Glendaruel Pastoral Company: How to produce more beef from the same number of cows
The Hassall family has made changes to their cattle operation that have seen production skyrocket with the same number of cows.
Producing an extra 250,000kg of beef from the same number of cows is just one of the barometers that shows the phenomenal progress of a NSW beef operation.
In the past decade, Glendaruel Pastoral Company has increased the number of cattle sold each year by 342 and increased the kilograms sold per beast by 72kg, all from similar breeder numbers.
Tracking these kinds of details reflects a determined effort by the family-run operation to ramp up the returns from what was already a profitable operation.
Creating a checklist of changes – all of which have been implemented – has kept them on track.
SMART MOVES
The Hassall family’s NSW operation started at Braidwood, but expanded further south more than two decades ago as they looked to expand.
The price of land at the time at Braidwood was prohibitive and they considered better value in Holbrook.
The decision to spread their beef producing operations four hours apart has turned out to be a master stroke in a system that turns off more than 1700 cattle a year.
Jono and Francine Hassall have been joined recently in the family business by their son Fergus, and together with a manager and station hand at Braidwood, run 2000 cows across 4375ha. The southern expansion started at Holbrook 26 years ago, with land at Mullengandra added more recently.
While they probably would have chosen to expand closer to home, the very different climates and seasons have allowed them to have green feed year-round, albeit hundreds of kilometres apart.
“Our winters and springs are great at Holbrook and our summers and autumns are good in Braidwood, so we have arranged our system to take advantage of that,” Jono said.
In practise, that means about 80 per cent of the 2000-cow herd of Angus and black baldy cows are run at Braidwood and calve in August.
The calves take advantage of good spring and summer feed before they are trucked south to Holbrook in late autumn, where they are grown out to feedlot entry weights.
This takes advantage of the feed wedge on the southern properties during spring, where high grazing pressure and stocking rates can be applied. That pressure is released as the feed runs out by selling steers, allowing ground cover to be maintained and the country to be semi-spelled before the next crop of weaners arrives.
Early weaning is one of the changes on the checklist that has been made in the past decade, taking the calves off the cows four to six weeks earlier. This has allowed cows to recover condition more quickly before they calve again and has not had a determinantal effect on the weaners.
The calves are trucked from Braidwood to Holbrook at about eight to nine months, weighing 200-250kg liveweight. Already weaned, they are unloaded at the family’s Holbrook property Jergyle with little if any check in weight gain, thanks in part to the emphasis on temperament of the Glendaruel herd.
“They get their first drench and vaccination before they leave Braidwood, and as they have been yard weaned, settle very quickly and would be putting weight on straight away,” Jono said.
Weight gains are steady through winter at about 0.5kg a head a day, but quickly lift to 2kg a head each day or more as spring feed of Phalaris and clover explodes in volume and quality.
The steers are turned off at anywhere from 350kg to 500kg at 14 to 16 months, selling to a range of buyers including feedlots and grass finishers.
Jono said all buying interest was welcome, but they had found it particularly rewarding when Greenham bought their steers and sent them to Tasmania a couple of years ago, where they were taken on to heavier weights to supply the grassfed beef market.
HEIFER HEAVEN
The family turns off heifers at slightly lighter weights of 300-450kg at a similar age to steers. That’s due to the tops of the heifers being retained within the herd for breeding.
Another of the raft of changes that the Hassall family has made in the past 10 years to smarten up their beef herd is to include more heifers in their breeding female breakdown.
Jono said they had reduced the heifer joining from 12 weeks to six weeks, and heifers that did not get in calf were culled.
A fixed-time artificial insemination program with some of the heifers, which has achieved rates of up to 70 per cent in calf, with a back-up bull to follow, has allowed a tightening of the calving period, too.
“We are now joining a higher percentage of yearling heifers – it was 350 but now it is more than 600,” he said.
“About 80 per cent of the heifer calves go into the herd and that allows us to cull our older cows more heavily.
“This had reduced the median age of the cow herd from 6.5 years to 4.5 years, and the oldest cows are about eight years, not 12 years.”
It has also meant that those cull cows, sold at about 600kg liveweight, are generating more income for the business than if young cull heifers were sold at a much lighter 300kg, but female numbers are maintained.
BREED APART
Probably the biggest change – and potentially the most challenging – was to switch breeds.
The family had been producing Herefords for decades and Jono said “we kept waiting for the Angus fad to fade but it didn’t”.
“We could see that the market wanted Angus cattle so when it was clear this was not going to change, we started using Angus bulls over our Hereford cows,” he said.
There are telltale signs of the Herefords still in the herd, with 40 per cent of the cows’ black baldies, but all bulls used are Angus, mostly from the Harbison family’s Dunoon Angus stud down the road, which has improved the scale and size of the breeding cows.
At the same time, they have also introduced some Rennylea Angus bulls from Culcairn NSW to chase some more meat characteristics and to moderate frame size.
While they look at estimated breeding values for growth to maximise weight gain, and birthweight (around breed average), fertility remains king.
“I saw some analysis by Phil Holmes once that showed the biggest determinant in profitability is herd fertility and calves on the ground, which that analysis showed was 10 times more important that carcass traits when it comes to returns,” Jono said.
“No matter what we do, we need cows that can get calves on the ground and can survive the tough years.”
There have been other changes along the way, including the management of pastures, with set stocking switched to rotational grazing. In applying grazing pressure and then releasing it when the stock are taken off, the pastures respond with extra growth and vigour.
But at no stage in the process to drive up profit has quality been compromised. That’s evidenced in the average returns for the steer portion of the operation, which achieved a stunning 571c/kg average across the whole drop in 2021-22.
While Jono acknowledges that it was a stellar year and may not be seen again for some time, the quality of the draft of cattle played and continues to play a role in achieving maximum returns.
The end result of 10 years of change has been the creation of a beef cattle breeding and background operation which has EU accreditation, Greenham’s Never Ever accreditation, and the ability to turn off hundreds of thousands of kilograms of beef each year.
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