Renee and Quentin Mooney have covered plenty of ground very quickly since setting their sights on producing a true paddock-to-plate product with their commercial milk vealers.
In 2010 and feeling hemmed in on 16 hectares at Echunga, the Mooneys took a chance on 526ha at Culburra, near Tintinara, with the view of expanding their milk vealer production.
One of the keys to their success, which includes selling direct to a wholesaler and expanding to a production herd of 140 cows – has been their homebred Simmental bulls, Ms Mooney says.
“We started with 20 breeders in the hills going for a milk vealer product and dealing direct with the buyer,” she said.
“We thought we were developing a good product and expanding and we were pretty proud that we were producing a genuine paddock-to-plate product.
“We loved the country down here at Tintinara so we set about our expansion, buying the first farm at Culburra about six years ago.
“We went pretty hard, hand rearing 140 heifers to build our breeding herd.”
Ms Mooney said dairy-cross cows had been their focus when building the breeder herd and were throwing the calves they desired for the milk vealer product they specialise in.
While they predominantly look for Angus-Fresian cows, she said the breeder herd also included Hereford and British White genetics.
Through their small operation at Echunga, they had become known for quality milk vealers, sold straight off the mums at eight to nine months old, with a hanging weight between 200 kilograms to 240kg and with five millimetre to 7mm fat coverage.
Replicating the grassfed cattle on a larger production scale was what took the Mooneys to the Upper South East.
“When we had established at Black Flat, Culburra, with mum and dad moving to that farm to help, we found 40 acres at Echunga was not big enough and we were doing too much back and forth down this way,” she said.
They bought a 485ha farm at Tintinara just three kilometres from their original Black Flat property, with this now called Mt Mooney.
“At Black Flat we have the 140 breeders. We’re doing a bit of paddock renovation there. We grow a bit of lucerne there under pivot and across the property we have veldt and dryland lucerne,” she said.
“We run mobs of around 40 breeders with calves. We do three calvings a year – in January, towards the end of March and July – so that we can sell through the whole year.
“Through paddock rotation, we have the lead mob, with the eldest calves, on the best lucerne; the second mob on dryland lucerne and the dries in the scrub.”
The Mt Mooney operation in the Upper South East is a family effort, with Renee Mooney’s parents Peter and Bernadette Wheeler maintaining their tree change that took them to the Black Flat property to help set up the farms, and Renee and Quentin Mooney’s boys Callum, 12, and Liam, 10, also helping out on the property.
Mr Mooney is the grandson of a Hills dairyfarmer and it is his understanding of genetics from that background that has pushed the Mt Mooney program along, with plenty of hard work from former thoroughbred industry track rider Ms Mooney.
She said a highlight after so much hard work setting up their commercial operation and building a stud to feed into their own program was having their Mt Mooney stud bulls going to sale for the first time.
“It’s very exciting. We’re very happy with them,” she said.
“One ended up reserve senior champion (Simmental bull) at the Royal (Adelaide) Show.
“It’s a pretty special bull. One of the others we have used and it’s a real vealer bull.”
The bulls will be sold under invitation from Yerwal Estate at its sale on February 6.
Reaching the stage of selling stud bulls is a byproduct of the Mooneys’ quest to get what they wanted into their own herd to produce good milk vealers.
The Mt Mooney stud operations are run at the Mt Mooney property where there are about 40 stud females.
The Mt Mooney property is also running a mob of 30 Angus cows and 30 Hereford cows, all with calves at foot to “fill up the block” and turn over some trade cattle.
“They will run back with the Simmental bulls to produce those milk vealers we concentrate on,” she said.
“We know so much goes into the breeding and we’re able to see now just what’s working and we’re breeding our Simmental bulls to get just what we want.”
To build up the stud numbers, the services of Total Livestock Genetics have been used on the herd.
“They implant embryos that we’ve flushed from our cattle into 20 cows,” she said.
“We bring them all on heat at the same time, they work out which are best to put embryos in and we put the bull in with the mob on the same day the embryos go in. From a mob of 40, we end up with about 10 to 15 embryo calves.”
