Fertility is our most important trait in Northern Australian Wagyu breeding

Taking a closer look at how CPC has developed

The Consolidated Pastoral Company (CPC) was started in 1983 by the Packer Family as a predominantly northern Australian cattle operation, and has since expanded into Indonesia with live exports and slaughtering. We have about 300,000 head of cattle across nine property aggregations, covering 3.5 million hectares of mostly high rainfall land, of which 20,000 is set aside for cropping. We also have two feedlots in Indonesia that can turn over 90,000 cattle a year.

CPC maintains environmental, social, governance and climate projects through emissions reductions in our cattle, savannah burning and biodiversity projects a few hundred km north of Cairns. If you go back a few years, we were worried about the endangered species on our property limiting our production. This year, we’re spending a fair bit of money to look for them because there are paid opportunities to look after animals like golden-shouldered parrots, bilbies and koalas – animals we would have never hurt, but we didn’t want to find a few years ago.

People are also an important part of our business. We have approximately 200 people in Australia and around 600 in our Indonesian team. We implement early weaning to avoid double handling of our cows and calves, which has improved productivity. We export cattle from the northern stations, and some of our Central QLD stations supply cattle for the boxed beef and feedlot markets.

Where CPC began, ten years ago

A lot of CPC’s market strategy stems from this map. With northern Australia being so close to Asia and its ~4 billion inhabitants, we pay close attention to the long-term demand coming out of the region for food and fibre. We still pay attention to the EU & US markets but our focus is much closer to home.

Ten years ago, we sat back and asked ourselves, "Where are our markets?". We found that our markets were in Indonesia with cattle weighing 500 to 600kg live weight, as well as in Australia, with slaughter cattle weighing 500 to 600kg live weight, and cull cows going to multiple markets weighing 350 to 500kg. We worked backwards and wondered why we were buying 1,200kg bulls, and why did we have 800kg cows walking around the paddocks that weren't giving us a calf every year.

Then we looked at the challenges for northern Australia, like uncontrolled joining, lactational anoestrous cows that wouldn't get back in calf if they had a calf on them, and, of course, difficult conditions. We also looked at our genetic gain, and it was lower than CPI, though most of northern Australia was at that time – and still is today. If you look at the average profit through benchmarking in northern Australia's beef situation analysis reports from 2001 to 2012, it was $6.16 per animal equivalent. The top 25 businesses had profits of $61.96, ten times what we saw. We wanted better incomes through better herd productivity and lower operating expenses. Our new focus was on productivity.

Breaking old habits

If you look at heifers in northern Australia, the relationship between weight and pregnancy is straightforward – the higher the pre-joining weight, the higher the rates of pregnancy. But this was causing people – including ourselves – to go for bigger heifers, thinking if we got heavier heifers we’d get more calves, which actually resulted in heifers calving at older and older ages. We decided it was not about breeding heavier heifers: it was about finding and breeding heifers that get pregnant at lighter weights. Putting that together for us at CPC, with our challenging strong wet/dry cycles, low quality soils but cheap land, we were looking at around $1,500 per AE back then. Today we’re looking at around $2,500 an AE. These are low production costs compared to somewhere like southern Australia. If you look at weaning at 180kg, by the end of that first year they might gain another 40kg and an additional 90kg in their second year, getting you to 310kg. Most of those heifers were not getting in calf until at least three years of age, and then they were missing a calf when they should be having their second calf.

The granularity of this data is important when you consider how important every kilo is, how important it is to find females and bulls reaching puberty early to increase productivity. We ran the numbers and found a CPC heifer that had a calf at three years of age was costing us $205 by the time we weaned that calf. But if she calved at two, we were making $30, all costs in. That became our benchmark: We needed to get our heifers calving at two years.

You've probably heard of the argument of calves versus kilos, and I'm here to tell you it's calves that pay the bills. By way of example, if in a herd of 10,000 feeder cows, you choose to take a 20kg weight gain per head, you end up with an additional $210,000. If, instead, you choose an additional 5 per cent calving, you'll end up with 500 more calves and make an additional 30 per cent revenue when all is said and done, or approximately $273,250. At least, that's how it works for us in the north: More calves beats more weight. But we were greedy and wanted both. We found it helpful to calculate that it costs about $285 to cull a cow that doesn't produce a calf. We would keep the cow for a year; then, you put her on a truck. If you've got a branding rate of around 60 per cent, that's a lot of cows you're loading onto the truck. We had to break this trend but also wanted our steers to grow faster. We aimed to have younger steers because keeping them on the property longer was expensive. It is common knowledge for anyone in the feedlot industry or those involved in breeding, backgrounding and growing cattle in southern Australia. In the northern regions, land is cheap, and the cost of capital was not a major consideration. The prevailing thought was, "They'll recover and get bigger next wet season". We wanted to change this way of thinking as quickly as possible.

