THE Moyle family’s Pathfinder Angus stud has produced Australia’s top performance sire in the breed.
Pathfinder Genesis G357 is the highest ranking sire ever to go through Angus Australia’s Angus Sire Benchmarking program.
He is being tested in the fourth cohort of bulls across a range of Breedplan economic traits.
Late last year the rising five-year-old became the first sire in the Angus breed to hit the $200 mark for grainfed premium index.
He is also ranked number one in the breed for both the Angus Breeding Index at $172 and grass finished index at $156.
He has a strong pedigree being a son of Te Mania Berkley B1 and out of Pathfinder Direction D245 – from one of the stud’s “good cow families”.
Stud principal Nick Moyle said Genesis G357 was the best bull the family – who have been breeding Angus for 30 years – had bred in recent times.
“It is a result of our breeding program’s continued focus on positive calving ease with as much growth and carcase as we can get,” he said.
Mr Moyle says Genesis G357 has much to offer the beef industry, with his rare combination of excellent calving ease in the top 20 per cent, with top 10pc growth, fertility and top 5pc carcase figures. “He is a unique combination of structural soundness, outstanding performance and the phenotype to match which is very hard to come by,” he said.
“He is an athletic, sound-footed, bull with great temperament and extreme performance.
“He recently came out from serving 60 cows and is still in good order weighing about 1100kg.”
Genesis has more than 200 recorded progeny, including bulls to be offered in their SA sale on February 18 at Naracoorte and Vic sale at Penshurst on February 24.
“We use all our young sires cautiously until they prove themselves, but there will be a few sons in both our sales and we have kept three top bulls by him ourselves,” Mr Moyle said. “In 2015 he was the most heavily used bull in our AI program.”
There has been strong overseas interest and Genesis is now at Total Livestock Genetics, Camperdown, Vic, where semen is being collected for Australia, New Zealand and the United States.