The Season
The holiday season has now been and gone. We are now firmly in 2021 which will hopefully be a better year from a social perspective than 2020.
Regular rain over the last three months has kept the pasture in a terrific state. We along with many others are battling weeds of all descriptions. They have prospered on the bare ground created by the drought. Rotational grazing with big mobs of cattle is knocking them over slowly. We hope the great performance by clover over the September, October, November will set us up for a wonderful season for 2021.
As part of our preparation we went out and purchased a Merlo 35.7 telehandler. This, combined with more shed capacity, should put us in a good position to store and trade hay through the winter.
F1 Market
Prices from feedlots for F1s continues to be quite strong. Our last sale of F1s in December was on average around $6 kg live weight. Talking to buyers it seems there is a great deal of resilience in the market and prices are expected to remain firm for the F1 job through 2021. While China is always a concern, demand from other markets remains strong.
Breedplan
The AWA ran a final breedplan analysis on Christmas Eve. We were very pleased with the results. Of 106 R calves 58 had a marble score EBV greater than 1.0. The breed average EBV for calves born in 2018 was just 0.7.
The most exciting thing was the steady rise and rise of our favourite bull LTCFQ122. This bull is owned by our associated company QGI and is now ranked 2nd in the Australian Wagyu herd in terms of genetic defect free, The Self Replacing Index and Marble Score.