I want to discuss the impact of IMF in northern Australia. As we progressed, we noticed we were culling our cows on pregnancy. If we weren’t in a wet season or the cows weren’t pregnant, they went onto a truck. We did this for a couple of years to try and tighten up the herd, and what we found was that our older cows had a lot of marbling – scoring 2’s and 3’s. We dug around, and our research found 12 to 15-year-old cows that were staying in the herd (mostly) had this level of marbling when killed. Looking at the value of IMF in terms of getting more productivity into the cows, as the cows lost weight during the North’s dry seasons: If they burned fat, they’d keep cycling; if they burned muscle, they stopped cycling. As a result, we decided we wanted to look for positive rib fat and positive IMF. How did we go about fixing this? Our answer lay in composite animals.

At CPC, we aim to create cattle that perform well in northern Australia, increasing our fertility and productivity. We wanted our carcase yield up, and we wanted to get a view of what the customer wanted.

A pinch of this, a dash of that

We started with our Brahman as the base. Brahmans are tough cattle – they can walk long distances, handle droughts well, and don’t eat much. Brahmans are easy to sell when things get tough, and the cattle price is good. When the cattle price is challenging, Brahman heifers are hard to sell. Operationally, they prefer to be led rather than pushed.

We obtained some Boran genetics from Kenya. These animals are well-adapted to tropical climates, have high fertility rates, mature early, and can walk long distances. They are resilient to drought. While there are limited market options for selling their meat due to its less-thanideal eating quality, they are excellent mothers. They can be impatient, have a low tolerance for incompetence, and dislike repeating tasks. Overall, they are a good cattle breed. We wanted fast young growth, predictable performance and an excellent longer-term focus on feed conversion efficiency, so we put some Angus in. Finally, wanting to fix the fertility and get market differentiation, we included Wagyu to round out our composite. It took a bit to convince the board who had bought a Brahman herd. We had been breeding Brahman for a long time and had one of the oldest Brahman studs in Australia at Allawah. When I came in and said we would start putting Wagyu into our composite, it was a challenge for the board, but ultimately, the numbers spoke for themselves. And they keep speaking today.

The Wagyu helped us fix up the udders. Some of our Brahmans had an issue with big, bottled teats when calves were born, and our Wagyu fixed that quickly. Anyone in the feedlotting industry knows Wagyu can be a real pain in the neck, being in calf at really young ages, but that early puberty proved to be a great boost for our composites. If you have something in calf at six months, join it with something that gets in calf at three years, and you land roughly where we wanted to land. It was like fixing a watch with a hammer, but it worked! We ended up with a composite that’s Brahman based with Angus, Wagyu and Boran in a four-way cross.

Operationally speaking, what does that look like for us?

We run an elite genetics herd at our Allawah station, with a few thousand performance-recorded cows. We also run an IVF program with our best cows, and we’re crisscrossing Brahman, Angus and Boran there. They go into two multiplier studs in the northern Territory, where the cattle are produced under harsh, challenging conditions and then put out into the commercial herd. We feed the information back into the program, particularly the data from our two feed lots.

We aimed to create cattle that performed well in northern Australia, increasing our fertility and productivity. We wanted our carcase yield up, and we wanted to get a view of what the customer wanted. When we sat down ten years ago and tried to determine what we thought the future market would want, we were confident that eating quality would continue to grow and that productivity would be a big focus.

Looking at our data, it was clear that our yearling joining rate was too low. Our Brahmans needed to have their first calf at two years, not three. At that point, our pure Brahman calves also had a survival rate of about 75 per cent, which is about 10 per cent below the average for northern Australia. It was simple crossbreeding and selection, which delivered a huge lift in our first calf heifers at two years old. We went about this by tallying up the data. From 21,000 cows, we found that composites with Wagyu content had a 7 per cent higher pregnancy rate than purebred ones. In yearling heifers, composites with Wagyu content had a 23% higher pregnancy rate than composites without Wagyu content. We’re seeing higher fertility rates at lighter weights in the Wagyu bulls, too: At the end of 2023 there were 1,000 young bulls in our commercial herd which passed their semen tests and physical tests. The Wagyu composite bulls hit puberty earlier and passed at 12 per cent lighter than the bulls without any Wagyu in them. >>>

Because we have a four-way composite cross, we run our own EBV system in Australia. It was set just a few years ago, so the numbers look low compared to other systems.

