ITS $40 million upgrade program complete, Northern Territory cattle station Beetaloo is now only a few thousand head short of its ambition to increase cattle carrying capacity from 20,000 head to 100,000 head.
The Beetaloo infrastructure development, bankrolled by entrepreneur Brett Blundy, is the most ambitious ever undertaken by an Australian beef enterprise, involving 600 water tanks, 3000 kilometres of poly pipe, and more than 3000 kilometres of fencing.
And it appears to be working.
John Dunnicliff, who with wife Trish bought million-hectare Beetaloo in 2002, told Fairfax that cattle numbers are now “into the nineties”, (90,000 head range) and cattle availability permitting, it would crack the 100,000 head mark in the next year.
Before the Dunnicliffs began developing Beetaloo, it carried 20,000 head.
Buying cattle to stock the property hasn’t necessarily been cheap, but recently the value of those purchases has been outstanding because of the tragedy of drought in Queensland.
“We’ve bought some magnificent genetics out of Queensland,” Mr Dunnicliff said.
“Most of the places we’ve been buying cattle have never sold out of their main cow herd before.”
Despite the investment in herd growth, Beetaloo’s ambitious development program is already “washing its own face”, Mr Dunnicliff added.
“We’re selling as many cattle as we need to support the business, and from here on there will be surpluses coming out of it," he said.
“I think we’re proving that you can spend the money and get the return from it. Once you see what’s going on, it’s an easy sell. It then becomes a matter of how fast you tip money into it.”
The Dunnicliffs chose to tip money in very fast, thanks to an investment arrangement with billionaire retail entrepreneur Brett Blundy.
Others are now taking a similar route, but are more cautiously funding development out of cashflow. “That’s going to be a lot slower,” Mr Dunnicliff observed.
When the Dunnicliffs bought Beetaloo for $20 million, it ran about 20,000 head of cattle on 40 turkey nest storages and natural water holes.
Mr Dunnicliff saw that although Beetaloo’s watering points were up to 12 kilmetres apart, cattle never walked more than three kilometres from water. Between those distant turkey nests was hundreds of thousands of hectares of untouched pasture, much off which burnt in Dry season fires.
Infrastructure development for more intensive production was already Mr Dunnicliff’s modus operandi. It started with an early investment at Coonamble, NSW, and powered a property development career that moved to King Island, Isis Downs in Queensland and Cherrabun Station in the Kimberely, before reached its height at Beetaloo.
Mr Dunnicliff’s ambitions for Beetaloo were larger than a bank could stomach, so he forged an alliance with Brett Blundy, who has travelled extensively in Asia and saw the enormous future demand for protein in Asia’s dynamo economies.
Since Beetaloo, Mr Blundy has also invested in a similar infrastructure program on adjacent Amungee Mungee, which his investment company BBRC Beef co-owns with Adrian and Emma Brown.
Emma is the Dunnicliffs’ daughter; the Browns own Northern Stock Water in Katherine, source of the material used to roll out the water infrastructure on the two stations.
(Another Dunnicliff daughter, Jane Armstrong, is Beetaloo’s marketing manager; her husband Scott is operations manager.)
It is likely that the same development model will be deployed across two other adjacent stations, Walhallow and Cresswell Downs, which BBRC Beef is looking at buying from Paraway Pastoral for a rumoured $100 million.
Rotational grazing convert
Along with Beetaloo’s huge infrastructure development program, John Dunnicliff has also built a rotational grazing program on a massive scale.
About 110 paddocks ranging from 400 hectares to 1600ha are used to strictly control the grazing of a mob of 5000-7000 young bulls for the live export trade.
The development was a trial, but after three years, John Dunnicliff declares himself a convert to the concept.
“To grow your grasses properly, you really have to graze them and rest them,” he said.
“The only way you can efficiently set-stock is to be ultra conservative, and that means lowering your production.”
“I think the rotation is giving us a better effect on our perennial grasses; better understanding of our carrying capacity; and better decision making about our stock.”
That control is of particular value in the Territory’s unforgiving climate.
“We like to think that we can see out ahead of us 12 months on the rotational grazing paddocks, and that gives you the ability to make some pretty heavy decisions. If it hasn’t rained by the end of April, you know you have to get off at a hundred miles an hour.”
The results of the rotational grazing program are encouraging enough that Mr Dunnicliff is certain that more cells will be developed on Beetaloo in the future.