Low maintenance, consistent cattle is how Michael Williams describes the Santa Gertrudis breed, which has been at the core of he and his father Syd's commercial breeding program at Cardross, Mt Mort, in Ipswich since the late 1990s.
The 1214ha of mainly deep black soil and alluvial river gum creek flats with cultivated improved pastures on Cardross, purchased 22 years ago, is where the Williams run most of their pure Santa Gertrudis breeding herd. They also count Moogerah at Spicers Gap, and Warregah Island, in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales among their holdings.
Michael said 2021 has provided their best winter season in 15 years, with 660mm falling overall to date so far.
"We still have good standing feed and good sub-soil moisture in the black soil going into spring."
The Williams ran a Classified S Santa Gertrudis stud until close to 2010, and still use several stud production principles within the commercial program.
"We still buy stud bulls, and we carry out inspections of the weaners to ensure we're retaining stud-level quality through the herd."
"Even since we switched to a commercial business we've continued to breed pure Santas. They're low fuss, reliable cattle with good weight for age, that present well. We initially bought them in for their drought and tick tolerance, but we soon found that they were easy to market, adapted well to our country, and that the cows were easy calving. The Santa is a solid all-round breed capable of holding up through any season."
Michael and Syd put the bulls in with the breeding herd from early September to the end of December. While they were more lenient on female selection in the drought years, they're reverting to a stricter culling regime now.
"Our calving rates had dropped a bit due to the dry but hopefully with more consistent years like this one, we'll go back culling first-year heifers on fertility. We are also trying to remove horned cattle from the herd as we're striving for a poll herd. Cows are culled for age, which is now down to about seven years-old, due to the amount of replacement heifers we have coming through."
Until this year, they'd kept on steers at Warregah Island, which were sold over-the-hooks, grassfed at 24 months.
"We've moved into the weaner market now. It makes sense when we're seeing a $1600 per head return off the cow at present. It also allows us to spend more time focussing on the cow herd."
Since getting out of the stud business, the Williams have been consistently buying bulls from Rob and Lorraine Sinnamon, Yulgilbar Santa Gertrudis.
"We initially went to Yulgilbar chasing progeny of Warenda Sahara (which Yulgilbar purchased in 2007 for an Australian Santa Gertrudis breed record of $80,000). These bulls markedly improved our cow herd, so we continued purchasing his progeny. These bulls have consistently sired good-boned, well presented calves, which has led to repeat buyers coming back to buy our weaners.
"We have close to 20 working Yulgilbar bulls on Cardross. They've acclimatised well to our country, and produce consistent lines of calves for us. The poll percentage of our herd has risen due to them as well."