EBVs and breeding goals

Because we have a four-way composite cross, we run our own EBV system in Australia. It was set just a few years ago, so the numbers look low compared to other systems. Looking at the CPC crossbreds containing Wagyu genetics versus the crossbreeds without Wagyu that we have full EBVs on, there’s about 20,000 head. One thing to call out – and that we need to keep an eye on – are that birth weights are pretty low. In northern Australia it’s a fine line between being too light and too heavy. A lot of the work the Beef Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) did on calf survivability showed that Bos indicus calves from cattle that were too light weren’t making it through to weaning.

Our yearling weight gain is a little light, but through selection we’ll be able to lift and speed that up, and we’re currently focused on putting in Angus, Boran and even Wagyu genetics which have faster young growth. In terms of mature cow weight, we don’t want mature cows in northern Australia that are over 450 kilos with a calf on them. The dollar index we have in place was developed for our systems and wouldn’t work for other people’s businesses – we’re very fertility focused, with some feedlot growth performance in there too.

From a breed content phenotype perspective, our four-way crosses have exactly what we’re looking for. We need a little bit of extra skin, with a slick coat. It’s important we don’t have much hair on the cattle because of ticks, so skin type is also important, particularly skin around the eyes. We don’t want cattle rubbing their eyes, because there’s nothing worse than driving into a paddock full of cows bleeding out of their eyes. We just don’t have any tolerance for that, and with Indonesia being stricter on skin, we’re similarly strict on the cattle in our elite and commercial studs for bad skin and fly bite susceptibility. It’s amazing how quickly we’ve been able to clean up these aspects through breeding.

Structure is important to us, and we’ve learned a lot about the importance of being true to structure. Some breeds tend to get too caught up in perfect feet placement and hooves and things like that. Through the Wagyu cattle our team has learned a lot about what you can tolerate.

We’re trying to breed poll cattle pretty heavily. Any kilo lost from a heifer is a big issue for us – losing 10 to 15 kilos in the first two years of life can actually add six to twelve months to joining. It can mean that a heifer which should be in calf from November through to January is actually getting in calf from June through to September, which we don’t want because the probability of missing their next calf and death later in life is a lot higher if they’re not pregnant over a wet season. Wet cows in northern Australia do not have great survivability.

A better beef business

What does this all mean for us as a company?

Ten years ago our average age at turn off was 4.2 years. Today we are down to two years, including our cull cows. We’re culling early, but we’ve got higher productive rates which means a lot more calves coming through and a lot more calves being processed and killed at 18 months of age. Some are even younger than that, which has pulled our age of production down further. We’ve lifted our kilograms of beef per hectare by 74 per cent. Cattle standing around taking years to grow, waiting for the next wet season to compensate was costing us a lot in kilos while limiting our marketing options too, through ossification and dental issues, and discounts. Branding rates increased from 51 to 82 per cent, and death percentages decreased from 5.7 to 4.6 per cent.

In our Indonesian feedlots the composite cattle made us an extra $36 profit per head last year. While this has also helped us diversify in the market, it has added complexity to the program too, particularly with Wagyu bulls that want to get out and breed with everything causing challenges with calves and different breed types and market types. There are plenty of feedlots that still aren’t sure about buying F1 cattle and feeding them as short fed, given their performance issues in the past, so it’s important we’re being transparent and clear with these feedlots about what those cattle actually are.

We participate in the Federal Government’s emissions reduction program in a few different ways, including via our herd methodology. From 2018-2022, we took 300,000T of CO2 out of the cattle business. Last year alone, when our genetics and management practices started to kick in – plus it was a good year in terms of environmental factors – we pulled out 200,000T. We’ve then gone and sold those carbon emission reductions on the market. We also have some biodiversity, regeneration and other emissions reduction programs we can monetise; we don’t work with programs that are not monetised.

The following graph tracks the share of new genetics in our herd, marking the start of our journey back in 2014. At the time we were asking ourselves how long the journey would take, if everything went to plan. Genetics in our business is a long-term commitment, and markets change a lot in longer timeframes. You second-guess yourself. People change. Continual reeducation is important in maintaining course during these times, to remind yourself why you’re doing it in the first place. Summing things up, fertility is the most important trait I think Wagyu can offer for North Australian operations and for CPC. Wagyu are tough cattle too, and toughness – which includes the ability to work year-round – is the second most important trait in our region. Other important traits for northern Australia include slick coated skin and eyes which provide resistance to ticks and flies; horns are a problem for us in young heifers because if we lose that 15-20 kilos it can add an extra six to twelve months to that female’s life, and it can knock around the steers as well; fast young growth and good mothering and, of course, good eating. All of these the Wagyu offer in spades.

Wagyu is an important part of our business and there’s many opportunities for them in northern Australia.

Follow CPC on social media via @conpastco on all channels, and follow Troy on X (formerly known as Twitter) @troysetter