Focus on Red Angus, Charolais-cross pays

Stewart Archer of Weymouth Farm, runs about 350 breeding females in his family's commercial herd of Red Angus and Charolais-cross across three properties.

"We try to mate 200 to the Red Angus bull," he said.

"The whole female herd now is Red Angus and the ones that don't meet our criteria to stay in the pure Red Angus we put a Charolais bull over."

Mr Archer said they purchase bulls from various studs, including Hicks Beef, Holbrook, Paringa Livestock, Yea, Vic, Pine Park, Westbury, Tas, Rangan, Charleroi, Vic, and at The Invitational Red Angus Feed Trial and Bull Sale.

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In 2021, he purchased the $26,000 top-priced bull at Hicks Beef's sale, Hicks Henry Q28, which at the time was a record for Red Angus.

"We're very happy with him. His calves are showing real promise and they're growing well," he said.

Mr Archer said he had previously bought bulls from Hicks and would continue to, but the main thing was he found what he was seeking with carcase attributes.

"We look for eye muscle area, high intramuscular fat and rib and rump fat," he said.

"We look for the top end of the markets there and like to have above average growth. I also like colouring - I like to have a good, even, red coloured bull."

Fitting these characteristics was one of the reasons Mr Archer said he had gone to the mainland in search of bulls, because there were only a small number of Red Angus stud breeders in Tasmania.

"There is getting more of them but they're quite often not large breeders," he said.

"The studs only have half a dozen bulls to sell, if that, so finding the ones you want can be difficult."

With his crossbred herd, Mr Archer was focused on value adding and being smarter about when he sold stock.

"You'll get more kilos if you get the hybrid vigour," he said.

"You can increase your return hopefully by having a slightly bigger animal."

Mr Archer said he used to sell all the calves in the autumn calf sales.

"The Charolais-cross calves never really took off at sales," he said.

"I could make more money with the straight reds so we now keep them through to feeder weights.

"We run them for another six months or so and take them through to the 400-plus kilos and sell them to fatteners."

Mr Archer said the Charolais-cross averaged about 30kg better than the straight reds.

Managing the cattle across three properties had worked well for the operation, with one smaller 60 hectare property used for weaning the Charolais-cross cattle.

"It's a little bit higher rainfall and we've got it all set up into smaller paddocks to rotate them around that through the winter," he said.

"We supplement them with silage and sell them out through the spring.

"You only get one shot at selling your calves so we're trying to maximise what we get for them.

"We run them there for six or seven months and we value add another, probably, $500 a head."

Meanwhile, Mr Archer said he also runs first-cross ewes and sells lambs in the first week of January with many going to Victorian buyers.

"We're not fattening country," he said. "We don't have irrigation and the summer time here is our worst period - it dries off and we don't have any good quality feed, so all the lambs are sold when the feed is drying off.

"We can't fatten a lot of cattle either - we can fatten a few but we can't do it over the summer so try to lighten our load.

"Winter time is very mild as we're on the coast and we still have grass grow."

With this last season being the wettest Mr Archer had seen in the 30-odd years on the property, he said he had plenty of grass.

The family operation was also looking at scaling back its sheep to focus on the cattle and be able to keep more calves for longer.

The Red Angus had been a focus since they bought the farm - Mr Archer said it came with about 30 head.

"I like to be a little different - Tassie is 99 per cent black and you get sick of looking at black animals," he said.

"Really the only difference is the colour of the coat and I like them, so I've played with them ever since."

As for the crossbred, Mr Archer decided to give them a try after listening to a Charolais breeder talking about crossbreeding.

"It is a very nice cross, so we've continued with just a few and we're starting to build that side up a bit more," Mr Archer said.

"I did have some black Angus. I only got rid of the last of them last year and we had been using the Charolais on the blacks most of the time and we've gradually replaced all the blacks with the reds."