do something real real cool things with our genetics at that point here where our whites joining looking weak yeah not too bad in mine walk we just did a sample walk some cattle before and heavens senator you're on him from bet 292 surrendered 90 kilos I probably put on a bed 100 kilo three months so they come well we're expecting about 84% certainly what we've found and trials are the beef CRC have found that getting about 30% additional cards compared to a straight Brahman line in our composite cattle and certainly getting additional growth we're getting about 10 to 15% additional growth on grass about an extra point 1 to point 2 kilo de gain in a feedlot and about 2 percent extra carcass yield in the abattoir so it's about $50 a head at least in the feedlot and probably 30 to 50 dollars a head it out in the paddock as well for us just in just in weight gain and carcass performance we saw in the past people were hung up on bread lines and breed types where now people are really focusing on the profitability of their business their route they're assessing cattle on their merit and uncertainly commerce a cuddler go a long way to improving profitability recent advances in quality and efficiency in the northern beef industry have been welcomed by meat processors the productivity and the quality of production in the north has come a long way over the last 20 years of herd has moved north from the south numbers are increasing here we have got the capacity to breed animals to fatten animals and to finish animals whether that be on grass or grain so the production system the the capacity to produce numbers the ability to process at a competitive rate compared to other sites in Australia and also the ability to move product out of the Port of Brisbane makes the north a significant location for further investment whether on farm or in processing on the progress and profitability of composite cattle are being closely scrutinized by other beef producers modern technologies allowed us to to be a lot smarter with that decision like oppresses Glass Company like a echo or an app code that can lead the way in terms of change

Channel: LivestockExchangeAU

Views: 66,022

Rating: 4.7842321 out of 5

Keywords: AACo, StockIT, Herd Management

Id: beAu86_WOEI

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 21 2013