“Because we’re not trading cattle we’ve got a set number to sell and taking them through winter gets them to a higher weight.”
Grant said they kept bulls entire, instead of finishing steers, because they grew faster and could be sold at any time as bulls.
“As long as we’ve got power in the fences, and they’re not hungry, we don’t have trouble at all.
“Obviously we don’t put them beside the heifers or on the boundary to the neighbour’s heifers.”
Bulls were more comfortable in mobs, so they could not be spread out too much.
Most of the year bulls were run in mobs of 35-40.
Prices varied every year. Some years they earned more than the steer price for their bulls and sometimes less, Grant said.
They aimed to finish the bulls and heifers as heavy as possible and have them all killed before Christmas, when it became too hot and dry to carry them longer.
Bulls usually average 360kg carcaseweight (CW) and heifers about 235kg CW.
The Falls Station
- Owners – Grant and Kerry Hickling
- Location – Rere, 50km north-west of Gisborne
- Size – 593ha (580ha effective)
- Contour: Medium-to-steep hill country
- Annual rainfall – 1200mm
- Altitude – 180m-365m asl
- Sheep (at March 2014) – 1377 mixed-age ewes; 566 two-tooth ewes; 1367 ewe lambs; 1006 male lambs; 58 cull ewes; 23 rams
- Cattle (at March 2014) – 120 mixed-age cows; 65 rising three-year-old heifers; 116 rising two-year-old bulls; 70 cull rising two-year heifers; 50 replacement rising two-year-old heifers; 185 calves (on mum); nine breeding bulls
- Wintering – 5800su.
Grant’s goal is to kill a unit load of bulls averaging 400kg CW. Their highest average unit load so far is 385kg CW.
Bulls and heifers are weighed monthly during spring to make sure they on track for finishing by November or December.
If breeding cows were not so necessary for maintaining pasture, Grant said it would probably make more sense financially to trade in cattle.
Grant said the shape of the farm, with many paddocks on boundaries, was not suitable for all-bull farming. “With the number of stock we’re got and relatively limited labour, I’m not going to start chasing around with electric strings.”
However, beef cows and their progeny were certainly profitable.
“The sheep make more money per stock unit, but they’re more work too.
“Because we need that critical mass of cows to clean up in the winter we’re not in a position to trade.”
Full of hybrid vigour
Grant and Kerry Hickling chase hybrid vigour in their cross-breeding system.
For the past eight years Angus bulls have been used exclusively over mixed-age cows.
The unregistered bulls are sourced from a friend who uses very good genetics in his own breeding programme.
“I can get them at a good price and we’re getting hybrid vigour back again,” Grant said.
Before too long, they will change to Simmental bulls and reap the rewards of hybrid vigour from that cross too.
Bulls run with the cows and heifers for two cycles, so Grant doesn’t see any benefit in foetal age scanning at pregnancy testing as there are no third cycle calvers to identify. Even if they did want to use the foetal age information there was no space in their breeding and finishing system to cater for a separate mob of pregnant cows.
Mixed-age cows and heifers calve about 88% (cows to bull).
A big priority on the farm is caring for the mob of 50 replacement heifers, which are mated at 15-months-old.
All first calving heifers are mated to a Jersey bull for ease of calving.
“We end up with a live calf and a live heifer and we find with the hybrid vigour, the calves grow really well,” Grant said.
Heifers calve out the back of the farm in early September (two weeks before the mixed-age cows) with no shepherding.
The Hicklings have been using Jersey bulls for nine years. They are sourced from a local farmer who breeds them for the dairy market. Grant said the bulls were relatively inexpensive to buy and they often recouped much of their initial purchase price when the sire bulls were sent for processing.
Beef breeding and finishing are vital components of Kerry and Grant Hickling’s business on The Falls Station, which they have run together for 20 years.
To get through winter, they killed 50 in-calf cows, which otherwise would have been kept.
“We could really do with those 50 cows now, with the amount of rough tucker we’ve got,” Grant said.
“We’ll probably just breed back into it.”
One third of their bulls were killed in April, eight months earlier than usual, and at far lower weights than they would otherwise have realised.
They also sent mixed-age cows away for three months of grazing at Nuhaka, on the coast between Gisborne and Wairoa.
While supplements were usually only fed to calves at weaning, they spent $3/su on hay, silage, and maize waste last year, mostly due to drought.
The dry ground also opened up, allowing more thistles to germinate so, by spring the Hicklings were busy spraying extra thistles.
High numbers of thistles can cause strawberry foot (caused by the scabby mouth virus) in lambs and a lot of their lambs had these lesions at docking
Wisdom of Oz
Grant Hickling says Australian beef farmers seem far more closely connected to their markets than New Zealand beef producers.
Grant has twice travelled to Australia for an insight into their beef farming systems.
He found it hugely interesting, especially their connection with and focus on markets, not to mention the constant threat of drought.
“They’ve always got the drought in the back of their minds, it’s almost stifling their production in some ways.”
Grant said even breeders in Australia were very focused on marketing.
“They know where their stock’s going to go – they’re selling specifically to feedlots or their breeding programmes are targeting the end market – they know what it’s going to be.”
Feedlots helped Australian producers achieve more consistency in their product than NZ grass beef farmers were able to.
Despite that, Grant was convinced that NZ’s ability to grass-finish cattle was a big advantage.
“It’s by far cheaper than feedlots, so I think we want to keep focused on the grass.”
