Dear fellow cattle producers

Welcome to our 20th on-farm Angus Bull sale which will be held on Wednesday 5th June 2024 at Storth Oaks starting at 1pm.You may notice that this year our sale is a week later. We have move into the first week of June in order to align ourselves with two other performance Angus sales this week. This is in an effort for those of you who attend all sales to be able to travel to the Waikato/Northland area as easily and as cost effectively as possible. We hope this change works for most of you and would be interested in your feedback.

The beef job has been very solid for a while now and the prospects continue to look firm. Although your sheep enterprises may be suffering, this is a good time to secure top new genetics for your profitable beef businesses. We are excited about this year’s line-up and firmly believe there are some great options that will fit most all breeding objectives.

The offering this year includes some more sons of last year’s new sire list, Hometown, Zephyr, Dusty, Full House, Fireball and New Ground along with new exciting progeny from Dual Threat and Chiltern Park Moe and Millah Murrah Paratrooper. Also included as usual are some sons of Storth Oaks bred bulls in Q46, Q56, R104 to name some. It is very pleasing to see our own sons footing it well with top bulls from both the USA and Australia and again a good representation from 1st calving R2 heifers coming through.

Every bull catalogued qualifies to have either the A or A+ endorsement with the vast majority (72 out of the 87 catalogued) carrying the highest A+ endorsement. This gives you a quick guide in knowing that the sons and daughter of these animals will increase your herds performance and steers fed right should qualify for premium beef programs.

The most rewarding part of stud breeding is seeing the success that people have using our genetics and being rewarded with payments that reflect that quality along with no assist calvings and increasing fertility. Now I am no longer tied up with AngusPure it has allowed more time to start to visit some of you are customers and it has been rewarding to see some of your programs and the outstanding job being done with the genetics programs. We are seeing more and more Angus genetics being used in the dairy industry to create quality premium beef.

We are delighted with the results of one dairy farmer locally who has used six – eight of our bulls each year and finished the progeny. His latest unit load to go to Silver Fern Farms had a 100% EQ hit rate! Well-done Ross. (This comment from last years sale book) but Ross has continued to nail top hit rates with SFF Beef EQ.

Please use the breed indexes to make your initial selections and then target in on particular traits that you wish to improve on. By using a selection index, you are ensuring you are not single trait selecting as both the $A and $PRO indexes cover several traits to help secure a balanced trait selection. These indexes are both based on self-replacing breeding systems where heifers are retained for breeding. The great thing about indexes also is that they help to adjust for antagonistic traits as these are built into the model. They are effectively an EBV for dollars of profit.

We highly recommend either Heifer Select or Zoetis Inherit Select DNA tools to help you make sure that you are retaining the most profitable replacement rather than just the pretty ones that won’t produce the goods. It is not possible to draft the best most productive replacements with a stick in the yards. You will usually get it wrong!As always, if you have any questions or issues you wish to discuss, please give us a call or chat to us on sale day. We look forward to catching up again.

Best wishes,
Tim and Kelly