Articles

Selection, nutrition profitable in Hunter

1 December 2012

Kay Payne never at first intended to establish Elite Poll Herefords and sell over 40 bulls a year from her Upper Hunter property. However a thorough herd recording and selection program to produce pasture fed bulls suited to her local environment evolved to the point where she now sells surplus bulls and some females throughout eastern Australia. When the Elite herd moved to the Upper Hunter in 1990, the property was unimproved and pastures consisted mostly of wiregrass, with little or no legume content. Intensive selection was required for the herd to perform on those pastures without the addition of grain supplements.

Targeting performance with EBV's

1 June 2012

As a seedstock and commercial cattle producer, Kay Payne has used BREEDPLAN estimated breeding values (EBVs) for over 20 years to achieve genetic gains and track performance in her business, Elite Poll Herefords.

Kay has been performance recording since the late 1960s She began using BREEDPLAN to track and select for genetic gains in the early 1980s, as one of the initial experimental herds in the program.

At 'Eulalia' , Kay runs 350 commercial and registered breeders on native pastures oversown with sub clovers. Cattle must perform under these commercial production conditions,

so the focus for selection is on fertility, growth, milk and soundness.

Kay uses BREEDPLAN to target on-farm and market profit dri vers using the principles of producing offspring that go "from a vigorous calf, to a valuable carcase". Performance recording and EBVs enable optimisation of selected traits to meet the needs of seedstock clients and commercial markets.

"We know what characteristics our target markets require and, importantly, how to use these genetic selection tools to breed animals displaying those characteristics," Kay said.

Sires mainly come from Kay's seedstock herd. She uses artificial insemination to introduce genetics from other sources in Australia,