WHEN Mary Burston and Keith Fryer bought their Waitpinga property in 2011, they were a little daunted by the prospect of establishing a quality Angus cattle herd and boosting productivity on their farm.
While Mary's father owned a farm at Victor Harbor when she was a child, and Keith grew up on a dairy in New South Wales, both felt their farming knowledge could do with a boost.
Consequently, the couple attended courses run by the Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges Natural Resource Management Board, including Introduction to Rural Land Management, Cattle Management and Organic Farming courses.
"The NRM staff and the courses we've done helped us get our feet on the ground and make that transition from being brought up around a farm and moving away, to running a farm for ourselves," Mary said.
After initially looking to buy land in NSW, Mary and Keith found their property while on holiday and immediately felt it ticked all the right boxes.
The farm covers 56 hectares - half of which is leased out as a separate block - and has previously been run as a sheep stud and dairy.
Mary and Keith initially bought 56 Angus heifers from Balquhidder Station, Harwood and Longridge at Normanville, deliberately overstocking the farm to control weeds and give them a greater number of animals to choose from when building their long-term herd.
The farm is now home to 33 cows - 31 with calves and two yet to calve - and one Hazeldean bull, a level the couple will maintain long-term.
The heifers were 18 to 20 months old before they were run with the bull, and Mary and Keith believe this helped reduce calving trouble.
"We haven't had any calving issues at all, and I'm sure that's been helped by them being given time to grow out and not being put into calf too young," Keith said. "The calves we have - they're the first off our Hazeldean bull - are beautiful, muscled-up calves, and we're really happy with them."
Mary also attributes the addition of apple cider vinegar to the water troughs in the lead up to calving with helping the heifers have a trouble-free birth.
"It's supposed to work as a muscle relaxant, and after the run we've had we'll definitely keep using it," she said.
The couple plan to keep their core group of cows and sell the calves off each year as vealers at the Mount Compass market or through private sales.
The NRM courses have given Mary and Keith the confidence to change their farming practices and make perennial pasture growth a top priority. They are using organic practices where possible, and have stopped using herbicides or synthetic fertilisers.
Rather than spray out and resow whole paddocks as some neighbouring farmers suggested, the couple has opted to allow at least one paddock to go to seed each year.
"A lot of people talk about spraying paddocks out and reseeding but we don't want to do that, because we'd have a long period with no feed in that paddock," Keith said.
"We want to try and shut up at least one paddock every year and let it go to seed so it seeds itself rather than us having to go out and manually do it."
The couple wants to promote the growth of perennial ryegrass, cocksfoot and phalaris, and is working hard to control cape weed and geranium on the property.
They have previously used the spray-graze technique, applying MCPA 500 at a rate of 500 millilitres a hectare to sweeten the weeds and make them more palatable to the cattle.
But Keith says there is no longer a need to spray-graze, with the cows happy to eat the cape weed and geranium when the plants are young and fresh.
They have embraced cell or strip grazing, and introduced a rotation system to keep the weeds under control without baring the paddocks.
"With one mob of 20-odd, we've got a rotational program where it takes them two weeks to do the rotation and by keeping the plants fresh they go in and eat it off," Keith said.
"Where it goes a little bit longer they tend to not want to eat it."
A raceway running the length of the property and connecting the leased area with their home block was introduced last year to aid stress-free movement of cattle. The ability to shift cattle from one end of the property to the other without entering a paddock will also prove beneficial to their plan of letting paddocks self-seed.
*Full report in Stock Journal, July 18 issue, 2013.
