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Over the last six months we have received less than half our average rainfall, yet again we are hand feeding our cattle. With 30 years’ experience in ruminant nutrition research, Helena has the job of calculating what we feed the cattle to provide sufficient energy and protein to meet their maintenance and production needs. We also try and make the most cost effective decisions.

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We ran our Murray Greys at Picton for about 35 years and never had a problem with feet despite keeping many cows into their teenage years. The herd was fairly early maturing and we had a couple of dam lines that tended to be roly poly fat. The pasture at Picton was essentially C4 tropical type grasses like paspalum, kikuyu and natives such as kangaroo grass.

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At Cadfor we have been deliberately breeding some black Murray Greys in recent years. Some people do not agree with this or ask us why. It is a decision we have not taken lightly but in our situation it is vitally important to promoting our cattle to local commercial cattle breeders. Because some overseas breeders have asked us about our black MGs we will give a detailed explanation.

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For many years we never used electric prodders on our cattle because we had seen them misused. With good facilities and better stock handling methods, as espoused by Temple Grandin, stock can be easily and safely handled with minimal stress. We strongly oppose the misuse of prodders but there are times when they are invaluable and training cattle is one such time. [In getting ideas for this post we found an article from NSW DPI (reference below) that has the same opinion.]

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Last year we used semen from the leading Angus sire, Ayrvale Bartel E7, in some of our best Murray Grey cows. The main reason was to get a benchmark to compare some top Angus calves against those of our breeding. The calves are on the ground now and we have been reviewing the experiment.

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I remember reading an interesting paper entitled “Effect of breed on the profitability of commercial beef production” written by Holmes and Sackett some years ago but I mislaid it. Going through some files I found it again and reproduce the findings here.

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We have used turkey manure for over 20 years at Picton and Binda with excellent results. Turkey manure provides phosphorus at about two thirds the price of superphosphate plus nitrogen, potash, calcium and a range of micro-nutrients thrown in.

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When we bought here in 2001 the paddocks looked pretty run down so we did some soil tests. The level of phosphorous and other nutrients was very low with the Colwell test for phosphorus only 5 ppm. A soil chemist commented that he had seen lower but those samples came from China. The suggested critical level is about 30 ppm.

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At the request of Dr Robert Churchill of Crookwell Veterinary Hospital I have done a brief evaluation of the subconjunctival injection of antibiotic and steroid as a treatment for pink eye in cattle caused by Morexella bovis.

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